Annie Bolotin

Annie Bolotin is a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan where she studies modern and contemporary poetry and poetics.

By this author

Hers to elegize

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'Topsy-Turvy'

Charles Bernstein

Please buy the book directly from the publisher, University of Chicago Press, or a local bookstore, including Bridge Street Books, SemCoop, Talking Leaves, Indiebound, McNally-Jackson, and Bookshop.Org.

176 pages, paper and ebook. Audiobook is from Chicago and Amazon/Aubible.

Back to 'A Whole House'

A 'Trouble Songs' addendum

Jacket2

Jeff T. Johnson presents “A Whole House,” a new installment to his “Trouble Songs” project.

In 2015, we published “Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics,” Jeff T.

The Dada Andrews Sisters -- Six Jerks in a Jeep

Charles Bernstein

The Andrews Sisters perform Sid Robin's zany novelty song, let's call it zoot-suit Dada for the "bleeps" enlisting in the U.S. Army to fight the Nazis. Not quite Spike Jones's "Der Fuehrer's Face," but even so, Robin pays tribute to the the unheroic "schlemiels" that're gonna win the war. The jeep weeps for the jerks/wacks/quacks/creeps who are on their way to fight and die. "Six Jerks in a Jeep" combines slang and scat with rhyming abandon. It's Nude Formalism as comic propaganda.

At the risk of tarpooing the jouissance, the self-deprecation here is transvluation. You have to be jerk to go to war, knowing it's not only hell but futile; knowing it's the shmoes who end up on the front line while privledged stay safe far from the action And yet, three cheers for them (them is us).

The song was included in the 1942 WW2 Army recruitment film, Private Buckaroo. Robin, a private, originally wrote it for a GI review. It didn't make it onto an Andrews Sister Decca album and so remains one of their lesser known songs. But it's pure lyric gold.

The transcription is mine: {stanzas bracketed} are in full recording [also YouTube] but not in movie clip. If you have any corrections, let me know.

Six Jerks In A Jeep