Trying To Be Clever With Dispiriting Ditties

I'm going to have to do something about the music to which I have been listening these past few days.  Often I just hit 'shuffle' on my iPod as I go about straightening up the kitchen of an evening, and listen to good 'uns as I stack the dishwasher and wipe down the benches with my home made, chemical free, environmentally kind and inexpensive cleaning agent.  But every now and then an utter stinker will pop up.  The stinkers are not my doing.  They are the fault of Mr Bingells.  He bought me the iPod a couple of years ago, and tinkered about with it figuring how to transfer music from a CD to the cute little music machine.  Mr Bingells has okay taste in music, too, but for some reason the CD he grabbed for this experiment was a Tom Jones one.  I know, I know - there is nothing wrong with Tom Jones.  I like a bit of Tom, too.  My late mother was a humongous fan, and I recall my older brother and sister playing Mum's album when I was a kid, and for some reason lip-syncing to 'It's A Sin To Tell A Lie'.  I don't know why.  My brother was a huge Alice Cooper and Black Sabbath fan, so why he thought it would be fun to mime to Tom Jones is beyond me. 

But the other night I was pottering about in the kitchen, and from my blue tooth I heard 'Green, Green Grass Of Home'.  I smiled benevolently as Tom, in a tone so sentimental it almost hit mawkish, sang about stepping from the train to see his parents, and some girl named Mary, who has lips like cherries (collagen?).  I'm guessing Mary might be his neighbourhood crushie.  He mentions the old oak tree on which he once played.  This is good.  All little kids should climb trees at some stage or another.  I smiled as I switched on the dishwasher, remembering times I played in trees, and on tyre swings.

And then, and oh THEN Tom sang about waking up and seeing four grey walls, a guard, and a sad old padre, and I realised he wasn't about to see this:

Oh no, not that beautiful lush specimen of arboreal magnificence.  No, this is what Tom was looking at:

Yes, he was about to get strapped in and treated to 2000 volts.  And I spent the remainder of my evening in a funk of cheerless gloom.  The gloom returned today when I had a listen to 'One' by Metallica, which tells the less-than-sunny story of a wounded solder.  And by wounded I mean quadruple amputee, no sight, no hearing, no speech.  He lies on his bed bashing out messages in Morse code to the nursing staff, with his head.  Those messages are not a request for a bedpan, or for a jug of water, but that he be subjected to a mercy killing.

Although I do not believe art must be all sweetness and light, and actually have a rather noir sense of humour at the best of times, those two ditties really are as depressing as fuck, and I think I'm going to have to crank up some Beach Boys now to cheer me.

Okay, one of the reasons for this post was not just to talk about how bleak 'Green, Green Grass Of Home' actually is, but to see if I could be clever and add images to my blog.  Have I been clever, or what?