THE SONG THAT REFUSED TO DIE
By Ivan Stang and Philo Drummond
I don’t hear the music but GO BABY GO
It’s the song that refuses to die
The song that cannot die
It wants to die
It wanted to die so bad. It wanted to die so bad, but it just COULDN’T DIE. As soon
as one drummer died, another one would just pick up the fitful beat until
pretty soon, Oh My God!, the song came back!
Nobody wanted it; god almighty
They could a used some sleep; but the song refused to
die.
The song started 2 years ago, but STILL STILL it
REFUSED to die. It wasn’t a very pretty song;
you couldn’t even call it an interesting song.
But it was unfortunately an immortal song.
All it’d do was keep going and going.
Every now and then it would take on some semblance of an emotional tone. But
then somebody would get on mike who couldn’t even sing. then
it would just go splinter into a
But it kept twitching. its heart wouldn’t give up.
It might have been a nice song to begin with, in some remote time, but now it
JUST WOULDNT DIE.
Just when you thought that it’d given up, it would SCREAM’ and lust keep
getting uglier and uglier.
Every now and then somebody would come along and try to explain it. but then he’d die, or get tired of it.
It went through 3 generations of musicians. all the
musicians who’d started playing the song are dead. But not the SONG -- Oh NO!
That ol’ song ain’t gonna die, no sireee! Oh you can
PRAY for the song to die.You can call up your Mom and
say OH MOM, MAKE THE SONG DIE!. MY EARS HURT, MOM!
But it just gets LOUDER and LOUDER and LOUDER.
It’s like it wants to hurt you. And just when you thought it was over, when you
thought it’d killed you. Oh GOD, it brings YOU back to life! Oh NO! Not only
does the SONG not die, YOU don’t even get to die. You just have to keep
listening and listening!
Oh, a guitarist might die, but someone else would come along.
Maybe they’d try to kill it but NO. the song would
just keep playing and playing itself, THE SONG THAT REFUSED. to
DIE. (etc.etc)
((slows down))
What --is it dead? Is it DEAD YET? Is the song dead
yet? NO?
AAAHIIEEEEEEIIUUIUI!
The drums were broken, but that wouldn’t stop the SONG, unh-UNU! The power went
out-- you think that’s gonna stop the song? Whoo, YOU WISH! The song that refused to DIEEEW
Bullets couldn’t stop it! Flamethrowers
couldn’t stop it. the nuclear bomb, the harmonic
convergence, they tried everything they could think of, but the SONG REFUSES to
DIE. It continued to LIVE, relentlessly tearing into our eardrums.
You think it.s dead? Unh-UNH ferGET
IT! Oh, this song’s gonna be around LONG alter YOURE
dead and gone, boy!
Listen. its heart beats. OH NO! FIBRILATIONS! Has the
pain ended? OH GOD no. look at that EEG -- it’s incredible that it could be in
a coma for this long, yet still go on and on. and not.
DIE!
‘Try ‘n beg your Mom, it won’t do no good! Clean socks
wouldn’t stop IT!
They tried to clean up the song and make it feel good about itself,. they thought maybe then it would
be ready for death. Maybe just a sense of bitterness was keeping it FROM dying.
But NOooo. that ol’ song just kept going on.
Go ahead, try to kill it. Go ahead, TRY.
Oh, they could cripple the song. they could slow it down.
They could really HURT the song. They cut three of its legs off. But look at it
now, still trottin’ along, easy as can be. It doesn’t
care what you think about it. that ol’
song keeps going.
Nobody knows the words to it. my grandfather knew the
words, but he’s dead now. they say the aliens dropped the song here, trying to get rid of it. They
damaged the song, but it just hid in a hole until it HEALED UP. then it’d come back, LOUDER than EVER, and hurt everybody’s
ears again. When they pulled the plug on it, it just stumbled around, but never
quite died down. Just turned into sort of an acoustic song.
So they gave up on that. it still walks the earth. roamin’ the countryside, never
know where it’ll go next.
If it knocks at the door, for God’s sake don’t let it in. Tell your kids to
stay away from the song. Don’t worry about your neighborhood; property values
go back up after the song LEAVES.
But the song never stops. IT NEVER STOPS!
Sometimes the only lyrics to the song were thousands of people in torment
screaming, IT NEVER STOPS, IT NEVER STOPS!
HOW CAN YOU KILL A SONG THAT’S ALREADY DEAD?? It shambles on with an unholy
life of its own. It’s lived for centuries., but it
can’t stop killing ! It wouldn’t move aside for GOOD songs. there
were lovely songs in this country once, LOOK AT THEM NOW. this
empty husk was once a decent song. Its life force sapped away by the song that
refused to die. Centuries in the making: the song that refused to die.
Maybe someday a way to stop this song will be invented.
Uh-Oh, here it goes again, looks like it’s getting
riled up, it’s gettin’ angry.OH,
musta said something wrong. NOW it’s gonna kill me! But it WONT. It wont stop, it NEVER STOPS. just
gets uglier and uglier, more pitiful, more pathetic! IT WON’T DIE!
Whole religions were formed to try to stop the song.
But you know what happened. it never stopped.
It didn’t have a brain., not even a face. the SONG WITH NO FACE. it sort of
See what I mean?
Go on up there and try to stop that song. perfessor!
Wait, don’t kill it, we must try to communicate with the song! It could tell
science many things “Well, go on up there Mr. Professor ((ZAP sound effect
screams))
Eggheads came up with all kinds of new devices, trying to shut down that song,
but all that happened was, the devices got used against people in other
countries ‘cause the public decided, OH, the IRANIANS must’ve started the song!
The RUSSIANS must’ve started it! WORLD WARS were started over WHO was TO BLAME
for the song!
Monks burned themselves, that wouldn’t stop it. Human sacrifices wouldn’t stop
it.
Musicians would all put their instruments down, hoping their total absence
would stop the song. FRAID NOT!
You couldn’t hide from the song.
It just kept on refusing to
die, that ol’ song ain’t gonna die, just when you thought it was dead it started
over again until it was in a hypnotic endless loop forever cycling and
recycling through itself, mutating and perambulating over it’s own frequency distortion
bursts of sound and sight.
But still, overall, it
refused to die, it couldn’t die, it was impossible to die, the very fabric of
the universe was threaded in the fact that it couldn’t die, if the song that
refused to die, died, time and space as we know it would cease to exist. It was
the most important thing in the universe, more important than… than the
President, more important than the
It was the song that refused
to die. The song that held the very fabric of time and space together, if it
died everyone would die, it couldn’t die, it had to stay alive. It kept just
wearing out musicians over the years, through the centuries the song kept
going, every now and then they thought it would die but it couldn’t die.
Sometimes the people would
forget about it but is just sat there on the edge of their consciousness it sat
there like an overgrown turd, just flatulently
expressing itself in cosmic gaseous emissions bursting forth every now and then
reminding people that it couldn’t die, it wouldn’t die, it never died, it refused to die!
And just when you thought
that it would never die, a hero came along… and put the song out of it’s misery. He killed the song that refused to die. A Hero, a glowing beacon of Slack amidst the toils and trials and
tribulations of the song that refused to die.
Overcome by total Slack, the
song began it’s death throes. Starting to die took a
long time for the song that refused to die. Yes, indeed, it was the end of the
beginning of the song that refused to die… or was it the beginning of the end
of the song. Somewhere between the two, the song that refused to die began it’s mighty death throes, the throes that would last
throughout all eternity. Forever tortured in its death, the song that was
forever dying did indeed die forever.
Some people said that was a
lot like refusing to die but for some, but for some, the song had indeed begun it’s death cycle. And therefore could be considered to have
died or at least was in the process of dying. And would
therefore one day indeed be dead.
You or I won’t be here to see
it, Oh no. We’d never last that long. The song that refused to die took
centuries, decades, even weeks to die It couldn’t die in our lifetime. We’d
forget about our own mortality before it would die. We would cease to exist.
History would forget that we even ever existed. There would be no remembrance
of us on the Earth before the song that refused to die went completely through it’s death cycle.
Oh Yeah, but it kind of
wanted to die… it kinda wanted to die now. It sorta you could say it was already dead. It was just
twitching. It was really alive anymore but it’s more like it’s
nerves were just twitching. Kinda like when you cut a
chicken’s head off and it keeps jerking for a while… it’s not really alive but
is indeed twitching and jerking as if indeed it once had a life of it’s own. It was just a shambling corpse headless, bodiless,
legless, armless, but still just plodding along. Yep, it was just still keep on
going. You couldn’t stop it. You
couldn’t stop it from dying, now. You couldn’t make it quit dying. It refused
to die for so long that it forgot what it was like to even refuse to quit doing
something.
It couldn’t imagine what it
would be like to quit doing something for a while. There’s that ol song. Whatever it was doing it was just used to keep on
doing it. It didn’t know if it was dying or living or what. But whatever it
was… it just kept on going. If it was dead it kept on going, if it was alive it
kept on going, if it was refusing to die it kept on going. It wouldn’t quit,
there wasn’t a thing… it couldn’t decide what quit was. Somebody told it about
the concept of quit one time and it said, “I can’t understand what that means.”
It just won’t register. I can’t figure out what quit actually means. Is it kinda like ceasing to do something?
Was it the beginning of… was
it beginning to quit? Beginning to call all consciousness aside? Of something other than existence? Could you even think
about the unthinkable, could the song that refused to die think about refusing?
Or doing anything other than refusing? I don’t know… that’s for you to answer I
guess, that’s a question I am posing to you… Answer me!
Can a song that refused to
die ever think about quitting to refuse to quit to
die? Huh?
That ol’
song wore out it’s singer, wore out all it’s
instruments. The hydroelectric dams quit functioning to produce electricity to
power the song that refused to die. But it kept going on acoustically. It kept
just making residual sounds that were like ambient universal noises that just
seemed to be bouncing off the stars in a haphazard fashion falling to Earth
unheard by humans because they had long since died.
There wasn’t anything left on
Earth that could hear. There was no auditory functioning ability or sensory
organs left on any living creature, every living
creature that was left on the Earth at that time had no auditory functioning
capability. They couldn’t even hear a song if it was going. They wouldn’t know
if it was refusing to die because there was nothing there to register the
sound. It was like the old Zen saying can you hear it. does
a tree that falls in the wilderness make a sound if no one’s there to hear it?
Can the song that refused to
die even be a song if there is no one there to hear it?.
They said as they walked away from their instruments for the final time