Rubbish? Garbage? Litter? Landfill or recycled, tip out your music collections to find throwaway treasures that may refer to objects, talk, situations or feelings
“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” said Hector Urquhart in his introduction to Popular Tales of the West Highlands (1860). Was he talking a load of rubbish? Well, his words actually pertained to fairy eggs – floating seashore objects – and also stories themselves, seen as dubious by some, and magical by others. But the phrase could easily have come from the extremely eccentric man who lives down my street. He resembles Ben Gunn from Treasure Island, his ragged trousers hanging off his backside. He regularly wheels a creaking old bicycle that pulls a trolley, and almost every day fetches and fills his house with unwanted old fridges, washing machines, and a host of hoarded bric-a-brac. Rumour has it he’s got a double-first from Oxford, and perhaps writes poetry of genius. Or perhaps not. Perhaps he’s a ragged trousered philanthropist.
But meanwhile, what’s that sound? It’s the Readers Recommend lorry making loud warning beeps as it lowers a giant skip. And it is that skip in which you are invited throw any old iron, or indeed irony, but mainly fill up with songs about trash, rubbish or garbage. But what is this stuff? As we have already established, that’s subjective. Are there any brilliant songs about recycling? Possibly not, but there are many about things we might want to throw away, and hopefully not just to landfill. So this may refer to actual objects, but also things people say – trash talk, cutting the crap, or quite simply, bullshit. White trash? Perhaps you might want to bring this into the mix - and what demographic it might refer to. Then again trash might be negative emotions, situations, or simply “feeling rubbish”, or other connotations of these words. But to get one definition of the range, let’s go to an expert in the field, Oscar from Sesame Street.
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