I can see clearly now

Here is that rainbow I've been praying for.

Niki Hoeky: get hip to the cogitation, ASSHOLES!

Way down Louisiana

Down in Cajun land

Folks got something goin'

Goes something like

Care folk a-t-tootsie

I wants to t'tie ya puppe'tame me

Dim ya on a scoobydoo

I dig you on'a scuba-die
I oh boo-ga-foo you

You ooh boog-a-boo you, little girl

Get hip to the cogitation of the boolawee

Golly, squally miss Molly

Everything's copesetic now

Loog-a-boo, look at you

What I'd like to do to you girl

You woka-b-boo-you

You oh boog-a-boo you, little girl

Get hip to the cogitation of the boolawee
Mmmmm

Niki, Niki, Niki Hoeky

Pappy's doing time in the pokey

Your sister's on a trip

Your momma got hip

Little girl you're lookin' ok

You ooh boog-a-boo you

You ooh boog-a-boo you

Get hip to the cogitation of the boolawee

(musical interlude with humming)

You oh boo-ka-boo you

You oh boo-ka-boo you, little girl

Get hip to the cogitation of the boolawee

Listen to me now
Niki, Niki, Niki Hoeky

Your pappy's doing time in the pokey

Your sister's on a trip

Your momma got hip

Little girl you're lookin' ok

You oh boog-a-boo you

You oh boog-a-foo you, little girl

Get hip to the cogitation of the boolawee

I talk about you boo-la
(mm-mm-mm)
Come on I talk about you wisssh.
I talk about you boo-la
Talk about you wisssh.

NOTE. I sort of get this. And I'm sort of upset about it. It's the usual thing. When I try to find the lyrics to any popular song, then compare it to the actual (recorded) song, the internet version is always wildly wrong.

Well, no. Lamely wrong. The most unimaginitive reduction of a spicy pun into a plodding non-metaphor, because, gee, we just don't GET what he was trying to say here! It doesn't make sense, see. So this is sort of what he might of/ought to have said.

The weird thing is, these mondegreens (misheard lyrics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen) are exactly the same on every lyric site. They do not come from the original, published sheet music. They can't. Someone listens to the song and transcribes it and writes down what they think it might be. If it doesn't make sense to them, they make something up.

This dulls down the brilliance or at least the spark of the original song, irons out any irony and removes all those pesky puns.

How this-all started was with something I saw on Facebook - I barely pay attention on Facebook any more, it's like filing my nails or eating a Popsicle, just something to do. It was a post that was sort of  like "do you like new ideas? Do you love baking, walking dogs, picking your nose?" It was supposed to be a satiric take on those old ads to recruit dazzling original thinkers. A line jumped into my head, something I had not thought about since I was thirteen years old:

Get hip to the cogitation.

It came from a song, of course. From way back. But I could only remember bits of it, and not the title.

I followed it backwards by googling just that line, and got nothing at first. Then I added "your father's doing time in the pokey." Slowly it began to resolve into a recognizable song.

I found the lyrics on umpteen lyric sites, in fact, and they all said the same thing.

Niki, niki, niki, hoeky. Pappy's doing time in the pokey. Your mama died hip, your sister's on a trip.

Etc. etc., then the line:

Get hip to the CONSULTATION.

I couldn't believe it was consultation. Had I been wrong all those years? I found the original recording by P. J. Proby on YouTube, and listened for it.

NO

NO

NO

NO, the word was not, never was, never would be, no matter WHO recorded it (and a lot of people did after P. J. Proby), "consultation". Though it was hard to make out, there was no "s" sound anywhere in the word. It was repeated several times. It was "cogitation". It was, and it is.

So why  -

Every site you go on will say the same thing. Consultation. These things multiply, they divide, they seethe like gunky slimy pools of frog's eggs. Identical, WRONG tadpoles hatch out and turn into WRONG frogs who then lay the WRONG eggs.

Wrong.

All I can think of is that someone mondegreened the lyrics decades ago, then they somehow got glommed on to everyone's lyric site so that they would all be wrong in exactly the same (obnoxious, insulting, STUPID) way.

But we fixed it, I think. Not that anybody cares! The transcribed lyric for this was just so riddled with mistakes that I had to go over it line by line, playing the recording 8 or 9 times to make "corrections" to some sort of unintelligible patios, and then giving up.

I can't find anything about the provenance of this song. I can't, and I don't want to look at it any more. These could be Cajun-isms, they could, because Cajun is a language unto itself, but if it were Cajun I think I'd see more French mixed in with it. It's not unlike Acadian, the Canadian version, and at one point Cajuns and Acadians were one people. One went north, one went south, one went over the cuckoo's nest.

But I happen to know - I'd stake my very life on it - that no one has ever been hip to the CONSULTATION. That idea is now gasping its last breath while it writhes in the dust.

POST-BLOG COGITATION (NOT consultation), or at least a comparison. I tried to find an "authentic Cajun song", that is, without knocking my brains out, and thought of Doug Kershaw, who really was (is?) Cajun and had a few hits. I don't remember much about those songs, so googled the lyrics for the best-known one, looking for either French or the sort of gibberish that appeared in Niki Niki Hoeky.

Diggy Diggy La and Diggy Diggy Lo
Fell in love at the Fais Do Do
The pop was cold and the coffee chaud
For Diggy Diggy La and Diggy Diggy Lo

Diggy Diggy La and Diggy Diggy Lo
Everyone knows he was her beau
No other girl could ever show
So much love for Diggy Diggy Lo

That's the place they find romance
Where they do the Cajun dance
Steal a kiss with every chance
Show their love with every glance

Ah, yeah, no, I don't see any. The only "Cajunisms" are Fais Do Do (which is literally translated, if I remember my Grade 7 French, as "go to sleep"), "chaud" to rhyme with "do do", and "pop", the Canadian version of "soda". This might have some dim, far-gone Acadian origin, but I doubt it because there was no pop back in 1743.

Not much frazzlin' Cajun spice THERE, is there, boys and girls?

So on to that other one, the one Hank Williams did:

Well, goodbye Joe, me gotta go, me oh my oh
Me gotta go to pole the pirogue down the bayou
My Yvonne, the sweetest one, me oh my oh
I am a son of a gun, we gonna have big fun on the bayou

Yeah, jambalaya and a crawfish pie and filé gumbo
'Cause tonight, I'm gonna see my ma cher amio
You pick guitar, you fill fruit jar and be gay-o
'Cause I am a son of a gun, we gonna have big fun on the bayou

Well, Thibadaux, well, Fontaineaux, the place is buzzin'
And kinfolks come to see Yvonne by the dozen
You dress in style, you go hog wild and be gay-o
'Cause I am a son of a gun, we gonna have big fun on the bayou

It's a little bit Cajun/Acadian. "Pole the pirogue" sounds like some Polish guy eating perogies, but then I could have my ethnicity wrong. More likely, it refers to a sort of pole barge, like a gondola. Yvonne, yeah, she's French. File gumbo, cher amio, all the other family names - and that's about it, no fancy stuff, no verbal yodelling or Golly, squally, miss Molly. So maybe Niki Hoeky is just a sort of nonsense rhyme, the sort of thing we clapped to in school, the cum-la, cum-la, cum-la feast-a that I was astonished to find on YouTube.

P. S. There are even more versions. I just found out. Burton Cummings pronounces it "condensation", whereas various Motown versions sound more like "conversation", and I've also heard "consolation". But NOBODY says "consultation".

(next day) OH WAIT! There's more.

Another contender for this mystery word is "conflagration", a supposed reference to lighting a joint. So now we've got it down to SIX choices, one of which is definitely wrong:

Cogitation
Condensation
Conversation
Consolation
Conflagration
(and, the ever-wrong) Consultation

Pick one. You might as well do it blindfolded. But when I hear it, I STILL hear "cogitation".

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Crying. . . crying. . . crying. . .

This is one of those oh-my-god-i-never-thought-i'd-get-to-hear-this-again moments. This re-finding, rediscovery of buried treasure. The video goes back to 1989, and I had it on an old VHS tape, which of course eventually became unplayable.

k. d. lang kind of goes around in my life in one of those huge orbits, like hair styles, types of Purdy's chocolates, weight fluctuations, breeds of dogs, belief in God. Keeps changing and evolving and rounding the dark side of the moon, but somehow never quite goes away, because it can't. Try to throw it away, and it will boomerang and hit you in the face.

I figured something out as I watched and listened to this incredible performance just now:  it's Muriel, the protagonist of my novel The Glass Character, and her hopeless longing for the silent screen superstar Harold Lloyd.  "I thought that I was over you" is the heart-cry, the howl of the unrequited. Just when she is sure the rend in her heart has healed, well, he just shows up again, not unfriendly - as a matter of fact, he always seems glad to see her again - but he can't, won't love her. Never has loved her, and even if he did, couldn't possibly love her as much as she loves him.

This song is about the unattainable. I've always had a feeling lang's artistry springs from early abandonment: her father left the family when she was a young girl. Compare this to Streisand, whose father died when she was only a toddler. It leaves some trace on a voice, if the instrument is already exceptional. A something extra, ruby-dust and blood, and it makes for that subtle escalating, the reaching, each time she sings "crying. . . crying. . . crying. . ." , the hopeless anguish mounting and mounting until her voice soars and fills the hall and makes the audience burst into applause when she isn't even halfway through the song.

I wrote about this in The Glass Character, the same feeling, and I just realized it now. Goddamn it, I must tell you the process: I am only partway through the editing, and I don't know who wrote this! I don't even like parts of it, hate other parts, and put check marks beside others. I don't know why this is, and I don't even remember writing it, but Muriel cries too much. I'm having to ruthlessly reduce her tears, because I for one am sick of hearing her sniffle and bawl.

Have I ever lived through anything like this? I won't talk about it now, for it did not happen the way you might think. Well, actually it did. When you read the novel (and you WILL read it, won't you?), you might discover the dynamics of how it happened for me. It lasted five years, and for most of that time it felt like someone was steadily grinding out cigarettes on my heart.

No sex took place. Sex does take place in my novel, but not with Harold. So it's disconcerting to Muriel, who really doesn't get a lot of satisfaction that way. Just pining, endless pining. 

I used to say, about the greatest singers, if *I* could sing like that, I'd never have to see a psychiatrist again. Maybe a simplistic view, because God knows most of the popular singers of the day are melting down at a frightening rate. k. d. still sings, but I don't like her voice as much. She has always had certain mannerisms, and I call them "swoop, yodel and groan". She bends notes too much, or far more than she used to, and begins nearly every phrase with a groany little sound. Her "attack" is off and should be cleaner, saving the groans as an accent. The yodel, more of a  half-yodel or deliberate use of the break in her voice, sometimes shows up a bit too often or is too pronounced. I think she'd do just fine standing on an Alpine mountain with a goat. But never mind. We still have her recordings of when she was in her fiery prime. My favorites are still this song and Pullin' Back the Reins, a hairstanding wail of controlled grief and - yes, again - loss.  

I did see/hear lang in concert, quite a few years ago now when she was still singing exceptionally well. She is overwhelming. It reminded me, strangely, of going to a Renee Fleming concert and hearing the most extraordinary operatic soprano voice I can even imagine. When the audience was filing out, most of us still surreptitiously blowing our noses, I overheard a woman say, "If it had been any more, it would have been too much." That's how I felt about k. d. lang.

I know everyone talks about her sexual orientation and her look and her butchness (and this video is probably the only time you will ever see her in a dress). I'm not keen on her look, to be honest, but I don't care about it. She has gained weight and become stolid and, according to my husband who saw her sing at the closing ceremonies of the 2010 Olympics, "she looks like Wayne Newton." Yes, the baggy suits and Elvislike stance are beginning to seem alarmingly Vegas, and one hopes she doesn't pull a Celine Dion and glitz herself into oblivion.

Never mind. The song, the song! Artists express, not just what we all feel and can't say, but what is not supposed to be happening to us. That's an awful lot. The culture is a narrow box. Sex is everywhere, seemingly, but how embarrassing is it when you come right down to it? How awkward? How often does "the act" (always, always referring to penis-in-vagina sexual intercourse and nothing else) match up to the dream? How about never?

Which leaves me crying.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

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