Borges Music – PopCanon

PopCanon
(1995–2001)

Phish covering They Might be Giants; X collide with XTC; Devo in a bar-brawl with Mighty Mighty Bosstones; these are only vague pointers towards PopCanon’s sound. Hailing from Gainesville, Florida, and active from 1995–2001, PopCanon carved a niche all their own, with offbeat elements of jazz, ska, klezmer, and country spicing an already strange brew of shifting time signatures, muscular pop rhythms, and clever college-radio hooks. Eclecticism was their watchword, and their songs cover a wide range of unusual subjects—semantics, astral projection, sexual positions, and postmodern literature, from Jorge Luis Borges to Thomas Pynchon. If the Modern Word had a house band, it was certainly PopCanon!

Borges-Related Works

Labyrinths (1997)
A track from their debut album, The Kingdom of Idiot Rock, this song is a jazzy homage to Borges’ oeuvre. Description below.

Labyrinths (1997)

PopCanon: The Kingdom of Idiot Rock
CD: Tritone PC01 (1997)
Online: SoundCloud [Labyrinths | Album Playlist]

Track Listing
1. PopCanon Fight Song
2. Ice On the Sidewalk
3. Merimble
4. Wanda Tinasky
5. The Reason
6. Valentine’s Day
7. René René
8. Fishbee Island
9. Bloomsday
10. Labyrinths
11. Too Many Mikes
12. Codename: Snossage
13. Treasure of the Temple
14. Robert Coover
15. The Curse of Clang

Musicians
M. David Hornbuckle—vocals and guitars
Ned Davis—vocals, guitars, and piano
Michael Murphy—bass and vocals
Blue Lang—rums
Alyson Carrel—trombone, cornet, tuba
Don Undeen—saxophones
Lórien Carsey—violin

PopCanon’s “Labyrinths” sounds like a band playing an airport lounge where the arrivals and departures involve different dimensions. Built around a traditional jazz structure, the song has all the elements of a “Nighthawks at the Diner” style excursion: stuttering upright bass, whispering drums and ticking cymbals, a pulsing piano, and lazy horns that propel the rhythm along in big, slippery surges. But there’s a slightly seedy flavor to everything, like the band is staving off dissolution; and the vocals are delivered with a certain sneaky glee, as if the musicians—perhaps genuinely from Tlön!—are revealing their weird addiction to Borges on the sly. The lyrics are amusing and deliberately awkward, constructed around highly improbable rhyme schemes which Ned Davis pulls off by virtue of odd pauses, oblique hesitations, and the occasional bending of sounds; all of which add to the already skewed nature of the song. It ends after an undulating loud-then-soft jazz vamp with some deliciously warbling trombone, fading into obscurity over a mumbled bit of verse: “The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.”

Lyrics: “Labyrinths”

You can find him in translation—
If you’re like me it could change the way you read.
Like “The Secret Miracle” or “Funes the Memorius” or
the line “When we die we must find God, our friends
and Shakespeare will collaborate with us.”

Pierre Menard rewrote the Quixote—he did not look
at Cervantes’ book.
And “The Lottery in Babylon”
and “Encyclopedia of Tlön,”
The Library goes on and on and on and
we fear and revere the Tetragrammaton.

(Chorus)
In Argentina, In Buenos Aires,
Jorge Luis Borges guards the doorways.
‘stos secretos, tienen razon, en labyrintos—
These hints make sense in the labyrinths.

Of Orbis Tertius: its history unfolds for us.
“Fire and smoke: an association of ideas.”
And the terror of its mythologies,
its emperors and its seas,
minerals, algebra and architecture
and its theological,
metaphysical
controversies.

The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges….

Additional Information

“Labyrinths” on SoundCloud
M. David Hornbuckle has placed the entire PopCanon discography on SoundCloud, including the song “Labyrinths.”

PopCanon on SoundCloud
The entire PopCanon discography is available on SoundCloud.

Pynchon Music: PopCanon
Spermatikos Logos has a page on PopCanon’s song, “Wanda Tinasky.”

M. David Hornbuckle
The guitarist and singer of PopCanon, Hornbuckle’s personal site features his new projects and some videos of PopCanon in action.

PopCanon on Spotify
You may listen to some PopCanon songs on Spotify.

PopCanon Facebook Page
PopCanon still maintains a Facebook page.

Author: Allen B. Ruch
Last Modified:  9 August 2024
Borges Music Page: Borges Music
Main Borges Page: The Garden of Forking Paths
Contact: quail(at)shipwrecklibrary(dot)com