A song on the Talking Heads' Fear of Music album (1979), "I Zimbra" features Robert Fripp doing, like, Frippy guitar things and whatnot. The lyric to "I Zimbra" is a sort of down-boiling and reordering of Hugo Ball's "bruitist noise poem" (?!), "Gadji beri bimba", and according to the innersleeve (that floppy paper thing that used to come inside the cardboard envelope that the big round black thing came in... uh, never mind) it goes like this:


I Zimbra

Gadji beri bimba glandridi
Lauli lonni cadori gadjam
A bim beri glassala glandride
E glassala tuffm I Zimbra

Bim blassa galassasa zimbrabim
Blassa gallassasa zimbrabim

A bim beri Glassala glandrid
E glassala tuffm I Zimbra

Gadji beri bimba glandridi
Lauli lonni cadori gadjam
A bim beri glassala glandrid
E glassala tuffm I Zimbra




The "I" in "I Zimbra" is pronounced "ee".

Now, if Paul McCartney can namecheck Alfred Jarry's Pataphysical Society (in "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" on Abbey Road), and if Cabaret Voltaire can name themselves after, well, Cabaret Voltaire, and if that posturing louse Griel Marcus can claim that Malcolm McLaren was a Situationist or some such nonsense (and then have the further psychopathic gall to claim that it matters), then surely the Talking Heads can steal whole songs from the same gang, right? And they did give credit, be it known.

I originally had Tristan Tzara for Alfred Jarry up there; either I was very confused (likely) and nobody noticed, or I just made a major ass of myself "fixing" it.

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