(Fevered Mutterings v3 – December 11th, 2008)
It’s a well-known fact that Peter Sarstedt’s “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)” is the longest song in the history of music.
Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t mean this in an empirically measurable sense. It’s actually just over 4 minutes long in realtime. But nobody experiences time in realtime (take the length of the fifty-ninth minute of 4 o’clock on a Friday, for example).
This song has around 1,500 verses, all of which are intensely short and soporific. It’s not a bad song. The fact that it’s been covered by so many artists since should indicate that this is premier songwriting, or that the music industry is eating its own tail, one of the two anyway.
But the languid sine-wave nature of Sarstedt’s droning pseudo-Gallic singing, his palpable borderline boredom, is a bit like a musical expression of your head nodding with exhaustion, ending with a pig-like snort and full awakeness, ie.
Zzzz….Tell m’the thhhh’s that surrnd you
Mm wnnt to look ins’d yr
HEAD!
*SNORT* yes I do ah what er shit *blinking and coughing*
It’s for this reason that “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)” is subjectively too long in length to be experienced by any one human being. It can’t physically be done.
It’s (another) well-known fact that Mr Sarstedt recorded a verse a year for 13 years, built the song electronically and then lip-synched on stage while under self-induced hypnosis. If you find yourself listening deeply to the song, your brain will age catastrophically, passing through the remaining neurological decades of your life in a matter of seconds (realtime).
The only way to listen to the song is to have someone standing nearby with a handheld foghorn, the kind professional yachters use. After a couple of verses, this is operated somewhere near your ear. With luck this keeps the experience down to just a couple of subjective years – gaining you some wisdom but sidestepping a seemingly endless living hell. (It’s a little like fiddling with loose electrical wires while having someone stood nearby shod in insultating green wellies, ready to kick you away if they smell smouldering body hair).
