Thursday, September 2, 2010
Taco-taco
Fucking love this tune, thought it was They Might Be Giants but it turns out it's some Dutch guy called Taco.
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Fucking love this tune, thought it was They Might Be Giants but it turns out it's some Dutch guy called Taco.
you're thinking of istanbul not constantinople by they might be giants scobe, it is well similar:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeQ-wjDH4F4
putting on the ritz but man, what a tune. It's actually mental when you think about these old tunes that just live on as part of popular memory forever, you forget that someone actually wrote them at one point. Irving Berlin wrote this, as well as white christmas, no business like show business, anything you can do I can do better, and a million other tunes now woven into the very fabric of society.
If I may bore you further, it's also interesting how this tune was sanitised over time, this version is the same as the bing crosby version, which mentions 'up and down park avenue' and 'where fashion sits'. In the old thirties version I got, the original, it's 'Lennox Avenue' and says 'where Harlem flits'. This is because Irving Berlin wasn't writing about the well to do white toffs on park avenue. He was talking about the dressed up yet poor black folks of Harlem who were quite literally 'spending every dime for a wonderful time'. It's actually quite a condescending and racist tune, but y'know, it was 1929.
I first came across this version labelled as TMBG, cos as mentioned here (http://www.last.fm/music/They+Might+Be+Giants/_/Puttin+On+the+Ritz) it's commonly misattributed. I can now see why given the Istanbul/Constantinople tune.
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