“Blue Guitar” (Iain Campbell Smith)
Iain Campbell Smith is not your typical bard. He curses, plays a mean guitar, has a wicked sense of rhythm, writes songs that could be read as treatises on postcolonialism. (He was, after all, the ambassador before he became a singer-songwriter.) But it struck me recently that “Blue Guitar” has a lot of merit even in traditional terms: sounds, turns of phrase, rhythm, allusions, etc.
ICS incorporates tons of allusions, both musical and more broadly cultural. The title alone evokes Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Man With the Blue Guitar,” Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s hit song, Susan Werner’s non-hit song (for a few of us), the blues in general. Not bad for a song that takes place entirely in a post-coup Honiara bar.
Here is one verse:
Well I’ve been to many nations, caught many a fine disease,
I’ve got a little dog named Sampson with seven thousand fleas.
The French anthropologist said “buy un flea collar”,
I said “Mercy on you soul, ma’am”; she said “Merci, au revoir.
Jeu une autre chanson bleu sur ta chanceuse bleu guitare.”
I appreciate the code-switching on aesthetic grounds, but I think that it works especially well here. The merci/mercy play is cutesy, perhaps, but the line is remarkably catchy. And the last line is nice. Chanson bleu / chanceuse bleu is pretty and works semantically, too. (And non-French-speakers don’t lose anything, since ICS “plays [his] lucky blue guitar” elsewhere in the song.) It’s rhythmically strong, alternating between strong and weak beats: “jeu une AUT-re CHAN-son BLEU [rest] SUR ta CHAN-ceuse BLEU gui-TARE.” The switch between the adjective and the noun at the end of the line makes the meter consistent, keeps the collar/revoir/guitare rhyme, and also provides a nice cross-linguistic parallel to “flea collar”: “flea collar” is said in a French accent ([fle kolaŹ], or approximately “flay coal-ARE” for the non-IPA-inclined). Similarly, “bleu guitare,” is in the English word order, and the French words are cognates of the English, so that it could just as well be in English with a French accent. Plus, French with an Australian accent can never go wrong.
Here’s another verse:
These small Pacific towns all start to look the same;
missionaries, mercenaries, playing their little games.
Better a bashing with the bible than the butt of an SLR.
So they say, but either way I’d rather play my blue guitar.
Note the alliteration in the penultimate line: better/bashing/bible/butt (and all on the strong beats). Note the internal rhyme in the last line — say/way/play — and again, all on the strong beats! Etc. With political commentary included — in fact, at the center of the song. But to take Robert Frost deeply out of context, “All the fun’s in how you say a thing.”
