Song Of The Day 5/23/2016: Dan Lacksman Association – “Flamingo Moog”

Moog In Vogue – Step aside! No, no, no, just step aside and clear a path, you dusty-headed tissue-wavers! What is it? What is it? It's the Moog synthesizer, you miserable sons-a-bitches! It's barreling towards you right now and we're not gonna pay for whatever physical trauma you might endure because you couldn't get the hell out of the way!

What other musical instrument has been so misunderstood as the Moog? All at once it's the symbol of rampant futurism and hopelessly outdated. It slobbered all over the apex of space-age achievement where it resided for a time, only to be overtaken and abused in the nursing home by those cock-o-the-walk FM synthesizers that had the emotional depth of a barbell. Only the Moog was ever pumped up as the totem of electronic mystery, as a possible electronic side component to our human emotional stages -- then was ruthlessly denigrated when people started doing precious little with it aside from fart noises. Has a synthesizer ever made you cry? No? Then you haven't heard a Moog yet. They are needy, weepy and at times a little infantile. But a DX7 isn't ever gonna ask you to the prom. The DX7 skipped three grades in school and doesn't really know how to handle itself at cocktail parties or other social situations. It's a... you know, the DX7 is just a prissy little prick, is what it is. It didn't survive 1991. But the Moog hung around that wall, never minding a thing, just sat there knowing you'd come back to it when all the facades fell by the wayside, like Tony Bennett in the '90s. And now it's back. Stained maybe by the stains of spilled PBR's from a hipster's uncertain hand, but back nonetheless.

We're going to plumb the depths and skirt the surfaces of all the Moog has meant to humankind over the next few days -- its moments of relevance, its moments of grandeur, and its moments of utmost inappropriateness. Because no other instrument is capable of such wide swings of merit and demerit, and here at this blog I reward nothing so much as range of accomplishment and failure. I, heh, wonder why that is. No idea. Zip. But that's what I do.

Let's start off with this easily pluckable tune by something called the Dan Lacksman Association. They're not all going to be this easy this week so don't get too situated.