The lyrics to "Part of that/your world"

Part of that/your world" is a song in Disney's Little Mermaid, sung twice by the titular Mermaid. The first time she sings it, the title line is "part of THAT world." She is responding to fantasies she has built around the wreckage of ships and the fine things she has found they contain.

The second time she sings it, she is addressing a human, Prince Eric, and he is the "you" in the line "part of your world."

I admire these lyrics, written by Howard Ashman for the music composed by Alan Menken. I'd like to say something about what I admire in them. So, here we go.

The lyrics include the following:

I wanna be where the people are/ I wanna see, wanna see 'em dancing

Walking around on those ... whatdaya call 'em? Oh, feet

Flapping your fins, you don't get too far, legs are required for jumpin' dancin'

Strolling along down a ... what's that word again? Street.

This is very clever stuff. I think Ashman showed some courage rhyming dancing with itself -- or, rather, rhyming it with "dancin'"! I also like the fact that Ashman doesn't want to let us remove this song from its context.

A farm kid could say that he wants to be where the people are: that is, where they are crowded together. Someone with a boring job and no prospect for upward mobility could say he wants to be where THE people are -- the important ones, the ones in the rooms where important decisions are made. Anyone who aspires to be in a situation better than his own can sympathize with the desire to be part of THAT/YOUR world.

But Ashman won't have it. This is not generic. His words bring us rudely and I think brilliantly back to Ariel and the specifics of her fantasy situation with the fact that she, a mermaid, has to struggle to recall the word "feet".

Also, when I first heard the song, I had the distinct impression that it was about to provide a rhyme for the phrase "get too far". Of course, as I have presented the lyrics above you can see no rhyme was necessary for "get too far," but that wasn't obvious on a first listen.

The slow tempo allows for some thought between words. When Ariel got to "strolling along down a" I was sure she was going to say "boulevard". A nice rhyme for "get too far," amirite?

Anyway, I was both disappointed and delighted when the word Ariel was looking for there was a simpler one, "street," not to rhyme with "get too far" at all but to rhyme perfectly with "feet"!

It is all very well done. So well done that we are ready for it when Ashman gets political on us, though political of course in a Disney-friendly sort of way. In idealizing the creatures of land, with their feet, who stroll down what-do-you-call-thems, Ariel says that she bets these people "don't reprimand their daughters" who are "sick of swimming, ready to stand."

Stand. The singer needs to hit that word hard.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog