I’m listening to a bunch of mp3s by Momus, found via his LJ (I reached him through a link to his appreciation of David Bowie) . His voice is familiar from the Bran Van 3000 song, More Shopping (there was a video, but it went away. He wasn’t wearing an eyepatch in it).
Being a heroic fantasy geek, I perked up to an odd song about Beowulf (lyrics). Looking on the web, I find He Explains:
I have no idea where this one came from. I read Beowulf at university. I think the word looks good on the page, and I’m rather drawn to the, er, otherness of Nordic epic. But in my version the hero sent to slay Grendell the monster is deformed, a monster himself. It’s not surprising, really; you don’t tangle on a regular basis with the earth’s most vile and vicious bullies without sustaining some damage. The trouble is, our deformed hero can’t get people to take him seriously. They’re too busy laughing at his ‘helplessly flailing mutant apalling prosthetic thalydomide limb’ to realise that he’s Denmark’s only hope. Actually, this song probably relates to my experience this summer of returning to my home town only to have eggs thrown at me for looking ‘different’.
And if I’m putting links to songs, I am obliged to mention William Shatner’s cover of Pulp’s Common People, with Joe Jackson on backing vocals (an excerpt, but it goes as far as the first chorus. WMA file). You may shudder, I wanted more (link from Neil Gaiman, although I saw it elsewhere earlier).