Naminamu means… nothing. It’s not a word.
I’ve always thought that writing about music is kind of like golfing about sex. One has nothing whatsoever to do with the other, can hardly enrich it, and so it’s really just a fool’s errand (of course, golfing and sex do have one thing in common: you can be hopelessly bad at each and still enjoy them – no ‘scratch fuckers’ needed).
And that’s a problem, see, because I’m a musicologist. I spent nine years in formal education learning to, in effect, hit a five-iron to elicit moans, use a carburetor to illustrate normative jurisprudence, swim laps to champion gastronomy, and – now to the point – write whole blocks of scholarly narrative to demystify the immeasurable and unknowable beauty of music.
Naminamu is the title of a little-known song by Genesis, an album-rejected B-side that even their heartiest fans couldn’t sing for you (and it’s not because they don’t know the words: ‘Naminamu’ is the entirety of the song’s lyrics). The word is nothing but a nonsensical ‘vocable’ that drives the song’s manic, rambling, tempo-agnostic energy. Here, the text doesn’t tell us what the song is about. Rather, the music tells us what the lyric means.
See what I did just there? That’s musicology. That’s golfing about sex. That’s Naminamu. And I’m going to be doing a lot of it here.
Some of the subject matter probes music from auld lange syne, some others of spanking new toonage. Some exposes nuggets that haven’t even been published yet (and hopefully their authors will be amused by the early, er, reviews). Some subjects are well-known, some arcane. Some posts are deep musical analyses, some are just factual rundowns, and some are homilies and salutes, as the spirit moves. But none will be fangirling swoons, righteous judgments or bitter attacks. This site has one primary purpose: to torture natural language into elevating our common love of music into discussion and insight. And if it doesn’t do that, then at least the time I spent writing about it meant that I spent less time singing it, and that’s a good thing for all of us.
Last, let’s measure success in dialogue. Post comments, by all means: make suggestions for artists, their music and the genres they play in so we can all discover together. Let’s golf about it.
Fore…