Music and the Sweetest, Sweetest Sorrow

The crying echo of a soulful sixties ballad wafts through the canyons and corridors of my beleaguered brain.

By

David Gottfried

The crying echo of a soulful sixties ballad wafts through the canyons and corridors of my beleaguered brain.

The Song is “Build me Up, Buttercup,” by the Foundations.

I think I have been hearing that song on and off since the 6^th grade.

Just as people don’t know how to the read the Bible, and think that the Holy Writ is godly justification for the terror of Torquemada, many people don’t know how to listen to “Build Me Up Buttercup.”

They hear the buoyant, ebullient music and they think it’s a happy song. They are deaf, dumb and blind to the lyrics, in which the subject wails a lament of rejection, unrequited love, and insufferable loneliness. Sure, the music is happy but that is only because the subject is struggling to wear a happy face, and the happy music is forced and almost febrile as it realizes that it’s destined to crash in a midnight depression with all the violence and pathos of a speed freak.

I recently heard two very different renditions of this song. The first one was associated with some common movie from our cookie cutter common vulgar American culture. I think the move was entitled, “There is something about Mary.” In the video we see a bunch of silly, happy shmucks jumping around like Mexican Jumping beans, or sunbelt cretins whose IQ has shriveled up like a grape transformed into a raison, or midget- minded nincompoops who have listened to the Brady Bunch every day for the past 10 years.

The people in that video did not deserve that song.

Gorgeous melodies should not be given to gluttons of glee. Those bastards have had their surfeit of happiness. They are, I suppose, like so many of my friends who used to crack jokes about the dead and dying people they saw on the evening news.

A song that is a sweet, sad lament for the brokenhearted should not be prostituted to bring undeserved cheer to the vicious and victorious.

(This reminds me: Several years ago, I heard “All you Need is Love” used as part of an advertisement, enchained to make money for a chain of optometry stores. If that is Capitalism, then I applaud the Vietcong for invading the American Embassy in Saigon during the Tet Offensive of the year that is the Holy of Holies: 1968)

But I recently heard another rendition of “Build Me Up, Buttercup.” This rendition was played and sung by a fat man. I don’t know him, but I guess from the looks of him, and the moderately dejected vibes he conveyed, that his sexual and romantic pleasures have been scant and rare.

But his version is so much better. His version has soul. His version plays the notes that David played for G-d. And may the kingdom of Heaven be his.