Mr. Sun Cho Lee / Mucka Blucka— (Approximately) Five Paragraphs on a Five Star Song

(one man’s attempt to better understand the music that moves him…)

artist: Keola & Kapono Beamer / Tally Hall
track: Mr. Sun Cho Lee / Mucka Blucka
album: Hawaii’s Keola & Kapono Beamer / Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum 
 year: 1975 / 2005
 runtime: 3:31 / 1:38

Artists:

Before you start reading, let me point out that these two songs — recorded thirty years apart — have almost nothing in common. Except for some chicken-based noises, they’re dissimilar in every way.

But I like chicken-based music — so here they are, together. At last.

The Beamer Brothers wrote Mr. Sun Cho Lee, a song that’s quite popular in Hawaii, and less so here on the mainland. I heard snippets of it from nearby car radios during an aloha vacation a decade ago, and was sufficiently intrigued by it to track down a copy.

It’s adorable. Basically, it’s about how everybody’s all racist and selfish, but in an entirely overcome-able way. The pidgin English in which the song explains how Mr. Sun Cho Lee, Mr. Conrad Jones, Mr. Kazuo Tanaka, Miss Momi Lomilomi, and Mr. Kamakawiwo’ole all have various possessions or abilities that they don’t want to share.

Tally Hall are … OK, this is too complicated. They’re basically making fun of everything. (Quite well.) I can’t explain them in fewer than a dozen paragraphs, and will probably fail even then, so … never mind.

Flow, Mood and Feel:

Beamer Brothers: island languid.

Tally Hall: clown-suit frenetic.

Grace Notes:

Lee: the brothers’ harmony is impeccable. They’ve clearly been practicing their mesh since age five or so. The champagne cork popping during Miss Lomilomi’s section is nice, and the extra bells and clinks throughout are somehow right on target. But we’re all about the chickens here. So I’ve got to point us at 1:17, when one of the brothers decides to cluck the harmony. Twice.

Blucka: Despite it being completely impossible to create anything that sounds like lyrics using only chicken noises, the deranged gentlemen in TH somehow pull it off. (With a few verbal liberties, of course.) Starting at 0:37, the entirely clucked middle verse almost sounds like these chicken-fellows are actually trying to tell you something in English. (Clucklish?) If you can understand it, please forward it to me; the Internets have a running battle as to what the hell it is they’re saying, and I’m not taking a side.

When to listen to these songs:

Beamers: at your Thanksgiving holiday party when your old racist auntie starts going off again, so everyone can come together and lightly judge her by talking about the nuances of a charming little song, rather than just calling her out directly on her ignorance and causing a scene that will result in mashed potatoes on the ceiling, like that time eight years ago when the conversation turned to that young Obama fellow’s chances, and she kept demanding to over-pronounce his middle name.).

Hall: at 3am, driving to the house where you and your fraternity brothers are going to execute your annual prank, with a trunk full of balloons, toilet paper, silly string, a Rube Goldberg machine, and — of course — at least one chicken.