My wife keeps asking me, how can you love a song about dogs eating up the body of a dead woman?
Well, I can discourse all night about why rock and pop matter so much they can encompass any subject, but the truth is, the real reason I love "Marie Provst" is, it's just so catchy. Which is why rock and pop can be so encompassing in the first place.
This song comes from Jesus Of Cool, Nick Lowe's debut album after his pub-rock band, Brinsley Schwartz, broke up. Also known in the US as Pure Pop For Now People, both titles very witty, telling the same joke with a different punchline. The album is, like the US title implies, a pop masterpiece, full of sharp hooks that the more progressive musicians of the 70's had long since discarded and forgotten.
It's that love of the pop hook and the witty rhyme, complete in themselves and requiring no profound meaning, that make "Marie Provst" one of my favorite songs. Having said that, taking it to extreme gets you to "Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da" (actually, I consider Lowe one of the few good musicians to have been influenced more from McCartney than from Lennon) so I need to address a few more elements that separate the men from the boys: a big beat, a sharp guitar and wry vocals that make no concession to cuteness. Plus, unlike "Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da", "Marie Provst" totally absorbs all its musical antecedents and sounds totally fresh. It will never sound outdated.
The final measure of the song's greatness comes from this, my favorite verse:
The cops came in and they looked around
Throwin' up everywhere over what they found
The handiwork of Marie's little dachshund
That hungry little dachshund
Copyright 1978 Nick Lowe
Because no one else in human history had ever found a rhyme for "dachshund". Or even bothered to try.
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