[Intro] Ladies and gentlemen Scholars Buffoons Lend me your ears And perhaps a bassoon Tonight we’ll be touring With smug erudition The plight of the modern Neurotic musician Each style in the file Each mode that you know Self-referential Reverential And terribly meta Just so [Verse 1 – Classic Broadway] I begin in the kingdom of brassy bravado Where the trumpets proclaim every plot avocado Where a simple exchange Like “Pass salt” or “Good night” Is a full-blown eleven o’clock spotlight We declaim every craving With vibrato and verve And a key change for courage Any time that we swerve Here a character’s trauma Gets a tap break and rhyme And an existential crisis Takes precisely eight bars In cut time [Chorus – Classic Broadway] This is the Broadway number Belting our doubts to the balcony high We philosophize in F major While waving our arms at the sky If nuance is needed We modulate twice Then shout our subtext in tune For subtle emotion We simply add strings and a clarinet swoon [Verse 2 – Jazz / Cabaret] Now we slip to a club Where the tempo’s elastic Conversation is chromatic And the cocktails sarcastic Where the chords are suggestive Of a third failed marriage And the scat syllables Hide considerable baggage I will croon of ennui Over brushed hi-hat shimmer With a word like “indeterminacy” Slid in Soft To glimmer I’ll seduce you with syntax Over walking bass lines Till you question your morals And your internal rhymes [Chorus] [Chorus] [Verse 3 – Country] Let’s two-step to the land Of the heartbroken twang Where the dog Truck Town And relationship all went “clang” Where my ex took my dignity My dignity took the car And my car took my credit score Straight off to the bar I’ll recount every grievance With disarming plain speech Yet my PhD in linguistics Still occasionally leaks So I’ll rhyme “epistemic” With “you left in that Civic” And lament how your semiotics Never were quite terrific [Bridge – Rap / Hip-Hop] Now a pivot in the kick drum Verbal calculus in motion I’m a metrical magician With a hyperactive notion Of enjambment I jam it Past the bar line Frantic Let the consonants collide Polysyllabic Pedantic I’ll internal-rhyme “onomastic” With “automatic” and “fantastic” Pack a paragraph of parody In pockets of the plastic Every stress-mark is a chess-mark On the rhythm’s little grid I drop a reference Then three more You Google what I just did [Verse 4 – Operetta / Pseudo-Opera] Now we hoist up the curtain On grandiose hauteur Where a trivial tiff Gets a Latin overture I shall quarrel ‘bout the laundry With heroic recitativo While the chorus intones “In flagrante delictivo” Our disputes on the dishes Grow Wagnerian Absurd As we hurl coloratura At each mundane word It’s domestic dissatisfaction But with timpani and glee For a measly missing teaspoon We require a trilogy [Chorus – Overblown Finale] Yes This is the genre medley Everything louder than reason or rhyme We’ve anatomized our idioms And weaponized four-four time From the patter to the power ballad Every trope on parade If you felt both amused and attacked Then a Broadway success has been made [Coda – Faux-Gospel Curtain Call] Bring the choir Bring the key change Ring the brass till it’s slightly deranged We’ll reprise every style In a jubilant pile And pretend it was art Not deranged For the thesis tonight In this self-conscious song Is that every new genre’s Been winking along So applaud our audacity And our last clever line As we fade on a pun That refuses To Scan In
