Wednesday, January 12, 2022

Monkey Time


Major Lance (Okeh Records)

The moment you’re born you begin to die, but the opposite is not true, at least from a scientific point of view. The moment of death is not rebirth unless you’re a believer in either the afterlife or reincarnation which bring up the question of "Monkey Time," a legendary soul song of the 60s, performed by Major Lance who just happened to have been the father of the former mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms. And there’s “Mickey’s Monkey,” a Smokey Robinson hit. Of course, the monkey is an ancestor of man who famously mocks the vanity of men’s wishes by dancing on a grave. Shelley’s “Ozymandias” spins a similar song, “Look at my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Survival of the species occurs by way of natural selection, though as Stephen Jay Gould demonstrated in his theory of “punctuated equilibrium,” evolution proceeding by fits and starts, has a mind of its own. Ancestors (except going back to the musical analogy you realize that Sylvia Robinson of Mickey and Sylvia's “Love is Strange” fame had a second life as the producer of The Sugarhill Gang's “Rapper Delight”) do not make the light flicker at seances, except in horror films about possession, like The Exorcist.

read "Pornosophy: The Pleasure Principle" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and listen to "Monkey Time"(1963) by Major Lance


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