Day 24 – Hey Baby
The continuing adventures of “Eric’s Trip Around the Sun”. One final trip with the iPod.
“Hey Baby” – Butthead
It is interesting to view the nature of our vernacular over the years, how certain terms and words begin to morph. In respect to rock and roll, we’ve accumulated a host of terms, slang, etc., that have been used with artistic license.
Now the term “baby/babe” was surely not invented by rock and roll, however, they have clearly empowered the term in rock and roll. Rock and Roll reinvents sexuality, the terms, the meanings and thoughts. It empowers at the same time of degrading. It creates beauty and at the same time it creates hate. It’s a powerful medium that grasps our soul and spits it out at the most inopportune moments. If there is any terms that lives up to this cannon of meanings, it’s the word baby.
We can make the argument above that Butthead’s cat call was sexist in nature, coming up to a stranger and using a romantic term when addressing her. His education of listening to Robert Plant could play a tiny role in his education with a spice of the Vibrator’s ‘Baby Baby’.
When you get a host of songs on your iPod with Baby in the title, there are certain themes that start floating through one’s head. There are the wildcards like Elliott Smith’s ‘Baby Britain’ which is more depressing and suicidal and Neutral Milk Hotel’s ‘A Baby For Pree’, which is simply a beautiful song about having a baby.
Breakup song’s seem to be the ironic twist in rock and roll. If the term is used in an endearing manner I find it slightly hard to believe that this would be the normal vernacular when you are about to break up with someone. The aforementioned Robert Plant offered these skills in “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You Now.”
Michael Stipe used this in a very early R.E.M. song ‘Baby I’ in which it would seem obvious for it’s lack of inclusion on any official R.E.M. album when he sung ‘Baby I, don’t want to be seen with you”
The most obvious in my book is The Ronettes ‘Be My Baby’. It has first kiss potential written all over it.
Everything comes back to Butthead. As I listened to the host of relationship songs, it’s the comedy of our culture that I come back to.