Allusions to LITERATURE in Music

Bands as disparate as The Wonder Stuff and Cop Shoot Cop have alluded to Charles Bukowski (the Stuff with "A Great Drinker" and C$C with "Down Come the Mickey.")

"Victim of a Catch-22..." From "Walking Contradiction" by Green Day, on Insomniac.

Billy Idol recorded an album dubbed CYBERPUNK.....about five or six years too late, and I believe admitted to never even reading any William Gibson to begin with.

Jebus Cristo, every last possible reference? We'll be here until the cows come home -- some weeks later.

Challenge to make this thread more interesting -- find the literary references from acts not classified as 'wordsmiths' or making 'intelligent' music.

"I'm not as smart as Doestoevsky
And I'm not as clever as Mark Twain
And I'll only buy a book
For the way it'll look
And then I'll stick it on the shelf again"

"This Is Just A Modern Rock Song" by Belle and Sebastian


"Down by Rosemary and Cameron
She hangs out the Bhagavad Gita"

"Kate" by Ben Folds Five

On side notes, Level 42 and Six By Seven are both references to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (as is "Paranoid Android"), Symposium and the Doors were both named after novels as well.

Both Ryan Adams and Peter Laughner quite liked Sylvia Plath. Enuff to write a song about her.

"Raymond Chandler Evening" by Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians

PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN by Pink Floyd -- chapter 1. of "The Wind in the Willows."

Marillion take their name as a truncation of J.R.R.Tolkien's "Silmarillion."

The Boo Radleys took their name from the object of fear in "To Kill a Mockingbird."

Pink Floyd's live album, DELICATE SOUND OF THUNDER is originally the title of a short story by sci-fi kingpin, Ray Bradbury in which a millionaire goes, fittingly, DINOSAUR hunting.

The Mission UK recorded a cloyingly earnest ode to John Steinbeck called, mawkishly, "The Grapes of Wrath." Said book was also the subject of Springsteen's "Tom Joad," later covered by Rage Against the Machine.

The Pop Group - She Is Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche) The Beatles - I Am the Walrus (Through the Looking Glass) Manic Street Preachers - Patrick Bateman (American Psycho)

Steely Dan - Named after a device in "Naked Lunch"

"The House That Jack Kerouac Built" - Go-Betweens

The Ass Ponys have a song called "Ford Madox Ford" but I can't recall if it references any of his books.

Girls Against Boys have "Crash 17 (X-Rated Car)," about J.G. Ballard's "Crash" (the same work that inspired the Normal's "Warm Leatherette").

Scrawl has a song called "Louis L'Amour."

Oh yeah:
"The Go-Between" (go-betweens) by L.P. Hartley

Ubu Roi - Alfred Jarry - Pere Ubu

j.lu - Are you Columbus or Cincinnati? (or where?) BTW Louis Lamour is one of Scrawl's all time greatest songs... I wish they would get a drummer already & put out another record.

.. Forgot "Harlan" (Ellison) - Jazz Butcher.

Piper at the Gates of Dawn isn't chapter 1, it's about halfway through the book if I remember rightly. And also a tad bizarre. Sorry to be pedantic!
Venus In Furs, by the Velvet Underground. Hell, the Velvet Underground was a book as well wasn't it...

How can you expect to write rock lyrics if you don't know where the Hobbit dwells?

And Rush: Tom Sawyer

The only obvious answer to this thread is...

BLOODHAG

ooo brian thanks for the bloodhag link dr j m mcnulty is dreeeeaaammmeee http://www.bloodhag.com/bio/jeff.gif

Heh.. uh... you're welcome! I mean, who would want to live in a world where butch metal musicians who promoted literacy were not considered sexy, anyway? (Actually, the good Dr. McNulty, whom some have the rare privelege of calling "Jeff", is a really friendly, sweet guy who deserves all the love and adoration he gets..)

morrissey meets wilde and keats the cemetery gates (ooo...i never know the correct spelling), has the characters from graham greene's brighton rock as his friends in now my heart is full, he serenades his sailor love in billy budd (novel by melville)...there was a time when I could memorize smiths-trivia on the top of my head...neil tennant sings about harold pinter in up against it...

now if someone can mention all the allusions to literature in momus songs...make sure you have a whole week off

"Among the Living" by Anthrax is also based on Stephen Kings The Stand. Also, their song "I Am the Law" is alledgedly a tribute to comic book super-cop Judge Dredd
"To Tame a Land" by Iron Maiden = Frank Herberts Dune.
I've heard a theory bandied about that "Suicidal Maniac" by Suicidal Tendencies is a tribute to comic book killing machine Wolverine.
"Battle of Evermore" is Tolkien.

To Althea, From Prison got thier name from that Richard Loveless poem.

graeme downes used to fill his songs with loads of them but apprently he was criticized for being pretentious

my fave is 'you'll never spend a season in hell if you lie in bed all day'

ones i didn't notice until later:

(1) song on nowhere based on bit of franny and zooey "she knew she was able to fly / because when she came down / she had dust on her hands from the sky"

(2) song on stereolab's peng repeating quote from first chapter of one hundred years of solitude, slightly altered: "across the river are all kinds / of magical instruments / while we keep on living like monkeys" (nee "donkeys")

(3) "catch the breeze" (i think) on daydream nation borrowing from denis johnson: "i wanted to know the exact dimensions of hell"

yay brian for bloodhag!!

this is flimsily related if at all, in fact it's just about sting
there's this tv show here a quiz show with kid's high school teams
last episode the question was asked "dave grohl was the drummer for nirvana; now he is the singer for what band?" and this kid called Omega answered "sting".

Joy Division - Dead Souls (novel by Nikolai Gogol); Atrocity Exhibition (J.G. Ballard); Interzone (William S. Burroughs) - Radiohead - Pyramid Song (Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse); Fitter Happier (the last line is a quote from the book What A Carve-Up, by Jonathan Coe IIRC).

"I must have read a while/ the latest one by Marilyn French/ or something in that style"

ABBa The day before you came

(Blancmange later changed it in Barbara Cartland in their up-t-date cover version, to sooth the kitchy synths even more)

How has this thread gone on so long without anyone mentioning Lloyd Cole? I'm only sorry that I have had to do so.

Some others: Hey Jack Kerouac (10,000 Maniacs), Something Wicked This Way Comes (Barry Adamson), Alice in Blunderland (Beefheart), Bug Powder Dust (Bomb The Bass - a Burroughs ref), 1984 (Bowie), Wuthering Heights (Kate Bush), Crusoe (Cinerama), Tale of Two Cities (Dave Clarke), Riding the Waves (For Virginia Woolf) and The Lighthouse (both Cockney Rebel), Killing An Arab (Cure), War & Peace (DJ Die), The Joke (Fall), Hunchback of Notre Dame (Frantic Elevators), Atrocity Exhibition, Dead Souls and Interzone (both Joy Division - the last's another Burroughs one), Das Kapital (Killdozer), Cat In The Hat (Little Benny And the Masters), Billy Budd or Suedehead (Morrissey), Through the Looking Glass (Mott the Hoople), Tender Is The Night (The Long Fidelity)(Triffids), Vanity Fair (Tom Verlaine). I note that some of the acts' names have literary links too.

There are of course loads about the Bible, if you count that as literature, and lots with coincidentally similar titles (e.g. Hard Times) or where something other than the book is the likely inspiration, usually the movie.