Weird one. Listening now there’s a lot about this one that was brand new to me at the time, but which became more my style later on. Like the way the minor key melody is, and the ahh ahh stuff. I remember feeling really naked and self conscious ’cause I was doing this crazy falsetto singing – or at least I thought it was falsetto then – it doesn’t sound as high to me now.
The lyrics on this one are a little nutso. I was going for something, not sure what. But it’s kind of a lot of surreality that has meaning that I wouldn’t know. That became my slam poetry style later, so this Banetai song really could be analyzed, if you were gonna analyze me, as the beginning of something.
I have a reference to the slam in here, and to Matthew John Conley. I guess that means I did this song AFTER I was 21, which means I released this record after I was 21. I wrote a lot of this stuff long before that though, I know that much. But yeah I guess that’s right ’cause this is my SECOND record.
Yeah the slam/Matthew John Reference is “33 revolutions a minute come, from the depths of the mind and the flaming tongue”
Flaming Tongues was his thing, back when I first ever met him. My poems that I was doing at that time on stage were fucking stupid, and he has at least one practically memorized. Guy’s always quoting that thing, how embarassing! Anyway Flaming Tongues was his, the notion of “summon the fire” was his thing on the slam team, and he even had this tattoo of the danger icon that’s on a hot water heater, of the stick man being engulfed in flames, but to him, he said, it looked like a poet “summoning the fire”. That’s what we called that documentary, the one I was helping Manny Machuca of channel 5 PBS shoot, that introduced me to slam.
The 33 revolutions a minute thing I got from the slam too – maybe Matthew said it, or some other poet said it in a poem. I thought that was pretty clever, you know, the whole 33 RPM record thing (that’s the speed of a vinyl record, I’m sure you know). I mean actually that’s an old piece of hip-hop clever so I think even whatever poet that was was being cliche, and I was biting a cliche, which shows how green and ignorant I really was (still am?), but I still think it’s a clever play on words, whoever came up with it.
Anyway Banetai, just so you know, is supposed to be a person, it’s a character. This is another song that might have originally been thought of as the theme song to some movie – like a movie about some Angel or medieval sorcerer who’s I don’t know – badass or something. So I’m making this reference like you’re supposed to know about it, and it’s not explained, it’s just sort of thrown in there. Banetai. Honestly I can’t even remember how I came up with that, but it is not a word, or a name of some historical person or anything. It’s completely a new word, and it’s a name, that I made up. God I’m weird.
Oh M.C. Murph, you’re strange.