One of the more Dada-esque offerings from a songwriter whose early career is typified by heaping helpings of the absurd. Like "The Great Pretender"--also on Side A of the Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) LP--there's a woozy sense of nasty dealings underfoot, despite not much of a "smoking gun" in sight. One might labor to locate a specific element obviously over-the-top in terms of cruelty or perversion.
Ah, but the description (in the second verse) of the Fat Lady of Limbourg! Close enough. The couplet:
But her sense of taste is such that she'll distinguish with her tongue
The subtleties a spectrograph would miss
...matches anything in "Seven Deadly Finns" for weirdness (followed up by an image truly nausea-inducing, if one thinks too hard about it). Either track would be a fine benchmark for Eno's playful perversity, most of which he--perhaps sadly--seems to have gotten out of his system, ultimately. Except for the odd bits of oddness on Side A of Before and After Science: the luxuriant wordplay of "Backwater" and the 'pataphysical madness of "King's Lead Hat". (These tendencies would crop up on My Squelchy Life, but only occasionally. An opinion based, of course, on those few tracks which ever saw legitimate release.)
My knowledge of world history being neither deep nor wide, nevertheless I've noticed how Eno enjoyed making obscure references to pre-Modern Europe on Taking Tiger Mountain. There's the prominence of Limbourg, a city (located in what's now Belgium) of little significance today, but which once had been a great fortress. Intended, perhaps, to underscore the Fat Lady's faded ties with royalty. In a similar vein, Eno's protagonist of "Mother Whale Eyeless"--in yet another unlikely image--finds himself "plugging holes in the Zuider Zee." That body of water (spangled with zeds!)--once prominent in the map of the Netherlands--has vanished. This changeable (not to say "fluid") feature of the Dutch landscape is kept alive in memory by the Zuiderzee Museum (and by Eno's song).
One of the more Dada-esque offerings from a songwriter whose early career is typified by heaping helpings of the absurd. Like "The Great Pretender"--also on Side A of the Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) LP--there's a woozy sense of nasty dealings underfoot, despite not much of a "smoking gun" in sight. One might labor to locate a specific element obviously over-the-top in terms of cruelty or perversion.
Ah, but the description (in the second verse) of the Fat Lady of Limbourg! Close enough. The couplet:
But her sense of taste is such that she'll distinguish with her tongue The subtleties a spectrograph would miss
...matches anything in "Seven Deadly Finns" for weirdness (followed up by an image truly nausea-inducing, if one thinks too hard about it). Either track would be a fine benchmark for Eno's playful perversity, most of which he--perhaps sadly--seems to have gotten out of his system, ultimately. Except for the odd bits of oddness on Side A of Before and After Science: the luxuriant wordplay of "Backwater" and the 'pataphysical madness of "King's Lead Hat". (These tendencies would crop up on My Squelchy Life, but only occasionally. An opinion based, of course, on those few tracks which ever saw legitimate release.)
My knowledge of world history being neither deep nor wide, nevertheless I've noticed how Eno enjoyed making obscure references to pre-Modern Europe on Taking Tiger Mountain. There's the prominence of Limbourg, a city (located in what's now Belgium) of little significance today, but which once had been a great fortress. Intended, perhaps, to underscore the Fat Lady's faded ties with royalty. In a similar vein, Eno's protagonist of "Mother Whale Eyeless"--in yet another unlikely image--finds himself "plugging holes in the Zuider Zee." That body of water (spangled with zeds!)--once prominent in the map of the Netherlands--has vanished. This changeable (not to say "fluid") feature of the Dutch landscape is kept alive in memory by the Zuiderzee Museum (and by Eno's song).
@foreverdrone She's tasting Opium. Read my post.
@foreverdrone She's tasting Opium. Read my post.