MOMUS – “King Solomon’s Mines”
I have been reading a fair amount of Near Eastern Erotic Verse for a class. Reading Sumerian, Tamil, Egyptian, Hebraic and Greek variations on the same themes get repetitive, and this song plays in my head most of the day. Its from Circus Maximums and comes fairly early in the eye patched ones oeuvre.
This song is probably on the tip of my tongue because it is the only pop song that name drops the people who I am reading about, the arias to Aida are not really hummable. The thing is if you look at the lyrics it is about an English Couple enslaved to help Solomon build a monument to his own ego. On the third track of his first album we can see a game Momus plays through out his career. He writes elegant and debauched lyrics as a frilled curtain. If we draw this curtain we see under all this frou frou pretty lyrics about conservative men who yearn for the domestic life.
Its all here, each album talking about seducing woman with his wit and then the woman staying. All the way to Folktronic which begs the Appalachian Mountain Girl to love him . Its kind of Sad really- Momus as the eternal hipster, only wanting a warm place to rest his laurels.