CULTURAL CODFISH

Sometimes it is cruelly apparent to me that Savage Kitten and I come from entirely different cultures. Cultures so staggeringly at odds that the chasm is nigh unbridgeable.

Her musical tastes were formed in the seventies and eighties, mine predate industrialization.

She hums ABBA and Madonna. I sing old-fashioned ballads like 'The Winnipeg Whore', 'Harlot of Jerusalem', and 'The Ring Dang Doo'.


And also airs like the following.


THE CODFISH SONG

Once there was a man who had a little horse.
He saddled it and bridled it and threw his leg across.

Idiotic refrain: eye tilly eye, eye tilly eye, eye tilly eye tilly eye tigh yigh!

He rode and rode until he came to a brook,
And there sat a fisherman a-baiting of his hook.

'Oh, fisherman, oh fisherman,' said he,
'Have you a codfish for my tea?'

'Oh yes sir course sir I've got two,
There's a one for me and a one for you.'

Well, he took that codfish by the tail bone
Mounted on his horse and galloped back home.

But when he got home he couldn't find a dish,
Into the chamber pot he popped his little fish.

All night long his old woman cried,
'There's the devil down below I can see his beady eyes!'

And when next the morning she sat down to squat,
The codfish jumped up her you-know-what.

She cried bloody murder and well cried she,
'There's a bloody big something a-getting up me!'

She hopped and she jumped and she gave a mighty roar.
And there went the codfish a-skating round the floor.

They chased that codfish all around the room,
They hit him with a brush and bashed him with a broom.

First they hit him on the belly and they hit him on the side,
They hit him on his ass until the poor bugger died.

Now the moral of this song is easy for to find,
Nobody got his eyes up behind,

So ya better be sure before you squat,
There's nothing swimming in the chamber pot.



See, lyrics like this come from a kinder, gentler America.
An America that knew narrative cohesion, and believed that not everything could be reduced to mere sexual innuendo.
A different, and more profound world.