Tom Lehrer Releases His All of Catchy and Savage Musical Satire Into the Public Domain

If the age of Amer­i­can musi­cal satire is behind us, Tom Lehrer may have end­ed it sim­ply by being unsur­pass­ably good at it. No less a com­e­dy-song mas­ter than “Weird Al” Yankovic still walks among us, of course, but he spe­cial­izes in broad par­o­dy rather than bit­ing irony. Despite hav­ing retired from pub­lic life, Lehrer too lives on, and at 92 has tak­en action to assure his work a longer exis­tence by releas­ing it into the pub­lic domain. On his offi­cial site you’ll see a state­ment from the man him­self: “All the lyrics on this web­site, whether pub­lished or unpub­lished, copy­right­ed or uncopy­right­ed, may be down­loaded and used in any man­ner what­so­ev­er.”

Direct­ly below his mes­sage you’ll find a list of near­ly 100 of Lehrer’s songs, which when clicked lead to down­load­able PDFs of their lyrics, and in some cas­es their sheet music as well. Ready for you to repur­pose are such sig­na­ture num­bers as “The Masochism Tan­go,” “Poi­son­ing Pigeons in the Park,” and “The Ele­ments,” a ver­sion of the “Major-Gen­er­al’s Song” from Gilbert and Sul­li­van’s Pirates of Pen­zance that name-checks each and every one of the phys­i­cal ele­ments known in 1959.

That Lehrer has also includ­ed the “Aris­to­tle ver­sion” of “Ele­ments” — in full, “There’s earth and air and fire and water” — just hints at the many play­ful touch­es to be found in this col­lec­tion of mate­ri­als.

Not just a singer-song­writer but a math­e­mati­cian who worked at both the Los Alam­os Sci­en­tif­ic Lab­o­ra­to­ry and the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency dur­ing the Cold War, Lehrer did­n’t shy away from address­ing the tech­ni­cal, the polit­i­cal, and the top­i­cal in his music. “Wern­her von Braun” sends up the rock­et sci­en­tist secret­ly recruit­ed by the Unit­ed States from defeat­ed Nazi Ger­many (“Don’t say that he’s hyp­o­crit­i­cal / Say rather that he’s apo­lit­i­cal”). “New Math” gives a sim­i­lar treat­ment to the Sput­nik-spooked U.S.‘s ill-advised scram­ble to reform math­e­mat­ics edu­ca­tion, and I got a laugh out of the song in child­hood despite grow­ing up long after the retrench­ment of New Math itself.

Whether hear­ing or read­ing Lehrer’s lyrics today, one mar­vels at both how they’ve retained their bite, and how wide­ly they were con­sid­ered too edgy for air­play in the 1950s. The BBC, for exam­ple, banned ten of the twelve songs on his debut album, includ­ing “Be Pre­pared,” which spins the Boy Scout’s mot­to into an ode to mis­be­hav­ior (“Be pre­pared to hold your liquor pret­ty well / Don’t write naughty words on walls if you can’t spell”). But now we’re free to craft new con­texts to make them trou­bling again, and with the hol­i­days com­ing up, this assures us very Lehrer Thanks­giv­ingsChrist­mases (“Mix the punch, drag out the Dick­ens / Even though the prospect sick­ens”) and Hanukkahs (“Here’s to Judas Mac­cabeus / Boy, if he could only see us / Spend­ing Hanukkah in San­ta Mon­i­ca”) to come. Enter his site here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Tom Lehrer Sing the Names of 102 Chem­i­cal Ele­ments to the Tune of Gilbert & Sul­li­van

Tom Lehrer’s Math­e­mat­i­cal­ly and Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly Inclined Singing and Song­writ­ing, Ani­mat­ed

Cel­e­brate Har­ry Potter’s Birth­day with Song. Daniel Rad­cliffe Sings Tom Lehrer’s Tune “The Ele­ments”

We’re All Doomed!: Weird Al Yankovic Tries to Make Sense of the Dis­as­trous Trump vs. Biden “Debate”

The Music, Books & Films Lib­er­at­ed into the Pub­lic Domain in 2020: Rhap­sody in Blue, The Mag­ic Moun­tain, Sher­lock, Jr., and More

Every Pos­si­ble Melody Has Been Copy­right­ed, and They’re Now Released into the Pub­lic Domain

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.


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