Nonsense! Gobbledygook! Gibberish! Balderdash! Folderol!

“Not even the President of the United States knew what that was all about. It was as though the country were saying to its citizens, ‘In nonsense is strength.” – Kurt Vonnegut

I think it’s time that we reclaim nonsense. I think it’s time we reclaim the beauty of the shifting meanings of words, and the slipping sense of what is real and what is true. The beauty in the words themselves, underneath and around their meanings. Eccentric. These wonderful things have been hijacked by evil super-villains, who use strings of ugly no-sense words (have you heard him talk?) and lies to confound us with their idiotic idioms and their sinister “alternative facts.” It’s a shame, and it makes me sad.

I work with words all day. I read all the time, all day long; it is my job. And I have to think about how the words are spelled and how they’re used grammatically. Sometimes I get a bit word-weary. Sometimes after work I have trouble putting a whole sentence together in a sensible or intelligible way. But at the end of the day, even a hot summer day sitting at my desk in the hot front window where the sun collects on the sidewalk, and I am tired of looking at my computer, I still love words. I still celebrate words. I love their meanings, their sounds, their shapes. I love them when they make no sense, when they become sweet-sounding nonsense.

Some people take nonsense to a whole new level, and it becomes a language all its own, articulate, even eloquent. And then they set it to music, and it becomes a thing of even more beauty. And that is the subject of today’s MixTape…songs with a language all their own. We’ve been listening to a lot of Slim Gaillard, and he speaks Vout, of course, a language of his own creation. And we also have songs with scat in them, songs in a language the singer doesn’t understand, or a language the singer invented (hopelandic!): any song that separates the sound of the words with their usual meaning; these are the songs on this MixTape. Songs that find the beauty outside of the words, or maybe in the very meaning-aside heart of the words themselves.