Well, darn it all. I just got the news that Tom Lehrer passed away. He was 97, so he had a pretty long life, but it’s still sad.
That’s probably the song that everyone knows him the most for, but the first one that I knew to be his was called “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”
When I found out his name, I decided to see if I could find more of his stuff…and merrily down the Tom Lehrer rabbit hole I went.
At which point, I landed on a song that I had heard Dad sing a few lines of from time to time. I just thought Dad was being weird, but I finally knew it was a real song. That was a revelation.
It took a while, but I think I found almost all of his stuff, and what a collection of stuff! There were songs about war, songs about nuclear bombs, freedom of the press…kind of, pollution, Harvard,, you name it, he probably wrote a song about it. And he wrote a bunch of them in the 50’s and 60’s and they’re still funny today.
And then he went and wrote kids’ songs! I had no idea he was in The Electric Company!
But I feel like a jerk mentioning all his music because in his later years, I heard that he really didn’t want to talk about that anymore. I don’t know if he was just sick of everybody talking about it, or if he wanted to be more known for his work in math, but that guy made a lot of good music. Lots of it was dark, but all of it was brilliant! But what else can you expect from a guy who got a math degree at 18? He says we can’t get away from mathematics, and he couldn’t get away from his music.
We’ve lost a genius today. But his music will stay with us for a long long time.
The last time I thought about him was at a family thing a few weeks ago watching Seppa answer some “questions of maff.” Somebody gave him a multiplication question, 12×6 or something like that, and as he’s working it out in his head he starts doing division. “What the heck is he doing,” I wondered. And then next thing you know, New Math is in my head.
He got the answer right, by the way. It really is so simple that only a child can do it.