“The Emotional World”
Nov. 13th, 2023 09:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eerietomOver the last several weeks I’ve been watching a lot of Eurospy films (aka “spaghetti spy” films), as well as those trying to cash in on the success of the 1976 remake of King Kong (dir. John Guillermin), such as A.P.E. (1976, dir. Paul Leder), The Mighty Peking Man (1977, dir. Ho Meng Hua), and Yeti: Giant of the 20th Century (1977, dir. Gianfranco Parolini, aka Frank Kramer).
The funny part is how obvious it was that the films were made by people who didn’t have the faintest idea about context. It would be like me making a movie about coal mining, without doing any research, combining clichés I’d seen in movies about miners, or just plain ol’ making stuff up. This, of course, results in unintentional hilarity.
I recalled a video I did around 1990 that was “spaghetti” in how I took a song and tried to emulate it, though rather poorly. I had decided to rip off Kate Bush’s “The Sensual World” with a song for “Kate Shrub” called “The Emotional World”. It was all done very quickly with no planning: lyrics were improvised over a droning synth and drum track, while “Kate” danced through literal cardboard sets with bad snow effects in a single take (we were shooting several videos that day, so there was no time for retakes). Technically, such a song is what’s called a sound-alike, but I prefer “spaghetti pop”.
I tried to transcribe the lyrics as best I could, but many of them are unintelligible, a combination of the poor quality of the video (filmed on VHS over thirty years ago!) and the fact I was using vocalese in some passages as a substitute for actual words:
An emotional world
You must tell her ...
And with an emotional world
You must open your heart to me
And dance in summer
And look and enjoy it
The sunlight
An emotional world, the sun can be enjoyed
And the pink flowers and the mountains
And the Howth Head and flesh ...
And then green mountain springs
With the peach fuzz and the moss
I can see and hear and dance
An emotional world
I can see how we can be so, you and me
I can see
I’m dancing
And the sun and the wind, we are passing through this ...
And see this ...
The emotional world
And dance each spring, ooh
... as the snow falls around me, the sea
The emotional world and the sea
The funny part is how obvious it was that the films were made by people who didn’t have the faintest idea about context. It would be like me making a movie about coal mining, without doing any research, combining clichés I’d seen in movies about miners, or just plain ol’ making stuff up. This, of course, results in unintentional hilarity.
I recalled a video I did around 1990 that was “spaghetti” in how I took a song and tried to emulate it, though rather poorly. I had decided to rip off Kate Bush’s “The Sensual World” with a song for “Kate Shrub” called “The Emotional World”. It was all done very quickly with no planning: lyrics were improvised over a droning synth and drum track, while “Kate” danced through literal cardboard sets with bad snow effects in a single take (we were shooting several videos that day, so there was no time for retakes). Technically, such a song is what’s called a sound-alike, but I prefer “spaghetti pop”.
I tried to transcribe the lyrics as best I could, but many of them are unintelligible, a combination of the poor quality of the video (filmed on VHS over thirty years ago!) and the fact I was using vocalese in some passages as a substitute for actual words:
An emotional world
You must tell her ...
And with an emotional world
You must open your heart to me
And dance in summer
And look and enjoy it
The sunlight
An emotional world, the sun can be enjoyed
And the pink flowers and the mountains
And the Howth Head and flesh ...
And then green mountain springs
With the peach fuzz and the moss
I can see and hear and dance
An emotional world
I can see how we can be so, you and me
I can see
I’m dancing
And the sun and the wind, we are passing through this ...
And see this ...
The emotional world
And dance each spring, ooh
... as the snow falls around me, the sea
The emotional world and the sea
