| At which point Roky begins singing his lines rather
too quickly for us to catch them completely. He says something about
the singing grandfather being a probation officer, and he says something
about a “skinny old grandma” somewhere else, and the melody:
well, it’s not just pretty. It’s gorgeous. It’s
as lush as Maui at sunset, as rich as triple fudge brownies. When
he gets around to the second of the song’s two main guitar figures
and sings a rising melody that repeats the line about the buzzsaw,
the words take on an irresistible romance; in your heart you feel
like you ought to be cheering for the singing grandfather, that somehow
he must be bucking the odds to bravely go forth with his instruments
of torture and death. And Roky is not playing this for laughs. He
finds your emotional center with the melody, and messes with it by
matching a dark lyric to his pretty tune; a lyric whose point, if
it has one, is fairly senseless violence buoyed by some garishly cartoonish
imagery marked by vaguely religious overtones. |
