Filking, F-bombs and surly poems

[kjn]

Another instafilk, based on a comment on the Filker Facebook group. Based on Tim Spencer's song "Cigarettes, Whiskey, and Wild Wild Women", but I learnt of it from Cacka Israelsson's Swedish version "Cigaretter, whiskey och vilda kvinnor" (YouTube)


Once I was happy and I was a good fan
I had enough egoboo to call me a slan
I met with a filker, and we went on all right
she taught me to filk and singing all night

Filking, F-bombs and surly poems
they'll drive you crazy, they'll drive you insane
Filking, F-bombs and surly poems
they'll drive you crazy, they'll drive you insane

Filking is a blight on the whole human race
A man is a monkey while singing of space
Take warning dear fan, take warning dear brother
A-filking on one end, a fools on t'other

Filking, F-bombs and surly poems
they'll drive you crazy, they'll drive you insane
Filking, F-bombs and surly poems
they'll drive you crazy, they'll drive you insane

Write on the cross at the head of my grave
'For filking and poems, here lies a poor slave
Take warning, dear neo, take warning, dear friend'
Then write in big letters these words at the end

Filking, F-bombs and surly poems
they'll drive you crazy, they'll drive you insane
Filking, F-bombs and surly poems
they'll drive you crazy, they'll drive you insane

Comments

[thnidu]

Hoo-hah, fun! Good to see you, old pal.

Coupla comments; hope you don't mind.

• to filk and singing all night
-> to filk and to sing through the night
> Rhythm and grammar; my high school English teachers would've tagged it "faulty parallelism". At least equally important, it sounds unnatural.

• Filking is a blight on the whole human race
-> Filking's a blight on ...
> Rhythm (scansion)

• a fools on the t'other
-> a fool's on the other
> Spelling (punctuation).
> "t'other" is already a contraction of "the other"

Oh, I must learn the tune.

[kjn]

Hi again! You moved over here permanently?

Fixing some of this, though I have a real hard time singing "through" so I'll keep the original there, and the scansion is all over the place in the (many) versions of the original song as well. Sing it any way you want, however, and feel free to add extra verses as the mood catches you.

I'm a little surprised you didn't react to the scansion in v1.l2; you have to cram in an extra syllable with "enough egoboo" - singable, but you need to be prepared for it.

There are plenty of good versions over on Youtube, with all sorts of text changes (including "she taught me to drink and to smoke whiskey"). I'm especially partial to the Muppets version with Peter Sellers.

[thnidu]

"Over here"? If you mean Dreamwidth, I've been here for years, posting primarily here with automatic crosspost to LiveJournal.

The extra syllable with "egoboo": sorry, I'm so used to that sort of thing it's trivial for me, especially as I'm a very fast and fluent reader, though I do sometimes trip on such things when sight-singing. Folk tradition has all kinds of variations, and the second, third, etc. verses (ISTM) hardly ever scan identically to the first, syllable for syllable. If that were a requirement it would be a real straitjacket. Of course it's probably harder in a language that's not your native one; do you never encounter such slight variations in Swedish lyrics?

[kjn]

Yeah, it was that it was posted on LJ several weeks ago, so I was a little surprised when you commented here and now.

We do encounter such variations in Swedish lyrics, but I believe not to the same degree as in the English-language song tradition, though now I'm curious and will have to check. "I had enough egoboo" was sufficient enough to make me notice, though, probably because of both cramming an extra syllable in and maybe having it on a stressed syllable.

But it's close enough for filk (or country)!