Uncorrected Personality Traits

A Capella three-part harmony is not common in any modern artists catalog, but Robyn here does it in his own inimitable style. With a loose premise of the damage done by accepting quirky behavior in children, Robyn gets his digs in on the modern fixation with pop psychology and media coverage of the same. My favorite verse:

Even Marilyn Monroe was a man
But this tends to get over looked
By our mother-fixated
Overweight, sexist media

What does that have to do with the subject at hand? Rather little, but it is an amusing aside.

Since much of this project is really about my involvement and connection with Hitchcock, allow me to digress into anecdote. Some time ago (roughly a decade, I think) I made a mixtape of cabaret/music hall inspired music for my mother. This is one of the tracks I chose, I believe to end the first side. I picked the song because of it's sonic sensibility not lyrical content, but my mother picked up on the lyrics right away. If you examine the lyrics (available for perusal here), there is a verse describing the balance of parental involvement and the consequences. The consequences do not describe me, but the over/under involvement ratio was the same in my life as stated herein. I was asked rather pointedly whether I was trying to imply something with this choice of song; she certainly did not see her role in raising me as coddling to my strange childhood tics and behaviors, or that any issues I may be facing as an adult could possibly be tied to how she treated me as a child, excepting maybe in my poor relationship with my father which she tried, oh she tried, so desperately to strengthen and improve.

Please believe that I had not consciously meant, or hoped she would infer, anything from this track. That she did, however, and the way she reacted to it, made me reconsider it and what possible correlations it has to my life. Since this event, I've liked the song much more than I had in prior years.