Aaron McCollough

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The Poetics of Alien Lanes. Item: “My Son Cool”

Posted on June 17, 2007 - Filed Under |

Although the poetics of Alien Lanes could be discussed for months on this blog, I only bring up the subject just now to point out a relationship between one of its enigmatic song titles “My Son Cool” and another cultural artifact: namely, Ron Howard’s 1989 film Parenthood. The film just happens to be on the TV right now. This song title has mildly intrigued me for some years and serves as a fairly standard example of Robert Pollard’s ear for the gripping, sort-of-surreal non-sequitir. How, I thought, does one come up with such a title? The fact that Tom Hulce (the n’er-do-well younger brother of Steve Martin / youngest son of Jason Robards) utters this line in a context that makes some sense (although not tons of sense) suggest to me that Pollard a) watched this movie (which is weird enough in itself), b) either wrote this line down or remembered it (a fair amount weirder), and c) decided in 1995 that it was time to use the line as a song title even though there is no other reference to the line or the movie (not so weird). What does this tell us about Pollard’s creative process? Not a whole lot, perhaps. More interesting, however, is the Andy Griffith/Happy Days/Splash/Cocoon/etc. strain this hints may be operating in the GBV catalog. What does it mean?

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