I've always been an appreciator of the Wiki concept, but I've never had the urge to actually contribute to them. Not until now. An entry at Wikipedia called List of self-referential songs misquotes one of the most important songs in my life, "El Scorcho": in place of
How stupid is it/I can't talk about it/I gotta sing about it/and make a record of/(my heart)
they have:
How stupid is it/I can't talk about it/I gotta sing about it/and make a record up
One might argue that the bigger issue is that these lyrics do not make the song self-referential, because they only refer to some record made by the author which may or may not be El Scorcho or Pinkerton. But personally the mistranscription bothers me a lot more. And yet, will I correct it? More likely I will weigh the options awhile before forgetting about it completely, and someone else will do it (at least that's what I'll tell myself while weighing).
The rest of the list is interesting, but it's also enormous because they chose to include every instance of "this song"* or variants of "so I wrote a song about it, called [title of this song]." This is good for a reference work, but not for an article which has any aim other than convincing you that this idea has been driven into the ground 12 times over.
Although many find it "cheap" or otherwise undesirable, I think self-reference is probably the key to intelligence and perhaps to the whole universe in some way. If this site were really about anything, self-reference is surely one of the things it would be about. And I do try to incorporate it into my songs. But I promise not to do so in any ways such as the aforementioned, that have been done sooo many times before.
*Not including, of course, instances in which "this" refers to a different, more local antecedent, such as "There's a song called [other title]/and this song is um...good." I think that list would be a lot shorter and equally interesting to me; if anyone can find any examples that belong on it, please let me know.
Comments (2)
Correct me if I'm wrong - because Rivers is saying "How stupid is IT I gotta sing about IT" - that would be a self-refrence. "IT" being the subject of the song - "singing about IT" being the self-refrence.
I'm tempted to refer to this post within this post but I'm not going to do that. Or am I?
December 11, 2004 3:33 AM
Funny, for some reason I had ignored the "it" and focused on the "record" as the intended instance of self-ref. But you're right: if he says that he sings about the subject of this song, he must be referring at least partly to the singing that he's doing in this song (as well as to other songs or singings that might be about the same subject). Right now it seems more likely to me that he is referring to his general tendency to have to sing about these situations instead of talk about them, but since this song is one of those, it's still self-ref. Thanks Milkshake!
December 17, 2004 12:22 AM