“Land Down Under” by Men at Work

Selected for Immortal Muse by Zireaux (read Zireaux’s comments on this poem)

Men at Work singing Land Down Under

“Land Down Under”
by Colin Hay of Men at Work

Traveling in a fried-out combie¹
On a hippie trail, head full of zombie²
I met a strange lady, she made me nervous.
She took me in and gave me breakfast.
And she said,

Do you come from a land down under?
Where women glow and men plunder?
Can’t you hear, can’t you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover.

Buying bread from a man in Brussels.
Six-foot four and full of muscles.
I said, Do you speak my language, brother?
He just smiled and gave me a vegemite³ sandwich
And he said,

I come from a land down under
Where beer does flow and men chunder⁴
Can’t you hear, can’t you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover.

Lying in a den in Bombay
With a slack jaw, and not a lot to say.
I said to the man, ‘Are you trying to tempt me
Because I come from the land of plenty?’
And he said,

‘Oh! Do you come from a land down under?
Where women glow and men plunder?
Can’t you hear, can’t you hear the thunder?
You better run, you better take cover.’

¹ A broken-down van. It comes from the VW Kombivan (a neologism for “combination van”), popular in the ’60s and early ’70s, especially with surfers and hippies.
² Zombie was a particularly strong batch of marijuana, also known as “Zombie Grass,” named for its effect of transforming its users into the walking dead.
³ A fermented yeast spread; Australia’s national food.
³ Aussie slang meaning to vomit.

Colin Hay singing Land Down Under

Zireaux’s comments on this poem
In poetry, the sound of thunder is anapestic.

Buh-buh-BOOM!

That is to say, its metrical pattern is two unstressed beats followed by a stressed. Oh sure, it can mimic other patterns — bacchiatic booms, dactylic detonations, cretic claps — but when conversing with the Muse, anapest is her meter of choice.

From stanza 47 of Res Publica:

“To the West / soft thunder answered in anapest / a pressing question.”

Thunder is also anaphoric, that is, it’s repetitive, which is why Colin Hay’s lyrics, “Can’t you hear, can’t you hear” (can’t you hear the anapests?) and “you better run, you better take cover” — apart from creating a relentless, undulating urgency — work so perfectly to produce the music of impending thunder.

Last week we looked at Dicken’s “The Ivy Green” and how van Gogh (who never owned an iPod, my plugged-in readers) was as much impressed by its song as by its sense. I tried to show how music contributes to meaning, not in some vague emotional sense — a melancholic minuet, or a cheerful Bach cantata — but rather in a more specific manner, the way a particular letter can produce, in certain cross-wired brains, a particular color. (The letters “I-V-Y,” according to my synesthetic son, would be orange-brown, purple, and pale yellow).

In other words, the music of a poem can contribute to such things as character, setting, narration, with as much effect as any words can. The “ivy” in Dickens’s poem was fully personified by the friendly, affectionate rhythm and song. Conversely, words — such as Hay’s extraordinary “Down Under” lyrics — can give a catchy, upbeat melody the sort of social vision and earthly gravitas it couldn’t possibly possess on its own.

We see this effect — like a kite string connecting the music above with the spool of our daily lives — most dramatically when words are used to create characters in songs, especially when these characters actually speak for themselves. Think of The Eagles with “Hotel California” — “And she said, ‘We are all just prisoners here…’” — or Paul Simon’s penchant for dialogue and scene-setting (“And she said, ‘Honey take me dancing,’” in Graceland). In “Down Under” Hay creates several characters: a globetrotting, easy-going Aussie, a strange lady, a muscle-man from Brussels, the manager of an opium den in Bombay.

But it’s the thunder that can’t be forgotten.

Like its protagonist, the music of “Down Under” is carefree, playful, laid-back. But the thunder isn’t. The rhymes are casual, capricious (nervous/breakfast, thunder/cover, language/sandwich), but the thunder — “can’t you hear, can’t you hear” — is striking and deadly serious (“you’d better take cover”) and metaphorically more Australian, with its ceaseless rumble of history, than any Australian food or colloquialism. Such a thunder reverberates in every Australian sound, in every dialogue, in every situation of Australian life, even to those who are deaf to its portent.