Townsman dbuskirk was overheard reporting the following find from the depths of Rock Town Hall’s Research & Development department!
Marc Mundy, “How Can I Marry This Language”
I can’t remember the last time a song has captured me like this but it reminds me of that ultimate hopeless teenage obsession I had with “My Sharona”. It just broke and neither my local drugstore, The Ames, nor The K-Mart (my three record outlets in the summer of 1979) had it in stock, so I was stuck waiting by WCAU-FM so I could hear it once an hour.
This went on for a few weeks until my parents finally had to drive to the mall to get something and I could finally buy the single, with the foxy Sharona in the wife-beater picture sleeve and the faux Beatles label.
But I digress. The song I can’t stop listening to currently is by obscuro, private press rocker Marc Mundy, “How Can I Marry This Language”. Born in a showbiz family, raised in Cyprus, and brought up on Mediterranean radio that featured sounds from Istanbul, Cairo, and Tel Aviv, Mundy ended up in Greenwich Village in the late ’60s. He married a Turkish looker and in 1970 recorded his only album, with his wife on backing vocals and an unknown cast of her Turkish cronies on
back-up.
Although one has to get accustomed to a accent that sounds dangerously close to Borat, this song has been short-circuiting its way into my idle thoughts almost hourly for weeks. It’s that chorus, where he breaks into a wordless vocal that seems to approximate some ancient folk melody, that just kills me everytime.
Not that everything around it isn’t fantastic, that crazy stuttering Moon-like drumming, the stop-start rhythms with the kissing sound, the lyrics about asking for a woman’s hand in a foreign language, and the fact that it is one of those “3-minute zingers” (2:57 actually) recently talked about on some uptown blog, it all has me smitten like a schoolboy.
I’m like everyone here, I love the rock and roll of this era, but why listen to yet another Beatle-ish/Kinks approximation when I can listen to a song as confounding as this?
Buskirk, this is Planet Earth calling. You have listened to too much music. I repeat, you have listened to too much music. Come back, Buskirk, come back. Over.
I think you should always listen to criticism so I’ll consider that yes, I may be insane from spending too many years behind record store counters, inhaling mold spores and listening to records from the international section.
But you don’t think this is interesting at all? I recognize the whole thing is somehow off-kilter, but that’s part of the charm for me.
Oh, I wouldn’t want to debate whether it’s interesting–it’s undoubtedly a weird little ditty. I was more speaking to the music-addled state of mind that could get obsessed with this song. Go outside and play for awhile, would ya?
And I’m about to take my own advice on that…
though i wouldn’t say i’m in love with the song, i must say that this is the freshest pop song relative to my normal way of hearing that has hit my ears in at least over a decade.
it made me tilt my head like a dog does when he hears some distant noise just on the horizon between what is and isn’t audible.
every little detail — from the timing of the vocals to the production values — is somehow slightly off from my normal expectations.
it’s an exotic artifact.
thanks for sharing it!!!
Saturnismine says:
I must say that this is the freshest pop song relative to my normal way of hearing that has hit my ears in at least over a decade.
“…if I can touch just one heart…”
Glad someone else found this as intriguing as me. Looking forward to hearing the M. Mundy sound absorbed into your musical toolbox.
-db