Bob Kanefsky interview cont'd

Wordplay

I'd rather play with words than cymbals. I guess my entire parody-writing style involves frequent word-play off of the parallel lines from the original. It's fun when I can leave a line unchanged, or minimally changed, and totally alter its meaning. "Love" is a great example of a word that can mean many things, both noble and crude. It can mean "affection", "lover", "to be fond of", or to perform a physical act, as in "after loving me late at night, you just roll over and turn out the light", or "I don't wanna sleep, I just wanna keep on loving you". I twisted a line in just that way in “Dear Departed” , taking an innocent fluffy bunny rabbit line ("I'm sure I wouldn't mind if someone could still love me", to paraphrase) and changing it into something very different without changing a word. Similarly, I was very impressed by the Ookla line that changed a deodorant ad into a romantic statement by inserting one comma: "I'm strong enough, for a man, but I'm made for a woman". (And I don't care if the comma isn't there on the official web site, it's obviously the intended meaning.)

Here are two of my favorite ambiguous pop lyrics to misinterpret:

1. And she's dancing like she's never danced before.
2. (I was) crazy for thinking my love could hold you.

I'm not above writing a shaggy-dog song like “The Truth About Alert Solids” or throwing in an occasional pun like “final front ear” in a Star Trek song , but double meanings don't always have to be intrusive. You can get by without having heard about area-fill algorithms in computer graphics, and the line “filled the leaves with green” will still make some sense; you just won't get the visual image of leaves being colored in by a computer program.

I sometimes like to sneak a filker's name into a song. I did that at least once on a song that wound up on Roundworm, and I crammed a few names into “Lessen?” .

I guess my most elaborate case of word-play was where I wrote an entire song, “Tribble Gumbo” , comprised almost entirely with lines from other songs and various other references.