Chop, Wiggle, Tinkle, Bam
My brother Dan says he’s trying to get famous and asks people to share his song. There is only one small problem: he posted it six years ago, and after all that time it currently has a grand total of 14 views and 13 subscribers.
Dan’s birthday is coming up on October 8, so I thought it might be fun to see if we could suddenly make his six-year-old dream come true.
Watch the video. Give him a like. Leave him a comment telling him how great the song is. Subscribe to his channel. And, most importantly, repost this and ask your friends to do the same.
I’m curious to see what might happen if a six-year-old video with 14 views suddenly starts getting hundreds, or maybe thousands, of views for no apparent reason.
Dan Touchon and the Great American Pandemic Song
There are songs that capture their historical moment immediately. There are others whose importance becomes apparent only after the dust has settled and civilization has had sufficient time to recognize what happened to it.
Dan Touchon’s Chop, Wiggle, Tinkle, Bam belongs, I would suggest, to the latter category.
Created during the pandemic, the song initially appears to be a piece of cheerful nonsense, a homemade assemblage of percussive words, jokes, rhymes, social observations, whiskey, honey, bourgeois decadence, bathroom deals, theological reassurance and impending catastrophe.
This interpretation, while understandable, is inadequate.
What Touchon has actually given us is a compressed vernacular history of Western civilization at precisely the moment when Western civilization found itself sitting at home wondering whether it had remembered to wash its groceries.
Consider the opening:
Chop, chop, hammer, hammer, slam slam
Hung out to dry like a Virginia ham
Immediately we are placed in a world of labor.
Chop.
Hammer.
Slam.
These are among humanity’s oldest technological verbs. The axe, hammer and impact precede the computer, the corporation and the algorithm by millennia. Before Homo sapiens could develop derivatives markets, social media or customer-service telephone trees, somebody had to hit something with something else.
Touchon returns us to this primal condition.
But then, astonishingly, the human being becomes the product:
Hung out to dry like a Virginia ham.
The worker has become meat.
Marx would presumably have had something to say about this.
Yet Touchon refuses to remain inside the predictable confines of Marxist critique. No sooner has the Virginia ham appeared than someone politely asks whether mustard might be desired.
The answer is decisive:
No ma’am.
Whiskey, however, is acceptable.
Thus, within four lines, Touchon has moved from industrial labor to commodification, regional American foodways, hospitality and alcohol.
Bob Dylan might have required three verses.
Touchon needs four lines.
The Great Pandemic Dislocation
The historical circumstances matter.
During the pandemic, ordinary categories collapsed into one another. The office became the bedroom. The kitchen became the school. The dining table became the conference room. The computer became workplace, theater, pub, newsstand, marketplace, social club and nervous system.
Time itself became peculiar.
Tuesday became difficult to distinguish from Thursday.
Against this background, Chop, Wiggle, Tinkle, Bam makes remarkable sense.
The song does not proceed through conventional narrative because pandemic life did not proceed through conventional narrative. Instead, it advances through abrupt clusters of activity:
Chop. Hammer. Slam.
Wiggle. Giggle. Go.
Tinkle. Wink. Cha-cha.
Bam. Gitcha. Boom.
These are simultaneously words and sounds. More importantly, they are instructions. Touchon gives us a civilization reduced to verbs.
Do something.
Move.
Hit something.
Laugh.
Dance.
Explode.
Continue.
There is a long tradition behind this technique. Doo-wop famously turned apparently meaningless syllables into the structural substance of songs. The Rivingtons’ Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow made nonsense vocalization itself the central musical event, and the Trashmen transformed related material into the manic 1963 hit Surfin’ Bird.
Touchon belongs to this august lineage.
But where Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow gives us the exuberance of postwar popular culture, Chop, Wiggle, Tinkle, Bam gives us its exhausted descendant.
Papa oom mow mow.
Chop wiggle tinkle bam.
Sixty years of American civilization separate the two.
One can only speculate what happened.
The Four Movements
Formally, the composition might be understood as a miniature four-movement symphony.
The first movement is Chop.
Chop belongs to work, division and destruction. One chops wood. One chops food. One chops something larger into smaller pieces.
The second movement is Wiggle.
Here the body reappears. Wiggle is playful, erotic, childish and fundamentally unserious. Having established the world of labor, Touchon immediately destabilizes it through bodily movement.
Then comes Tinkle.
Tinkle is fascinating because it hovers between sound and action. Bells tinkle. Glass tinkles. A piano may be tinkled upon. The word also possesses a somewhat less elevated bodily meaning.
Touchon leaves the matter unresolved.
Finally comes Bam.
Bam requires no interpretation. Something has happened.
The architecture is therefore extraordinary:
Chop: civilization constructs.
Wiggle: civilization entertains itself.
Tinkle: civilization decorates itself.
Bam: civilization blows itself up.
One might reasonably ask whether Spengler could have improved upon this.
Enter the Bourgeoisie
Then, without warning, Touchon abandons Virginia ham and honey and enters political philosophy:
It’s a fine mess we created by the bourgeois.
The appearance of “bourgeois” is startling. Nothing has prepared us for it.
That is precisely why it works.
The bourgeoisie does not arrive accompanied by Marx, Engels or an explanatory footnote. It simply wanders into the song between “cha-cha” and “scrimshaw.”
This may be the most accurate representation of ideology in contemporary life ever written.
We encounter political ideas exactly this way: sandwiched between entertainment, consumer products, fragments of news, advertisements, jokes and somebody dancing.
And then comes one of the song’s great existential propositions:
Nothing lasts forever, not even a scrimshaw.
Here we must stop.
A scrimshaw is already an object haunted by time. Traditionally associated with sailors carving or engraving whale bone or teeth, it belongs to an older maritime culture of long voyages, handwork, waiting and storytelling.
Touchon could have written:
Nothing lasts forever, not even love.
Too easy.
Not empires.
Predictable.
Not mountains.
Sentimental.
Instead: Not even a scrimshaw.
The specificity makes the line strangely convincing.
Of course the scrimshaw will disappear.
Everything will.
The whale.
The sailor.
The ship.
The person who carved it.
The person who owned it.
The civilization that placed it in a museum.
The museum.
The label beside it.
Eventually the language in which the label was written.
Touchon has smuggled impermanence into a novelty song.
From Dada to Revolution 9
At this point we should acknowledge the avant-garde tradition.
Dada understood more than a century ago that when civilization becomes sufficiently absurd, a perfectly reasonable artistic response is to become more absurd than civilization.
Meaning can be dismantled.
Language can become material.
Words can become noises.
Noise can become composition.
This trajectory eventually passes through experimental music, musique concrète and sound collage. In popular music, one of the most famous examples remains the Beatles’ Revolution 9, assembled from tape loops, speech, sound effects and manipulated fragments to create what John Lennon conceived as a sonic picture of revolution.
Lennon had: Number nine. Number nine. Number nine.
Touchon answers: Chop chop. Hammer hammer. Slam slam.
The comparison is irresistible.
Both works recognize repetition as a device capable of transforming ordinary language into sonic material. Repeat a word enough times and its semantic function begins to weaken. Eventually we stop asking what the word means and begin hearing its shape.
Chop.
Chop.
Hammer.
Hammer.
Slam.
Slam.
Language becomes percussion.
Then Everything Goes Wrong
By the fourth section, the song has darkened considerably:
Bam, bam, gitcha, gitcha, boom, boom
The playful noises have become explosive. And now we encounter deals being made in bathrooms. It is an inspired image of institutional corruption because the bathroom is precisely where official architecture becomes unofficial.
The boardroom has minutes.
The bathroom does not.
History records the treaty.
History rarely records the conversation beside the urinal that made the treaty possible.
Touchon understands this.
Then comes catastrophe.
Stuff hits the fan.
It will consume.
And the resulting mess will require more than a broom.
We have moved from slapstick to apocalypse without changing vocabulary.
That movement is essential to understanding the song.
The pandemic itself had precisely this surreal quality. One moment people were discussing toilet paper and sourdough starters; the next they were discussing mortality statistics, supply chains, emergency powers and the possibility that normal life might not return for quite some time.
The ridiculous and terrifying occupied the same room.
So they do here.
The Final Turn: Theology
And then Touchon does something genuinely interesting.
After labor, appetite, alcohol, flirtation, class conflict, destruction, political deals and catastrophe, he suddenly gives us God:
The Lord is in heaven
He’s still on His throne.
The scale of the song abruptly expands.
We began with Virginia ham.
We have arrived at the architecture of the cosmos.
This is an old American songwriting maneuver. Folk, country, gospel and blues repeatedly allow the mundane and metaphysical to inhabit the same stanza. Trains become salvation. Rivers become death. Roads become destiny. Home becomes heaven.
Consider The Weight by The Band. Robbie Robertson constructed a landscape populated by Nazareth, Moses, Luke, the Devil, Miss Fanny, Crazy Chester, dogs, travelers and favors. Robertson later connected the song to Luis Buñuel and the “impossibility of sainthood”: the predicament of someone trying to do good while human circumstances continually complicate the attempt.
Touchon operates in similarly unstable territory, although his route to metaphysics passes through mustard. That distinction should not be underestimated.
Robertson gives us the burden: Take the load.
Touchon gives us the millstone. And the millstone is heavier.
The Millstone
The concluding image may be the key to the entire composition:
But the world’s still not home
It’s more like a, more like a millstone.
This is a far more complicated image than it first appears.
A millstone is certainly heavy. Indeed, “a millstone around one’s neck” has become proverbial for an inescapable problem, obligation or burden. The phrase carries particularly severe biblical associations with judgment and punishment. To compare the world itself to a millstone is therefore to imagine existence as something enormously heavy that we somehow find ourselves carrying.
This immediately places Touchon in conversation with The Weight.
The Band gives us the burden that one person takes from another. Touchon gives us the millstone. But a millstone is not simply a heavy object.
A millstone is a machine of transformation.
The grain comes from the harvest. The grain is placed beneath the stone. The stone crushes it. Through that crushing, grain becomes flour. Flour becomes dough. Dough becomes bread.
And bread changes the imagery again.
Bread is among the oldest symbols of human sustenance. It is the product of agriculture, labor, patience, technology and community. It is “daily bread.” In Christian symbolism it becomes something still greater: nourishment transformed into sacrament.
Suddenly the theological line immediately preceding the millstone becomes important:
The Lord is in heaven
He’s still on His throne.
Heaven.
Millstone.
Grain.
Flour.
Bread.
The sequence begins to acquire an almost biblical resonance. And yet the process depends upon crushing. The grain cannot remain grain if it is to become bread.
The millstone is therefore simultaneously burden and transformation.
This is particularly striking in a song created during the pandemic. The pandemic itself functioned as a kind of historical millstone. Ordinary life was placed under enormous pressure. Work, family, government, medicine, education, religion, entertainment, commerce and personal relationships were all subjected to stresses that exposed their structures.
People discovered what broke.
They also discovered what endured.
And some things were transformed.
The millstone therefore suggests something more interesting than simple catastrophe. The pressure that threatens to crush us may also be the pressure through which something becomes something else.
This brings us back to the strange sequence announced by the title:
Chop.
Wiggle.
Tinkle.
Bam.
Perhaps these are the noises of life beneath the millstone.
We work.
We dance.
We make things.
We drink.
We flirt.
We quarrel.
We construct systems.
We tear systems down.
We make questionable deals in bathrooms.
We create messes that cannot be cleaned up with brooms.
We pray.
And meanwhile the great stone keeps turning.
This is where Touchon unexpectedly enters one of the oldest human symbolic systems: the cycle of harvest, grinding, making and eating.
Seed.
Earth.
Grain.
Harvest.
Millstone.
Flour.
Bread.
Body.
Then seed again.
The millstone does not travel anywhere. It revolves.
That distinguishes it beautifully from another great image of American popular music: the train.
The train moves down the line. The millstone moves in circles.
The train promises escape.
The millstone promises recurrence.
The train takes the traveler somewhere else.
The millstone transforms whatever passes through it.
And perhaps this explains why the singer says:
The world’s still not home.
We are not home because we are still inside the process. We are simultaneously the farmer, the grain, the miller, the stone and the person waiting for bread.
Which makes Chop, Wiggle, Tinkle, Bam something considerably stranger than a pandemic novelty song.
It becomes, whether its author intended it or not, a little cosmology of work and transformation.
The world is a millstone.
It burdens us.
It judges us.
It crushes us.
It feeds us.
And it keeps turning.
And Then, the Masterstroke
After all of this, after the bourgeoisie, impermanence, corruption, catastrophe, theology and the crushing weight of existence, Touchon returns to the beginning:
Chop chop, hammer hammer, slam slam.
Nothing has been resolved.
The worker returns to work.
The rhythm resumes.
The ham remains hanging.
Someone once again offers mustard.
The singer once again refuses.
The whiskey remains acceptable.
And then Dan Touchon delivers what may be one of the most understated conclusions in the history of the protest song:
Goodbye for now. See you later.
Not farewell.
Not amen.
Not the end.
See you later.
Civilization, apparently, will continue.
Perhaps that is the ultimate pandemic message of Chop, Wiggle, Tinkle, Bam.
After isolation, fear, political absurdity, domestic confinement, economic uncertainty and the sudden awareness that the enormous machinery of modern civilization might be considerably more fragile than previously advertised, the appropriate response is neither despair nor triumph.
It is:
See you later.
And perhaps that is why, when the history of twenty-first-century American music is finally written, future scholars will place Chop, Wiggle, Tinkle, Bam somewhere between The Weight, Surfin’ Bird, Revolution 9, the Book of Ecclesiastes and a man standing in his garage hitting something repeatedly with a hammer.
Whether Dan Touchon intended any of this is beside the point.
Great works have never been entirely successful at controlling their critics.
Chop.
Wiggle.
Tinkle.
Bam.