CHAPTER 65

 

#36: WIRE

“Eardrum Buzz: 12” Version”

from the album It’s Beginning To And Back Again

Released: May 1988

 

 

“The Bee Song” by Arthur Askey was a gigantic hit in 1938 but is familiar to every British radio listener my age or older. Accompanied by just the piano of the song’s author Kenneth Blain, the Liverpudlian comic entertainer – at that point, one of Britain’s biggest stars – has great fun inhabiting the mindset of a bee as it goes about its average day of gathering honey and stinging and potentially killing unwary interlopers, including cows, Boy Scouts and butterflies. Actually it’s quite a brutal and sadistic song, bearing imagery that might subsequently have been worthy of Throbbing Gristle: “Flirting with the butterfly strong upon the wing/Whoopee! O' death/Where is thy sting?” The song concludes with a pitiless summary of the average bee’s ultimate fate, namely to be “pinned on a card in a mucky museum.”

 

Half a century later, that song’s reluctant sequel, “Eardrum Buzz,” appeared. The “buzz-buzz” leitmotif (with its twin, “Zee zee zee, zum zum”) is the only immediately visible factor which connects it to the Askey song, It isn’t really about a bee but more about that mucky impetus, hardwired into humanity’s DNA, that either cancels out good history or provokes bad history, because it renders the brain incapable of distinguishing reality from Debordian Spectacle.

 

“Eardrum Buzz” is a song warning us about how too much pop can kill us, owing to our stubborn tendency to grab the hooks, devoid of any workable meaning, and render us into artifices of perceived intelligence. Such as the inescapable hooks of the song itself and the ecstatic Cocteau Twins-ish guitar glides which punctuate each chorus, both of which deliberately serve to obscure half-lies, unfounded speculation and hearsay, all of which we are bound to accept because we cannot get off the merry-go-round to which we have unknowingly been chained. All human endeavour finally pinned on a card in that mucky museum. Who, or what, would dare pay humanity a visit?