we'll make a man out of him, put him to a trade
teach him to play monopoly and to sing in the rain
today i was seized by the impulse to listen to thick as a brick by jethro tull. it's an album, and the whole album is a single song! it's divided into two 20-minute halves so it could fit on an lp, but now we can listen to them back-to-back.
it's filled with jethro tull's lovely folksy melodies, and the song structure has a lot of twists and turns. there are speedy rock parts, slow ballads, and even a drum solo.
the lyrics are great. they're presented as a poem written by a precocious, cynical eight-year-old. they're memorable.
Really don't mind if you sit this one out
My word's but a whisper, your deafness a shout
I may make you feel but I can't make you think
Your sperm's in the gutter, your love's in the sink
So you ride yourselves over the fields
And you make all your animal deals
And your wise men don't know how it feels
To be thick as a brick
the album cover is incredible, too! if you're streaming the album, you'll see it as a newspaper headline:
but there's more to it! the original lp release came with a huge fold-out newspaper. it's filled with funny articles like "NON-RABBIT MISSING", "Magistrate Fines Himself", and "Sand-Castle Man Calls it a Day". here's a video of someone unfolding the whole newspaper.
and, finally, here's a link so you can listen to it! it's the whole album - all 43 minutes and 50 seconds of it.