Amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes: Pangrams in music

This thread involves a different form of nerding out about music than usually gets much play on ILX, a worse form, one that can't imaginably lead to any revelatory insights about music ... and I don't care. Inspired by this post of the first verse of All the Young Dudes, which, typos and all (thanks Internet lyrics sites!), you can still tell is a pangram.

Pangrams - you know, texts that include every letter in the alphabet - don't show up all that often in lyrics. The first verse of Amon Duul II's "Mr. Kraut's Jinx" is one too:

Mr Kraut's jinx was an Egyptian sphinx

It happened during his holiday to the Valley of Kings

He got hypnotised like Peter Pan by the moon

The strength of a smell made him quite dizzy soon

And suddenly there were cobwebs all over

That's pretty unusual (only 39 words!) because the shorter the text, the less likely it is to be pangrammatic. The shortest full song pangram I've come across (not counting the "ABC" singsong) is "Wurlitzer Jukebox" by Young Marble Giants:

Parrish is dancing, his feet are a blur
Comes to a standstill, I ask him a question
He doesn't hear
Wurlitzer jukebox
Wurlitzer jukebox
Wurlitzer jukebox
Fingers are pointed in my direction
Words fly around me, everyone's chanting
Wurlitzer jukebox
Wurlitzer jukebox
Wurlitzer jukebox

42 words in all - counting all chorus repetitions. Some other examples: "Sexx Laws" by Beck; "Mozambique" by Bob Dylan; "Alphabet Bitches" by Lil' Wayne; "Divide and Conquer" by Husker Du; "Youth Against Fascism" by Sonic Youth; "Down In The Tube Station At Midnight" by the Jam; "The Bleeding Heart Show" by the New Pornographers; "The Sphinx In The Face" by Van Der Graaf Generator. So, what else? There must be plenty of smart-guy indie songs that use all those high-scoring Scrabble words. And hiphop, the Fall, pretty much any overspill songwriting should be a prime candidate.

AMAZING

Good work, dad a. I just tried the Beatles "Sun King" but it has no j,w or x in it. Just tried "Green Shirt" by Elvis Costello but it doesn't have a 'z' unless you misspell "quisling."

Love - The Red Telephone

^^^great spot

ciara - g is for girl

Awesome. The uncommon ones are J, Q, X, & Z, finding all those is the tricky bit (like, why doesn't "No Xmas For John Quays" have a Z in it anywhere?) but if you've got those you should be good.

there must be loads more list songs like "g is for girl" where the singer actually goes through the alphabet...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIiFo-hX-5c

The uncommon ones are J, Q, X, & Z
Yes, seeing that now. I guess I never knew what Etaoin Shrdlu's full name was.

xpost right when the video starts she bends her knees in (0:11) and I really thought she was going to contort her body into the shape of each letter as she called them out, that would have been pure jawdrop.

I guess Ross Eckler should put a link to that in the next edition of Making The Alphabet Dance.

Notorious BIG - Hypnotize

So many Dizzee songs only need a q.

Queen's "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" has everything except, ironically, a Q.

they don't say "by queen" at the end?

They should.

is that really irony, j

Yes, b/c one would expect that a band named Queen would want to use the letter Q as freQuently as possible.

Blackalicious- Alphabet Aerobics (another one for the "listing the alphabet" subset)

Does "Killer Queen" work?

Depends on your spelling of "laser" doesn't it?

No 'z' I'm guessing.

x-post

Wu-Tang Clan - Reunited

Brainiac, "Kiss Me You Jacked-Up Jerk"

(xpost)
Does it depend on my spelling or on Freddie Mercury's spelling?

Billy Joel, "We Didn't Start the Fire"

Here's another one where the missing letter is in the band name: "Lazy Eye," by Silversun Pickups, missing only a K.

"All The Way From Memphis" starts out so promisingly- "Forgot my six string razor" - but the 'q' doesn't show up until the next song "Whizz Kid," which doesn't have an 'x'. Aargh!

The Soft Machine: "A Pataphysical Alphabet Pt.1"/"Pt.2"!

Lloyd Cole - Perfect Skin

"Outfoxed" by Chumbawamba:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dogs
Aided and abetted by the local hunt sabs

And on that note:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfxcq77FkdE

tori amos - datura

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX_dwuF-6oY

(she just recites a list of plants over the beat)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59IsOsKFJXM

Nas's "N.Y. State of Mind" reaches the goal halfway through the first verse. When he says "gave another squeeze", you get the z, and that's the final missing letter. Of course, if you spell "niggaz" with a z, like whoever transcribed the lyrics does, you get all the letters by the 12th line, but I think that's cheating.

having one of those pandora moments: holy shit i like a tori amos song

"Ça plane pour moi" has all 26 letters of the English alphabet (Q, J, Z much easier in French, X appears in "cheveux chinois", but he also gets not-so-French letters W, K and Y from "en buvant tout mon whisky"

inspired by the word squeeze, another tori amos one - "concertina" - http://www.last.fm/music/Tori+Amos/_/Concertina - which reaches the goal by midway through the 7th line:

Clouds descending
I'm not policing what you think and dream
I run into your thought from across the room
Just another trick
Can I weather this
I've got a fever above my waist
You got a squeeze box on your knee
I know the truth is in between the 1st and 40th drink

haha xps yeah her weirdo electronic experimentation period went pretty much unnoticed critically, but she went way, way out there; try "iieee", "hotel", "juárez" and "liquid diamonds" too

i had no idea tori amos ever had a weirdo electronic experimentation period!

i'll check out those others you suggest - thanks

yeah it's a pity that only live versions seem to be on youtube/last.fm - basically from the choirgirl hotel (1998) and to venus and back (1999).

The Who's "Squeeze Box," alas, is missing a J.

Ooh! Lost the TV show is based off Joni Mitchell's "Jungle Line": discus

Cole Porter's "Now You Has Jazz"

jawdrop buzz, quickly sexing up MTV (cf. Shakira).

― dad a, Monday, January 11, 2010 11:46 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

Fixed.

If only Franz Ferdinand's Jacqueline had been sixteen instead of seventeen.

Another "A is for ..." song - "Alligators All Around" - wonderfully written by Maurice Sendak, perfectly performed by Carole King.

The Flaming Lips get through the alphabet in the first verse of "The Ceiling Is Bendin'":

Well it's midnight in a liquor store in Texas on Halloween
Salvador Dali watches from his window in a dream
Jesus is a rock star who destroys all he sees
Godzilla is a cowboy who is dressed up as a queen