Tom Lehrer has some fantastic quotes - if you like dark humor.
“Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.”
“If after hearing my songs just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend or perhaps to strike a loved one it will all have been worth the while.”
"I feel that if a person has problems communicating the very least he can do is to shut up."
And now, perhaps the greatest of them all:
"In short, I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs.
So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money."
Godspeed, Tom, and thank you for your humor and your music!
On why he stopped writing: "Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize."
In the intro to "So long mom": "You know, every great war produces its great hit songs. And, after each war, we like to gather around the piano or the guitar, and play these songs. We enjoy the songs because they remind us of how much we enjoyed the war. Now, World War III is almost upon us, as you know – by popular demand, it seems. And, it occurred to me that if any songs are going to come out of World War III we’d better start writing them now. So, I have one here."
It's interesting to me the way Tom Lehrer totally walked away from his past life. Long ago when I was undergrad and involved with the movie/lecture group we asked a good friend of his at the school if there was any chance he'd make an exception and do a concert. No way.
I've know people in tech who have retired, often a bit on the young side. They often keep their fingers in tech in various ways. But I also have known people who just 100% walk away.
They often want to spend more time with family. They have hobbies that they didn't have enough time to devote to while working. And, for a lot of later career people in tech, they weren't doing a lot of coding anyway--and it's not like they can continue to meet with customers or set company technology direction part-time over the long term although a few very senior folks may stay around as an advisor for a time.
If you haven't had a chance, give his full performances a listen. He intersperses song and spoken comedy, with the whole arc hanging together masterfully. Think of one of the great stand-up specials.
I'd say it "feels very modern," but the truth is that Lehrer (re-)invented the modern form.
> “Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.”
There's a better one in An Evening Wasted, attributed to, IIRC, his friend Henry: "Life is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it."
life is like a sewer. It doesn't really matter how much you care about what you put in it because a thousand other assholes are gonna shit on it anyways
I took Tom's class, "Nature of Math", when I was in college (he lived in Santa Cruz) and it was wonderful. Great teacher and that's where I learned the birthday paradox.
I always loved the first few lines[0] of "WE WILL ALL GO TOGETHER WHEN WE GO" because I thought the rhyming of some of the words was so creative and I've (still) never heard it done that way anywhere else:
Georges Brassens (a well-known French singer and songwriter from the 20th century) did it often; for example:
Laissons le champs libre à l'oiseau
Nous serons tous les deux priso-
Nniers sur parole
(La Non-Demande en Mariage).
I don't know if he was the first to try cutting words or if not, who tried it first.
But in Feb. 1830 people in Paris fought over the versification of Hernani, a play by Victor Hugo, because the author had dared cut a phrase in the middle across two verses:
Serait-ce déjà lui? C’est bien à l’escalier
Dérobé.
Classicists thought it was unacceptable, moderns found it original and interesting. So they had at it every night during the first few performances of the play, and at least one man died in a duel defending new prosody vs. old.
Language is a battleground and the poet and the lyricist always walk carefully.
Word-breaks are hard to use because of the way the audience will react to the unexpected in language. In the literary standard, a poet would be considered to lack talent for breaking words in a sloppy way or making other clumsy structures.
Leonard Cohen may never have used word-breaks -- I can't recall an instance in any of his recorded material. The song "Halleleujah" contains some cheap rhymes where Cohen shifted the literary register for effect.
Cohen, Cole Porter, Lehrer, Al Yankovic, and of course the great Brassens are literary. But only Porter and Brassens were careful enough to use the technique for dramatic effect as well as the humorous.
Bob Dylan received a Nobel Prize for his work but he's notoriously hit-and-miss and by his own admission writes things as quickly as possible. As a lyricist, he has been prolific but not very careful about words, except in his early folk period where he imitated Woody Guthrie and the occasional later surprise (e.g a few compositions on Desire). Dylan is more of a verbose song writer. (Bettye LaVette is his best dramatic interpreter.)
Lehrer's and Yankovic's work is mostly humorous, even when there's a serious message behind the song.
Brassens may be the most brilliant of the 20th century's musical poets.
His song *Les Philistins épiciers" is another good example of his style. Brassens worked his syllables to perfection. He was not typically in a hurry to utter his phrase, although he could use rapid delivery for humorous effect (e.g. Les funérailles d'antan).
There are brilliant moments in Lehrer's recorded work and he is making a clear gesture by putting his work in the public domain. Dylan sold his entire catalogue of song for an estimated $300m. Porter may have earned the most money because of his association with Hollywood and the royalties from the jazz repertoire. Yankovic is known for his satire of Amercian songs and society. Brassens is not well-known in English-speaking countries because his work is hard to translate and, alas, eating a croissant does not bestow linguistic powers to the eater.
Rap music is a (lucrative) counter-movement to almost every tradition. I leave this topic to those with greater affinity.
> His song Les Philistins épiciers is another good example of his style.
Minor nitpick: that song may be a good example of Brassens' singing or music-writing styles, but the words are from Jean Richepin, an eccentric poet from the late 19th/early 20th century.
I'm instantly reminded of Eminem when reading your comment. Perhaps his subject material isn't to your tastes, but if you like interesting rhyme schemes I'd argue that his works are top notch!
His 1996 song "Infinite" could please your ear, if you'd care to listen :)
This stuff is present in a lot of hip-hop. The classic ("your favourite rapper's favourite rapper") is probably MF DOOM. Each line is so full to the brim with rhymes that it almost feels like each syllable matches with either the line before or the line after, and there are lyrics where he's rhyming against Icelandic volcanoes ("Catch a throatful from the fire vocal // With ash and molten glass like Eyjafjallajökull") or scientific chemical names ("One for the money, two for the better green // 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine").
That said, while DOOM is the obvious example, I'd like to throw a personal recommendation out as well: Ivy Sole is criminally underrated as an artist, especially her lyricism. Lines like "No second coming of Lauryn I got bigger // Hills to climb, no disrespect but it's my time", or the election metaphor later on are clever, but also beautifully smooth and fit in so well with the music.
True, "Alabama" is even the name of a boomer submarine.
But both it, and all the nuke-capable bases (MXF, RSA, etc.) are federal, not state, which has been an important distinction in the past (especially in 1963).
As a kid I saw a reference by Asimov to Lehrer and that sent me off on a quest which ended with a very helpful librarian in the American Center Library in Delhi.
Then many years later, iPad came out and there was an app which catalogued all the elements with that song as the lead-in.
Unfortunately it seems to have vanished from the app store.
Fun fact: when we made the app the song was of course not yet in the public domain, so I made a deal with Lehrer to trade him an iPad for the use of the song in my app. He was already talking at the time about eventually putting everything in the public domain. His main concern was to try to do it in a way that would prevent record companies from ever making money from his work.
I was the founder and creative director of TouchPress, so I had a hand in all those apps. For Disney Animated I wrote the text and directed the production. Sadly the business model of $10 interactive eBooks did not work out (unlike $10 static text eBooks, which seem to be much more popular?), and TouchPress was sold (apps and the name) to a company called Story Toys out of Ireland. About a year ago they were bought out by a larger Japanese company, and we were able to buy back The Elements, Molecules, and a few of the other apps, so they are now back to being published by myself and my partners on a low-key maintenance basis.
My 8-yo self rolling back and forth on the brown shag carpet wearing my pajamas in front of the wooden stereo console, warmed by the glow of the tubes inside, laughing with my dad to the pure comedy gold of Tom Lehrer's voice pouring from the speakers.
We didn't have fishing or hunting together, but Dad and I will always have those evenings with Mr. Lehrer and a sip of Balvenie.
This is a little strange... the notice on his website says "November 1, 2022", but here's an article (and discussion) from two years ago stating the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24833683
> In 2020, at the age of 92, Lehrer donated all of his lyrics and music written by him to the public domain.[60][61] He followed this on November 1, 2022 with all recording and performing rights of any kind, making all of his music that he has originally composed or performed free for anyone to use.[62]
That makes sense. Legally, a recording of a particular performance of a musical work, is a separate copyright from the underlying musical work. Releasing the later into the public domain did not release the former into the public domain, which is why he had to do it separately.
Why did 2 years pass between one and the other? Maybe he just didn't fully understand all the legal details involved at first. Or maybe there was some contractual issue (with record labels/etc) he had to sort out, and that blocked putting the recordings into the public domain but not the music/lyrics
The note on the website doesn't mention recordings, and I don't think Tom Lehrer necessarily owns the copyright to any given recording that he could commit to the public domain.
Also "committing to the public domain" is an idea with various interpretations and legal implications, particularly in an international context. That's why things like CC0 exist, which essentially grant a "license" to works that is as near as possible to being free of copyright even in jurisdictions where there's no legal way to surrender your copyright. I think this update is more of a clarification on those terms rather than a substantial change to the copyright situation of Lehrer's lyrics and music.
CC0 (like BSD/MIT) is basically a quit claim deed.
The US has unilateral copyright assignment though. I always wondered why you could not just assign the copyright to the federal government. Work-for-hire by feds is public domain.
> I always wondered why you could not just assign the copyright to the federal government
Assigning work to the US federal government does not put it in the public domain. Work created by a US federal government employee, in the course of their official duties, automatically enters into the public domain in the United States (but not necessarily internationally.) However, if someone else creates a copyrighted work, and then assigns the copyright to the US federal government, as far as copyright law goes, the US federal government has the same ability to limit access to it (or charge for access) as any private copyright holder does.
It's probably more accurate to say that, in contrast to everyone else in the country, most works created by the US federal government don't get copyrighted upon their creation (in the eyes of the US federal government). That effectively means they're what people describe as in the public domain in the US. But other countries may not recognize the right of the US government to create uncopyrighted works.
> But other countries may not recognize the right of the US government to create uncopyrighted works.
I think that's not the right way of wording it. [0] says:
> 3.1.7 Does the Government have copyright protection in U.S. Government works in other countries?
> Yes, the copyright exclusion for works of the U.S. Government is not intended to have any impact on protection of these works abroad (S. REP. NO. 473, 94th Cong., 2d Sess. 56 (1976)). Therefore, the U.S. Government may obtain protection in other countries depending on the treatment of government works by the national copyright law of the particular country. Copyright is sometimes asserted by U.S. Government agencies outside the United States.
It might be more accurate to say that US law limits the rights of the US federal government to own copyright in its works, but that US law was only intended to apply domestically within the US, not overseas. However, whether it effectively does apply overseas, is not ultimately up to the US, it is up to overseas legal systems – if an overseas legal system wants to make that US law effectively applicable in their country too, that might not be what the US wants, but there is nothing the US can do to stop them, and the US is unlikely to even complain much about it, just because this is not a particularly important issue as far as international relations goes.
I'm not aware of any country (other than the US) whose copyright laws explicitly mention US federal government works. Instead, I think the situation is simply due to this:
a) The majority of countries, their copyright laws just say that any work becomes copyright automatically upon creation, even works created overseas, and they have either no exceptions to that rule, or else no exceptions relevant to this case
b) A minority of countries, have a rule saying that their domestic law will not grant foreign works greater copyright protection than they have in their country of origin. Under such a rule, a US federal government work in the public domain ab initio in the US will also be in the public domain in that country ab initio. (You could interpret this as "the rule of the shorter term" being applied to the case when the term is zero.)
Neither rule was adopted with US federal government works in mind – such works have rather limited economic significance, and as such have never been a major consideration for overseas legislators. It is just how copyright laws, which were adopted for other reasons, happen perchance to apply in this case. Most international copyright treaties permit both approaches, leaving the choice up to each nation's legislators and court system to decide upon.
I don't know if that would work; transferring a copyright to the US government is actually one of the only ways the government gets to own a copyright.
Somewhere in HN history there was an article about him where a guy convinced him to donate his master tapes to an archive. Lehrer had them in a basement somewhere and was just going to throw them out. He was surprised to hear that they were valuable at all. He seems to be one of those humans who gets more interesting the closer you look.
I take it as “more unexpected” - but there have been many cases of artists not seeming to know or care that “originals” would be something special - after all it’s the art that matters not the first draft.
He's fantastic. The fact that his songs are just as funny and relevant today as when they were written is what impresses me the most. This is super hard to do with that kind of material.
In his biographical introduction of himself in the live version of Songs By Tom Lehrer, he says he is working on a musical based on the life of Adolf Hitler. If only he had beat Mel Brooks to that one...
From Wikipedia:
Other artists who cite Lehrer as an influence include "Weird Al" Yankovic, whose work generally addresses more popular and less technical or political subjects... Yankovic saw Daniel Radcliffe (who called Lehrer his "hero")perform "The Elements" on The Graham Norton Show, which led to Radcliffe starring in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.
Growing up where I did, there seemed to be “math people” and “art people.” Discovering Tom Lehrer on Dr. Demento on late Sunday nights proved to me this distinction was artificial: Music and Math can and do coexist in many people, and the result is often beautiful for the two having mixed.
My favorite is probably also the most famous--"Wernher von Braun". You can listen to that one and all of the others on Tom Lehrer's website here, in a continuous stream: https://locserendipity.com/Lehrer/Lehrer.html
Pretty good website, but all the downloadable audio files are in MP3 format. Is there any way to get higher quality files, like natively generated FLAC, or lossless rips from released audio CDs?
I wonder how his health is and what life looks like to 94 year old Tom Lehrer. It's sad that people grow old and die. His must surely have been a fascinating life. I hope he's still having fun.
Poisoning Pigeons in the Park and The Masochism Tango are two of my favorites. Introduce to me in an honors English class by an odder-than-normal English teacher
That's great, but I'm wondering whether the statement at https://tomlehrersongs.com/ constitutes a legally safe license, in the way something like a CC0 license would? Obviously Tom isn't going to sue anybody, but I'm wondering if a proper copyright lawyer's eyebrows might be raised if you included it in your chain of title docs.
There was a time when we didn't have to depend on the benevolence of creators and corporations to have works enter the public domain within our lifetimes (if at all). It's amazing when they do, but we should really try to fix that.
I agree. I think the 14 + 14 set out in the Copyright Act of 1790 is more than adequate. 14 years of copyright, plus 14 more years if you renew. After that, automatic entry into the public domain.
I would like to see an exponentially rising price to renew one work's copyright registration. There should be a financial cost and risk/reward balance for withholding a creative work from the public domain for others to reuse.
Sample: $0 for the first decade, $1 for the second decade, $10 for the third decade, $100 for the fourth decade, $1k for the fifth decade, $10k for the sixth decade, $100k for the seventh decade, $1M for the eighth decade, $10M for the ninth decade, etc.
Ehhh, that just lets the already rich/famous keep their monopoly on popular culture. Perhaps it needs to be an inverse of how much revenue it's already brought in?
The status quo is the extreme that every author gets ~100 years of copyright protection automatically for free. A proposed extreme is to get up to 28 years for free.
The problem I see is that under both alternatives mentioned above, there is no way to express the intensity of preference / how badly an author wants protection. Also, authors receive the benefit of copyright protection without paying anything to society. This is why I proposed an escalating cost - the longer the protection, the more you pay. And it's essentially impossible to win against an exponential in the long run. Can Disney really afford to pay $100M per title to renew for the tenth decade? Or $1B per title for the eleventh decade? Or $10B per title for the twelfth decade? And if you don't like these numbers, you can choose whatever initial value and multiplier you want, e.g. $3, $90, $2700, $81000, $243000, etc.
In a way, I'm proposing something ideologically similar to quadratic voting, where the more intensely you want your preferred outcome, the more you have to pay to society to vote this way.
> Perhaps it needs to be an inverse of how much revenue it's already brought in?
You'd either have to make it so prohibitively expensive that almost no one could afford to renew (at least not more than a couple of times) or it would have next to no impact at all on companies with billions to spend. The disparity between what a random bedroom musician or amateur artist could afford and what Disney can afford is so great that the impact of renewal fees for a single person would never come near the impact for a corporation. What makes Disney so special that they should be given preferential treatment?
The answer to "how badly an author wants protection" will almost always be "very badly" at least while a significant amount of people are interested in the creative work in question. Maybe instead of worrying so much about what the billion dollar corporations want it would be better to set a default, but make the copyright term for a work shorter according to how much the public wants to access it (as measured by sales). It's the public's interests that copyright was created to serve after all.
To be honest though, all of that seems needlessly complicated. I think it'd be better and much more fair to just set a solid cut off of X number of years that applies to everyone equally no matter how much money they have. That'd also mean the public doesn't have to do so much to try to figure out when each individual work's copyright expired. If they know something was released longer than x number of years they know in every instance if it's available for them.
Ideally, we'd make everyone register for copyright protection by sending a DRM free copy of their work to the state who will automatically release it online at copyright.gov as soon as the copyright expires. Then everyone can just go there to see what's available and access anything they want. Kind of like a less curated. but more accessible Library of Congress.
Considering that those 28 years were enough at a time when it was extremely expensive to publish at all and basically impossible to distribute worldwide we could probably go for something even lower than that, but 28 years would still be so much better than what we have now.
Bob Dylan famously sold his entire
catalogue to a music publishing giant, reportedly for over $300m. [0] Sadly I suspect that will be more common.
As autoexec stated in the sibling comment: due to the successes of copyright lobbyists we now have essentially indefinite
copyright terms, and for the time being it doesn't seem there's any
realistic chance of meaningful copyright reform. At the risk of sounding
defeatist, I'm not hopeful.
I made a mirror of the whole site and have made it available as well. It is a simple wget mirror but it seems to be correct enough that you can browse and play all of the songs.
I'll try to "seed" it for a while but likely will not keep it alive forever. It would be appreciated if others can help keep it alive in case the site goes down. The data is 1.2GiB after deduplication.
Those of you rushing to download before the site goes down —- I’m certain the Internet Archive will have these in perpetuity (or for as long as the IA is around)
Nine Inch Nails released their music on What.CD (a music torrenting website), under an alias. Maybe a bit similar. They did it for the arts, very punk-like :)
Trent Reznor was a member of OiNK[0] but to my knowledge he's never said that he posted any of Nine Inch Nails' music there and he certainly never released any of their music to the public domain.
I used to be staff at What.CD, so that's where the info comes from. They had several accounts (which I don't think are a big secret actually, they've been very vocal about being pro-torrent), one of which was a random name that the public didn't know about. If I remember correctly, at least one of their albums was released on What.CD before being officially released to the public, or perhaps at the same time. My memory is a bit fuzzy on this.
Yeah, but they didn't free-licence the copyrights. There was a fairly explicit permission to tape concerts; there was an implicit permission to trade tapes; but it was never permitted to trade tapes for money. I don't think there was ever a formal legal basic for the tapers.
And then, later, when archive.org was hosting entire shows (soundboards and audience), the drummers came along and made them take down the full downloads (you can still stream).
There is no "public domain" in the EU. Did he cross-license it with CC0 or similar? Otherwise his works are still protected in the EU and he or his estate can still sue for copyright infringement.
The various "public domain licenses" don't help you to relinquish rights you can't legally relinquish. IANAL but, as I understand it, the issue in parts of continental Europe (e.g. Germany, I believe) is that there's a concept of "moral rights" related to things like attribution and preserving the integrity of a work that one can't disclaim to various degrees. The concept doesn't exist in common law countries. Legal concepts aside I'm pretty sure a court is going to pretty much go no take-backs although, as a company, I'm probably not going to use the lyrics for marketing/advertising/etc.
There's no standard form for placing something in the public domain in the US either but there is a legal concept of "copyright abandonment" which is what probably governs if you place a work in the public domain.
“Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.”
“If after hearing my songs just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend or perhaps to strike a loved one it will all have been worth the while.”
"I feel that if a person has problems communicating the very least he can do is to shut up."
And now, perhaps the greatest of them all:
"In short, I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs. So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money."
Godspeed, Tom, and thank you for your humor and your music!