Yam, the King of Crops ^{1 2}

In the liner notes to Protein Source of the Future... NOW!, John writes:

My noble if futile efforts to write a song as good as the Tom Robinson Band's "2-4-6-8 Motorway" continue. If cornered, I will admit that Yam is my favorite Mountain Goats release, so I'm very happy to have it on here: it's been out of print for ages. Red gold all over! Somebody catch me.

2-4-6-8 Motorway is a British rock song charting to the #5 singles position. ↩

Many songs on Yam, the King of Crops are related obliquely or directly to a significant work of African literature. The album title (as well as the eponymous song and references in several other songs) is directly taken from the seminal work by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart:

"Share-cropping was a very slow way of building up a barn of one's own. After all the toil one only got a third of the harvest. But for a young man whose father had no yams, there was no other way. And what made it worse in Okonkwo's case was that he had to support his mother and two sisters from his meagre harvest... It was like pouring grains of corn into a bag full of holes. His mother and sisters worked hard enough, but they grew women's crops, like coco-yams, beans and cassava. Yam, the king of crops, was a man's crop." (pp. 22 - 23)

"Yam, the king of crops, was a very exacting king." (p. 33)

Achebe, Chinua (1953). Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. ISBN 0-385-47454-7 ↩ ↩²

These are the opening lines of Horace's Ars Poetica, Horace's thoughts on writing good poetry, contained in his second book of Epistles. This phrase translates to, "If a painter should wish to unite a horse's neck to a human head, and so on." The full paragraph continues:

"If a painter should wish to unite a horse's neck to a human head, and spread a variety of plumage over limbs [of different animals] taken from every part [of nature], so that what is a beautiful woman in the upper part terminates unsightly in an ugly fish below; could you, my friends, refrain from laughter, were you admitted to such a sight? Believe, ye Pisos, the book will be perfectly like such a picture, the ideas of which, like a sick man's dreams, are all vain and fictitious: so that neither head nor foot can correspond to any one form. 'Poets and painters [you will say] have ever had equal authority for attempting any thing.' We are conscious of this, and this privilege we demand and allow in turn: but not to such a degree, that the tame should associate with the savage; nor that serpents should be coupled with birds, lambs with tigers."

Horace. Ars Poetica. Translated by Christopher Smart. Retrieved October 19, 2013. ↩

Quetzalcoatl is a major Aztec diety. Meaning "feathered serpent", Quetzalcoatl is one of many winged snake dieties throughout history in South and Central America. ↩

Quetzalcoatl Comes Through is part of the informal series of Aztec songs. ↩

Quetzalcoatl is described as having bright, multicolored plumage, much like the Resplendent Quetzal which is associated with the god. ↩

I am not sure what this refers to, although it recollects Xolotl, the canine Aztec god of death and lightning, who escorted the dead to Mictlan, the Aztec underworld. Dogs were strongly associated with the dead in Aztec mythology. ↩

Given the similar use of a prefacing Greek letter and the divorce context, Omega Blaster is sometimes considered to be an Alpha couple song. However, based on the geography and context, I don't think this is correct. ↩

Yosemite is an enormous national park located in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. Renowned internationally for its beauty, especially the granite walls of Yosemite Valley and Tuolumne Meadows, it is a Mecca for climbers, backpackers, mountaineers, backcountry skiers, and other outdoor recreationalists. ↩

Taro, also known as cocoyam or coco-yam, is a major root crop of Africa, India, and elsewhere. Germane to this context, it plays a major role in Achebe's Things Fall Apart, where coco-yams are described as an important crop, if less significant than yams. While related to the Igbo culture described in Things Fall Apart, this scene is not described in the book. ↩

John describes this clip as being intended to provide a "stark contrast" to the content of the song. Heavy Metal, Ephemera, and Popular Culture: A Chat With the Mountain Goats, Space City Rock, Spring 2001. ↩

This excerpt is from the showtune Always True to You in My Fashion, written by Cole Porter for the Broadway musical Kiss Me, Kate. This particular version is that sung by the jazz and pop great Peggy Lee. ↩

Described in numerous world religions, most famously vodou, the creation of objects intended to carry magic power over other individuals in a community, often by depicting them physically, is known as fetishism. While not a major part of Things Fall Apart, Igbo culture may have incorporated such objects. ↩

Kola is a caffeinated tree nut indigenous to Africa and notable for being the origin of cola as a flavoring throughout the world. It is described in Things Fall Apart as being a key part of hospitality and many ceremonies, being broken and offered to guests or eaten before important occasions. ↩

A reference to the poem Alagemo, by the Nobel laureate author and playwright Wole Soyinka. He has been active in political activism in Nigeria, the country of his birth, and was imprisoned for several years as a consequence of his commitment to justice and independence. Alagemo prefaces his play The Road as follows:

"Since the mask-idiom employed in The Road will be strange to many, the preface poem Alagemo should be of help. Agemo is simply, a religious cult of flesh dissolution." (p. 149)

The poem itself is as follows (p. 150):

I heard! I felt their reach
And heard my naming named.
The pit is there, the digger fell right through
My roots have come out in the other world.
Make away. Agemo's hoops
Are pathways of the sun.
Rain-reeds, unbend to me, Quench
The burn of cartwheels at my waist!
Pennant in the stream of time — Now,
Gone, and Here the Future
Make way. Let the rivers woo
The thinning, thinning Here and
Vanished Leap that was the Night
And the split that snatched the heavy-lidded
She-twin into Dawn.
No sweat-beads droop beneath
The plough-wings of hawk.
No beetle finds a hole between Agemo's toes.
When the whirlwind claps his feet
It is the sundering of the... name no ills...
Of... the Not-to-be
Of the moistening moment of a breath...
Approach. Approach and feel
Did I not speak? Is there not flesh
Between the dead man's thumbs?

Soyinka, Wole (1973). Collected Plays, Volume 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-281136-3 ↩ ↩²

An earthworm used as bait for fishing. Oxford English Dictionary, retrieved October 19, 2013. ↩

The title and these verses are adapted directly from the prologue to the novel Two Thousand Seasons by Ayi Kwei Armah, a writer from Ghana. The book focuses on the destruction wrought on Africa by colonialism. Speaking of such, the original text is as follows (italics present in original):

"How have we come to be mere mirrors to annihilation? For whom do we aspire to reflect our people's death? For whose entertainment shall we sing our agony? In what hopes? That the destroyers, aspiring to extinguish us, will suffer conciliatory remorse at the sight of their own fantastic success? The last imbecile to dream such dreams is dead, killed by the saviours of his dreams. Such idiot hopes come from a territory far beyond rebirth. Those utterly dead, never again to wake, such is their muttering. Leave them in their graves. Whatever waking form they wear, the stench of death pours ceaseless from their mouths. From every opening of their possessed carcases comes death's excremental pus. Their soul itself is dead and long since putrified. Would you then have your intercourse with these creatures from the graveyard? Go to them, and speak your message to long rotted ash."

Armah, Ayi Kwei (1973). Two Thousand Seasons. Nairobi: East African Publishing House. ↩

This is not a variety of palm tree, however, the city of Jericho, located in Palestine, is known from Biblical times as the City of Palm Trees. These varieties are likely date palms. ↩

Basmati rice is an Indian variety of long-grain rice. Pari is a brand of rice from India which has been in business since the 1700s, formerly as Sachdeva and Sons. ↩

Told in Ovid's poem Metamorphoses, Galatea is the name given to the statue which Pygmalion, a sculptor, makes and then falls in love with. On the day of the festival of Venus, he prays for a woman like his statue, which comes to life. Pygmalion and Galatea then marry. ↩