Radcliffe girls dying of cancer and the degraded bagatelles of South Minneapolis.
After work yesterday I was outside S. 12th tuning up the Mediator, when I heard a bleeping, mournful little tune emanating from down the street. It was obviously an ice cream truck, but it actually took me a second to register it as such. The song just seemed too slow, too sad to really be an ice cream truck. It sounded like a dying music box. In fact, do you remember that Kathleen Hanna album where she sang overtop of the music box playing “Theme from Love Story”? It sounded like that. It sounded like Radcliffe girls dying of cancer.
I flagged the truck down when it passed, and bought a strawberry crunch bar for a dollar. I asked the woman driving the truck what music she was playing.
She looked down at something on her dashboard (are these things like iPods, with display screens?), and looked back up. “Fur Elise,” she said flatly. “Beethoven. Bagatelle.” And then she drove off.
Reader, there is no way this song was Fur Elise. I know Fur Elise, if from nothing else than from that Reagan-era McDonald’s commercial where the cute little girl uses it to express her eagerness to throw away five-hundred years of Western culture for a Happy Meal. As far as “bagatelle” is concerned, that is actually a word I had to look up.
Even so, the conversation raises a lot of questions: how do ice cream truck owners program their jingles? Do these jingles degrade over time, like wax cylinders? Was the woman mistaken? How could she be mistaken when she clearly knew more about classical music than I do? Was choosing such a sad song a kind of counter-programming, defying expectations and standing out in a market that is oversaturated with ice cream trucks blaring “La Cucaracha” and “Turkey in the Straw”?
Consider this: apparently, the Animals’ famous 1964 version of “House of the Rising Sun” was written when they were invited to open for Chuck Berry’s British tour that year. They needed a new song to anchor their set, and knew that all of their pageboy-hairdo’d English peers on the bill were all going to be trying to out-Chuck Berry each other. So instead of a Berry-ish uptempo rocker as the centerpiece, they arranged “House of the Rising Sun” as a pop dirge, a funereal, organ-heavy slow-burner. Of course it stood head and shoulders over the chunka-chunka-chunka Berry clones, and became a massive worldwide hit.
I think of this degraded bagatelle in the same way: it stands out, confounding even as it engages. It made me buy a strawberry crunch bar, after all.
Next project: I am going to purchase a digital recorder and do an anthropological study of the ice cream truck jingles of South Minneapolis. There’s at least six or seven distinct ones to be heard on a regular basis. I’ll post the results here, including, I hope, my degraded bagatelle.
