Relentless Virtuosity: The Musicality of Lists Part 3

And the List Goes On. And On. And On.

In my previous post on the musicality of lists, I highlighted the virtuosity displayed by rapper Gift of Gab on performances such as Blackalicious’s ‘Alphabet Aerobics’. I also talked about the potential monotony of lists and how that created challenges for those setting them to music even as lists can contain musical aspects in their use of rhythm, repetition and a lilting, leaning or ‘listing’ quality.

In future posts I’d like to explore those ideas a bit more and connect them to other observations I’ve made about ‘the sound of nonsense’ and how lists veer between being nonsensical texts (from a grammatical perspective) and coherent narratives—the very thing from which narratives can emerge. I’m curious about what that means for song as a form of communication. Thinking about Gift of Gab’s relentless virtuosity on tracks like ‘Alphabet Aerobics’ also gets me thinking about other kinds of vocal acrobatics, such as scatting. Is scatting a form of listing, I wonder?

But for this final part (for now, at least), I’ll stick to how torrential lists are used as forms of virtuosity, how they may overwhelm songs and singers and even exist as symptoms of anxiety. And I’ll say something about songs that cite other songs, which is another topic I’d like to extend in future posts.

Torrential listing

‘When a list goes on and on’, asks Francis Spufford in The Chatto Book of Cabbages and Kings, ‘are we looking at an abdication of control over a torrent of separate pieces of data, or at the equivalent of a strongman’s display of strength with more and more weights’? Simon Schama, meanwhile, reviewing Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists, writes of greed mixing with pleasure in the long list; again, there is the sense that some lists are just too relentless, too abundant, too overwhelmingly greedy.

‘It seems to me’, Schama writes, ‘that the two impulses that lead us to make, and dwell within, lists are at odds with each other. One is the "reality effect" of massively agglomerated detail: the illusion of panoramic omniscience augmented by thick texture … But the other impulse, much exercised by Renaissance encyclopaedists in picture and in text, is mystical: a revelation from broad sampling. So a trip through the welter of detail … might yield an epiphany of cosmic "Wow": the harmonic connection ties the discrepancies of the world together with a single ribbon of meaning.’

Front and rear covers of More of Tom Lehrer LP (1959).

A classic example of the relentless virtuosity that sometimes comes with list songs can be found in ‘The Elements’, a song by the humourist and academic Tom Lehrer which lists the 102 elements of the periodic table that were known in 1959 when the song was written. Rather than arranging the elements in either alphabetical order or in the order they appear in the table, Lehrer organises them according to meter, alliteration and assonance.

The first four lines run as follows:

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen, and oxygen, and nitrogen, and rhenium
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium

Having finished the list by rhyming ‘rhodium’ and ‘sodium’, Lehrer then includes an amusingly awkward rhyme by singing ‘These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard / And there may be many others but they haven't been discovered’. This recognition that even a seemingly exhaustive list can be added to anticipated the discovery (so far) of sixteen further elements since its composition. Indeed, in the clip below—recorded in Copenhagen in 1967—Lehrer pauses mid-song to mention the previously unlisted element lawrencium.

In thinking about virtuosity, it’s interesting that Lehrer introduces this performance by saying, ‘I think the only reason I still do it is to see if I can’.

Lehrer used the music of the ‘Major General’s Song’ from Gilbert & Sullivan’s comic opera The Pirates of Penzance. ‘I am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General’, to use the full title, is a patter song typical of the genre and is also an example of virtuosic listing as the Major-General boasts of all the things of which he’s knowledgeable and shows off his ability to recite words very quickly and find unusual rhymes for them.

Gilbert & Sullivan were no strangers to list songs, as evidenced by another much-parodied song from The Mikado, ‘I’ve Got a Little List’, which frequently gets updated to refer to contemporary list items (see this version from 2015, for example). Indeed, there’s a whole other story to be told about the role of list or catalogues songs in opera, musical theatre and Disney-style musicals.

That story will have to wait for another day. What I want to highlight here is the relentless virtuosity of songs such as the Major-General’s or ‘The Elements’ and how they invite virtuosic performances. Any actor taking on the role of the Major-General in Pirates of Penzance or Koko in The Mikado is forced into a display of virtuosity through listing.

So too with anyone who takes on Lehrer’s song. A cover version by the Canadian hip-hop artist Jesse Dangerously makes explicit the way that rap has relied on listing techniques in its rhymes and rhythms.

Jesse Dangerously adds another pun to his version of Lehrer’s song by mentioning the existence of more than four elements. He is thinking of the elements of hip hop here, as he explains in a note on his Bandcamp page:

‘The elements were arranged for optimal lyrical purposes in this song by Tom Lehrer, who is also a major hero of mine when it comes to rhyme schemes, wit, and wordplay, to say nothing of moral fibre.

I recorded this as a response to the purist assertion that hip-hop was founded on, and can never expand beyond, the "four elements" of DJing, b-boying, rapping, and graffiti.’

Another connection between Lehrer’s song and hip-hop is provided in the unexpected example of the actor Daniel Radcliffe, who has spoken in interviews of having a penchant for memorising lyrically complex lyrics and who has performed ‘The Elements’ and Blackalicious’s ‘Alphabet Aerobics’ on TV talk shows as party pieces.

Lists can also give the sense of rushing and exhaustion; one can feel tired reading them, whether silently or out loud. Lists can be overwhelming—think of shopping lists, to-do lists, action points. They are exhausting without being exhaustive. Indeed, the very awareness that more things exist outside the list (off-list) can often add to the sense of anxiety they evoke.

There’s always the worry that something has been left off of the list or that the seemingly exhaustive list is, in fact, a substitute for a thing that can’t quite be grasped, let alone contained in a list. In his book Essayism, Brian Dillon argues that the act of setting things down in literary lists suggests instead a kind of defeat, or at least the recognition of something missing:

‘Is there such a thing as a happy list in literature? The blithe verbal sum of possessions, achievements or experiences? Isn’t the very act of setting such things down evidence of some vexation, a clue that something is missing? The collector’s catalogue, the merchant’s tally, the seducer’s black book: they are all examples of compensating control.’

When we think of performing a list song as a kind of virtuosity—alphabet aerobics, error-free recitations, feats of memory—it’s also a recognition that the very creation of a long list is also virtuosic, an attempt at exhaustive detail even in the face of inevitable defeat.

Is virtuosity a kind of victory? And is it also a kind of victory for a singer to sing a list without making it seem like a list? In my book The Sound of Nonsense, I suggested that lists had a ‘normalizing power’ in that the mechanism of the list made new alliances between list terms seem natural. I stand by that but list songs also make me aware of the danger of reducing songfulness through the disruptive aspect of the listing mechanism. That’s a topic I hope to return to in Songs and Objects when I consider ‘songful’ words.

For now, let’s return to Bob Dylan, who has been a recurring presence in these posts about the musicality of lists. In 2020, to general surprise and critical acclaim, Dylan released the album Rough and Rowdy Ways, which opens and closes with two great list songs. The first is ‘I Contain Multitudes’, its title taken from the work of Walt Whitman, whose ‘Song of Myself’ can be read as an epic listing poem detailing American experience as embodied in the figure of the visionary poet.

Whitman offered a reminder that such listing had been a feature of epic poetry from at least the time of Homer, a tool for cataloguing the abundance of the world and turning it into drama. As Astrid Lorange notes,

‘In the history of poetry, the list form has figured as a constructive conceit—one that, through the seemingly paradoxical affects of repetition and difference, speaks of a world both heterogeneous and somehow harmonious. Walt Whitman, an exemplary list poet, used the performative affect of the litany to emphasise his most beloved subject: multitudinousness.’

This word ‘multitudinousness’ seems to me an apt description of the subject matter of Bob Dylan’s songs from pretty much the start of his career, so it seems only apt that in his seventh decade as a recording artist he open an album with a song called ‘I Contain Multitudes’, a song that has him listing some of the multitudes he and his songs contain. In one sense, the ‘I’ of this song could be the song itself speaking in first person, telling us what its made of:

Pink pedal pushers and red blue jeans 
All the pretty maids and all the old queens 
All the old queens from all my past lives
I carry four pistols and two large knives

But it seems to be a human who signs off the verse:

I’m a man of contradictions and a man of many moods . . . I contain multitudes

Even more multitudinous is the album’s closing song, ‘Murder Most Foul’, a nearly seventeen-minute track containing over 1400 words in which a narrative about the assassination of John F Kennedy spirals out into a seemingly endless list of cultural references. A large proportion of these are references to American musicians, lined up by Dylan as am imagined set of requests sent out to the legendary US disc jockey Wolfman Jack. 

Play me a song, Mr. Wolfman Jack
Play it for me in my long Cadillac
Play that Only The Good Die Young
Take me to the place where Tom Dooley was hung
Play St. James Infirmary in the court of King James
If you want to remember, better write down the names
Play Etta James too, play I’d Rather Go Blind
Play it for the man with the telepathic mind
Play John Lee Hooker play Scratch My Back
Play it for that strip club owner named Jack
Guitar Slim - Goin’ Down Slow
Play it for me and for Marilyn Monroe 
And please, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood 
Play it for the First Lady, she ain’t feeling that good 
Play Don Henley - play Glenn Frey
Take it to the Limit and let it go by
And play it for Carl Wilson, too
Lookin’ far, far away down Gower Avenue 
Play Tragedy, play Twilight Time 
Take Me Back to Tulsa to the scene of the crime

If ‘Murder Most Foul’ plays out like a list of references, we might consider how many list songs can be understood as doing a kind of generative work, sending a listener or reader off on searches for new information and opening up new worlds. There are territories of knowledge and experience to be uncovered in reference lists, as there are in contents pages and indexes (both of which, of course, are types of list).

Such scholarship need not be limited to what are traditionally considered as scholarly texts. The fact that Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ could inspire a history podcast of the same name in which the people and events listed in his song are explored further is one example of how songs can inspire research; the exegetic notes on lyric sites such as Genius provide countless further examples. Dylan’s ‘Murder Most Foul’ has more than enough to keep Dylanologists and cultural archaeologists busy for a long while.

Songs that list songs

‘Murder Most Foul’ reminds me of one last category of list songs that I want to consider before closing: songs that list other songs. Among the many cultural references that Dylan includes in his multitudinous song are several song titles. For starters, the section I quoted above evokes ‘Scratch my Back’, ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’, ‘Tom Dooley’, ‘Only the Good Die Young’, ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’, ‘St. James Infirmary’, ‘Goin’ Down Slow’, ‘Take It to the Limit’, ‘Tragedy’, ‘Twilight Time’, ‘Take Me Back to Tulsa’. And the list, as I keep saying, goes on.

I’ve long been interested in songs that cite other songs and have enjoyed following my curiosity by looking up those that I don’t know, an example of the generative aspect of songs that I mentioned above. I found myself thinking about this again recently when Shane MacGowan died and lots of people (including me) started discussing the songcraft of MacGowan and the other Pogues. That was just ahead of the annual replaying of ‘Fairytale of New York’, of course, a song that memorably cites other songs—‘The Rare Old Mountain Dew’ and ‘Galway Bay’. I got to thinking about other songs that MacGowan had written or sung which did something similar.

I thought about the references in ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’ to ‘Where the Water Lilies Grow’, to Ray Lynam and Philomena Begley performing ‘My Elusive Dreams’ and Johnny Cash singing ‘A Thing Called Love’. I wondered which version of ‘Where the Roses Bloom Again’ was being sung by the old men in ‘Dark Streets of London’ (here’s Vernon Dalhart’s version and a quite different version by The Carter Family with Johnny Cash). And, on discovering this Pogues forum post, I was reminded of the shout outs to ‘The Little Cottage By The Lee’, ‘Paper Roses’, ‘Boolavogue’ and ‘Eileen Aru’ [aka ‘Eileen Aroon’] in ‘Boat Story’. (The internet is always there to remind you that others have asked the questions you’re asking before.)

For those tempted to go further down this particular rabbit hole, I recommend checking out the lists of songs that mention other songs provided by The Guardian, Reddit and TVTropes. I discovered the last one while looking at the same site’s ‘List Song’ list; I’ve generally tried avoiding such lists while writing these pieces as I had examples of my own I wanted to focus on, but they are a useful reminder that a significant number of people engage in this kind of activity. (I guess we all need reassurance when we head down rabbit holes!)

I’m likely to come back to the topic of song titles to be found inside other songs in future Songs and Objects posts. Here, I’ll just mention examples that, like ‘Murder Most Foul’, use lists of songs as a structuring device (the MacGowan songs I mentioned above are not really list songs, but I thought them worth mentioning at this moment).

Country music has many of these—the genre is known for its tendency to refer to itself via references to country musicians or songs—and it’s therefore not a surprise to find country titles in the TVTropes ‘Song of Song Titles’ list, including Brad Paisley’s ‘This Is Country Music’ and Gary Allan’s ‘Songs About Rain’. My own list would have to include Dale Watson’s ‘I Hate These Songs’, the title track of a 1997 album.

Watson’s song is structured around a list of classic country songs, evoking recordings made by Merle Haggard (‘Misery and Gin’, ‘Silver Wings’), Moe Bandy (‘Here I Am Drunk Again’), Lefty Frizzell (‘She’s Gone, Gone, Gone’), Patsy Cline (‘Crazy’), Jim Reeves (‘Four Walls’), Willie Nelson (‘Funny How Time Slips Away’), George Jones (‘He Stopped Loving Her Today’), Ray Price (‘Lonely Street’), Ray Charles (‘Born to Lose’) and Tammy Wynette (‘He’s Just an Old Love Turned Memory’—I’m guessing that one as Watson’s lyric is ‘old lonesome memory’ but I don’t know which song that would be).

Why does the singer hate these songs? Because he loves them really and keeps getting drawn back to them, to ‘bathe in their sorrow’ and to ‘get through tomorrow’. Because he’s in pain and he thinks they’ll help him, remind him that he’s not alone and that others have gone through what he’s going through. But the songs are too true, they cut to the bone. And so he hates them.

There’s a recognisable world to the songs Watson lists. They’re not only country, but also connected by artist affiliations: Nelson wrote ‘Crazy’ and has also recorded it and ‘Four Walls’; Nelson and Haggard often collaborated (occasionally with Price too) and both were influenced by and paid homage to Frizzell; Jones and Wynette were married and recorded together; Price recorded ‘Born to Lose’, and so on. There’s no accident that Watson cites work by these artists as they fall firmly into what he calls ‘real country songs’. It’s also telling that he titles his album after this song. It’s both slightly weird for a songwriter to release an album of his compositions called I Hate These Songs but also right on the money for an artist like Watson: that same sense of love and hate as two sides of a coin, that awareness that what gets you through might also be what takes you out.

We’ve gone a little distance from listing the elements of the Periodic Table to listing the elements of classic country songs. Time perhaps to bring things to a close for now.

Just as there is almost always more to add to a list, so there are many more things to say about listing songs, and many more songs to consider. List songs will continue to be a feature of Songs and Objects because they do even more explicitly what I’m arguing other songs do anyway, which is to place objects in play with each other. Because songs describe relationships between objects anyway, I think it’s always interesting to analyse the structures they use to do so.

I’ve started unravelling several threads here and I can think of plenty more to pull at. It would be great to hear from anyone who’s enjoyed reading about the musicality of lists (or indeed any other Songs and Objects topics that I’ve covered in the last couple of months) to know whether there are any related topics you’d be interested in me tackling in 2024. All the best for the new year!

The text above is a slightly revised extract from the fourth episode of the Songs and Objects podcast, originally released in November 2021. I’ve divided the episode into three for this version. Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here.