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ROY ZIMMERMAN
Homeland/Security (Metaphor)
Reviewed by Rusty Pipes
At last Roy Zimmerman has made a new release, actually two simultaneous releases, one called Homeland and the other called Security. They are both worth the wait.
Roy is the former front man of the satirical folk group The Foremen, and he's the best rhyming lyricist since the legendary Tom Lehrer. That's no exaggeration. Take a song like "Guns In Space" which talks of going into space and meeting something "alien," for which Roy builds a quadruple rhyme -- "scary an' scaly an' not the least mammalian!" He rhymes like that over and over in the song and that's far from the strongest song here. Also included here is an update of "Saddam Shame" - the hard-to-find Foremen tune from the early 90's; "Pumping Irony" for Arnold Schwarzenegger; a love song for the "sexiest man alive" Dick Cheney ("He's like a barrel of oil, he's crude and yet refined"), "One World, One Bank" and "Psychedelic Relic," which has many familiar hippy motifs throughout and lines like "If you can't remember where parked your car, and you're in it, You're a psychedelic relic!" An unusual track is "My TV" which is seems completely inane at first but in the second part Roy explains the "deep poetic significance" of the lyrics and amazingly turns it into a strong comment on the stealing of the Presidency by Bush. There's no doubt there's a master at work here.
There are a couple of studio cuts including the title track "Homeland Security," but the best ones are just Roy and his guitar live. Often we get his hilarious set up jokes, such as where he responds to all the penis enlargement spam, but the songs are simply golden. My favorite this week is "Jerry Falwell's God," a deadly satire of the Moral Majority Leader's outrageous post-911 comments. Mostly spoken over a funky acoustic guitar riff (yes, Roy does have a lot of styles in his playing) he tells of a Yahweh-type deity crashing his party and among other things making the lame to walk. "And these were my friends, so they were still lame but they could walk!" he deadpans. There are a lot of lighter cracks like that but then as Falwell's God continues to make the party-goers miserable, Roy lets loose with a withering tirade, an indictment really, of exactly what's wrong with the evangelical leader's claim that Bin Laden's attack was really God punishing us for our sins. It brings the house down and rightfully so.
Hell, I might as well go out on a limb and admit it, Tom Lehrer was often snide and macabre in his work, Roy is both funnier and more poignant in his brand of satire. I like Roy more. Either CD should be proof enough but get both and see if you don't agree.
© 2004 - Rusty Pipes