[HN Gopher] Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?
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Why did Tom Lehrer swap fame for obscurity?
Author : f_allwein
Score : 81 points
Date : 2024-05-22 11:44 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| I saw "Tomfoolery," a Lehrer revue, in 1980 or 1981 in SF. The
| actor singing "The Elements" had a periodic table and a pointer.
| He identified every element in time and at tempo without missing
| a one. Impressive.
| f_allwein wrote:
| Check out https://tomlehrersongs.com/albums/ - he put all his
| works into public domain.
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| Yes, indeed. Bookmarked that a while ago!
| lupire wrote:
| Daniel Radcliffe sang it on Graham Norton, introducing Tom
| Lehrer to a crowd who didn't know him.
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rSAaiYKF0cs
| space_oddity wrote:
| When I saw that video back then my jaw dropped.Was fascinated
| by it
| bitwize wrote:
| Radcliffe's geek cred was a factor in his casting as the
| title character in _Weird:The Al Yankovic Story_.
| eichin wrote:
| Wow. (Without the piano line it's clearly a lot harder to get
| in the pauses to breathe, even the comically large one that's
| in the original performance.)
|
| Back in the 80's, the MIT freshman chemistry class had A
| Thing where if you'd stand up in the lecture hall and sing
| The Elements, you'd get extra credit (I think it was an
| automatic A on the first quiz? something small.) I'd already
| placed out, but helped one of my housemates practice, which
| was fun (he did succeed, on the day.)
| I_am_uncreative wrote:
| I remember singing this in my 8th grade physics class in
| middle school for extra credit. Circa 2007.
| mannyv wrote:
| "Life is like a sewer - what you get out of it depends on what
| you put into it."
|
| Truer words have never been sung.
| gjm11 wrote:
| Those words haven't (so far as I know) been sung either:
| they're from one of his spoken preambles, not from any of the
| songs.
|
| (The preambles are generally at least as funny as the songs, at
| least in my estimation.)
| walterbell wrote:
| From https://tomlehrersongs.com/we-will-all-go-together-when-
| we-g...
| JohnFen wrote:
| Tom Lehrer is one of my musical heroes, and I listen to his songs
| regularly to this day. My hat's off to you, Mr. Lehrer.
|
| Having known a couple of very famous people and seeing what that
| brought to them, I'd prefer obscurity. I don't know if that's
| related to his decision-making, of course.
| jcalvinowens wrote:
| I've made a simple archive of the work Lehrer released to the
| public domain: https://github.com/jcalvinowens/tomlehrer-archive
|
| The text on his website suggests it won't be around for long. The
| archive is a git repo, you can help out by hosting it somewhere.
| pdonis wrote:
| Just cloned it. Thanks for doing this!
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Tom Lehrer DAT Recordings_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38778749 - Dec 2023 (2
| comments)
|
| _That 's Mathematics - Tom Lehrer Songs_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38471908 - Nov 2023 (1
| comment)
|
| _Tom Lehrer puts all music and lyrics in public domain_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34038206 - Dec 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Looking for Tom Lehrer, Comedy 's Mysterious Genius_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34034896 - Dec 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Tom Lehrer has released all of his songs into the public
| domain_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34024968 - Dec
| 2022 (130 comments)
|
| _Tom Lehrer - We Will All Go Together When We Go_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30509279 - March 2022 (2
| comments)
|
| _Tom Lehrer - So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III, 1967)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30496103 - Feb 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Tom Lehrer on Kurt Weill 's Broadway Music (1999)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27743713 - July 2021 (1
| comment)
|
| _Tom Lehrer Puts His Music into the Public Domain_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24882384 - Oct 2020 (1
| comment)
|
| _Tom Lehrer releases song lyrics to public domain_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24833683 - Oct 2020 (132
| comments)
|
| _Tom Lehrer 's Mathematical Songs (1951)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24279151 - Aug 2020 (44
| comments)
|
| _Tom Lehrer's memorable "Revue" session_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18036813 - Sept 2018 (6
| comments)
|
| _Tom Lehrer at 90: a life of scientific satire_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16774608 - April 2018 (83
| comments)
|
| _Looking for Tom Lehrer, Comedy 's Mysterious Genius_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10684409 - Dec 2015 (3
| comments)
|
| _Tom Lehrer_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10675682 -
| Dec 2015 (32 comments)
|
| _Tom Lehrer 's last (math) class (2001)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1914399 - Nov 2010 (1
| comment)
| walterbell wrote:
| Around age 70, "A Conversation with Tom Lehrer",
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210307035012/http://www.paul-l...
|
| _> This winter I 'm just going to do a math course. I'm doing a
| three-unit, as opposed to five-unit course on infinity, which
| I've never done before. I'm planning to study like crazy. It's
| for non-math majors. I'm trying to bring in the fact that
| infinity is when things get complicated. In calculus, algebra,
| probability, geometry, everything, so I'm trying to learn things
| like how perspective drawing uses infinity. So that'll take me
| three months. They won't appreciate it, but I will. I'll have fun
| with it. I've been teaching a course for non-mathematicians for
| years, and a lot of the stuff has already been covered there._
|
| 1997 math lecture performance (13m), including "That's
| Mathematics" for kids,
| https://archive.org/details/lehrer/lehrer_high.wmv
| walterbell wrote:
| Another Tom Lehrer interview clip (1994, age 65),
| http://www.crazycollege.org/lehrer.html GEO: I
| was surprised to learn that you enlisted in the Army back in
| 1955. TOM LEHRER: That's one way of putting it, but
| probably not the appropriate verb. The point is that they were
| drafting people up to the age of 35. So I dodged the draft for
| as long as anybody was shooting at anybody. And then when I
| realized that I would have to go -- there was really no way out
| of it except getting an essential full time job, which I didn't
| really want to do -- I waited until everything was calm and
| then surrendered to the draft board. I wouldn't call it
| "enlist". "Enlist" means that you have to spend another year. I
| allowed myself to be drafted. I was 27 at the time and there
| were a lot of graduate students who were like me who had gotten
| deferred as graduate students and now had to pay up. So it was
| a kind of an odd group there, a lot of educated people in my
| "outfit", I believe is the word. And we had a lot of fun. So I
| did that for two years in Washington DC and had a great time --
| especially since there was no war -- though vice president
| Nixon was trying to get us into one in Indo-China even then. So
| there was that little threat. And there was Suez and a few
| other little things that looked a little tricky. But it didn't
| look like there was going to be a real war. So it seemed to be
| safe to go in. And I'm sure that a lot of my cohort felt the
| same way. GEO: And what did you do? TOM
| LEHRER: It was NSA. I think I'm allowed to say that now. I
| asked around before I surrender to be sure that I would not be
| in special services or something playing volleyball with the
| troops in Korea. I wanted to make sure that I got a nice cushy
| job. We were called "The Chair Borned". And I found out that
| they were hiring mathematicians. So I arranged to be hired.
| GEO: Do you find that your training as a mathematician
| influenced your song writing. Writing a song seems to me to be
| like creating a puzzle. TOM LEHRER: Not Mathematics
| itself, but the kind of mind that likes mathematic. Stephen
| Sondheim has that kind of mind. He was a mathematics major in
| college, too. Having that kind of a mind, you look for
| organization, and rhyming, and pattern, and prosody -- all
| those things that are fun to do in a song, rather than -- which
| is what a lot of comedy songs are -- just couplets. Working all
| that out, if not "mathematical", is at least "logical".
| GEO: As a mathematician did you ever make any brilliant
| discoveries? TOM LEHRER: Oh,nonono. I have no desire
| to extend the frontier of human knowledge; retract them, if
| anything. I like to teach it and I like to think about it, but
| that's about it.
|
| https://tomlehrersongs.com/it-makes-a-fellow-proud-to-be-a-s...
| dekhn wrote:
| I took this class (in '97 IIRC), it was called "Nature of
| Math". I took it because I loved his songs and wanted to take a
| few math classes that weren't very hard. (from a comment I made
| a few years ago on a previous thread: Wonderful course and his
| delivery was excellent. I almost ended up being the TA the next
| quarter. It was my introduction to many things, including
| birthday paradox and analytic solutions for tertiary
| equations.)
| ghaff wrote:
| Although, as the article notes, he did glancingly dip his toe
| back in a couple of times but my impression was that he was just
| ready close that chapter. Even requests from close friends fell
| on deaf ears.
| doktrin wrote:
| I can't pretend to know the man's mind but I always got the vibe
| he didn't really feel at home in the cultural landscape of the
| late 60s and onwards
|
| Personally I think his contributions would be welcome in any era,
| and either way "this is the year that was" is a certified banger
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I grew up listening to him.
|
| He seems to be personally, very happy.
|
| That's something that I find inspirational.
| space_oddity wrote:
| Lehrer has often expressed that he didn't enjoy the lifestyle
| that came with fame
| jrockway wrote:
| I still have some Tom Lehrer songs in my playlist. They sound
| like they're a product of their time but are still relevant
| today.
|
| I am also amused that I learned "new math" in elementary school,
| but I think it's actually different from the "new math" in his
| song of that name. I didn't hate it, honestly. "Now the book
| wants you to do it in base 8." This is actually relevant to my
| day to day work. (Though in base 8, I have to say that I only
| ever use bitmasks. chmod 755 foobar)
| bitwize wrote:
| New Math was a response to the Soviet lead in the space race.
| It was thought that introducing more abstract concepts, like
| different bases and set theory, would help kids grok math more.
|
| It was a fool's game. Just like every other "innovation" in
| mathematics education since, up to and including Common Core
| (one of which you probably encountered). At the elementary
| school level, the only way to increase math proficiency is
| drilling. Drill the basic math facts and standard algorithms
| until the kid knows them by heart and can do problems as easily
| as breathing. Only then will they be ready for the higher
| level, conceptual stuff.
|
| The Soviets were ahead in math and science because they drilled
| their kids harder. Any kid who didn't want to drill was a
| traitor to the working class. (Were I a right-wing conspiracy
| theorist, I'd say New Math and its successors were Soviet
| psyops designed to sabotage math education in order to weaken
| the west. Instead I think it's more likely a psyop by the
| bourgeoisie to make us more compliant and exploitable slaves
| through mass innumeracy.)
|
| No surprise, then, that today, when Americans really want their
| kids to learn math, they use the curriculum from a country
| where they cane you for minor infractions. They use Singapore
| Math. Math is hard, and hard things can only be mastered
| through discipline.
| jrockway wrote:
| I think I'm too old for common core (39). It was "Chicago
| Math" or something like that. We did multiplication by making
| a 2x2 grid with diagonal lines and whatnot? I didn't really
| understand the simplification that much; my parents taught me
| the old way well before I encountered this in school.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| To be fair, New Math is a perfect intro to graduate-level*
| maths; it's just a poor fit for people who (because they
| don't have calculators? or even slide rules?) would like
| their childrens' maths courses to cover arithmetic.
|
| (I had a geometry teacher who had been excited because his
| daughter wanted him to sign something saying she'd be allowed
| to take "Sets Education". Imagine, finally sets being
| introduced at the Jr High level! ... and then he realised
| he'd misheard: there was an "x" at the end of the first word)
|
| Lagniappe: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/why-i-
| couldn39t-be-a-math-...
|
| * or undergraduate discrete maths, of the sort you'd want for
| any halfway decent CS programme. I'm _glad_ I got a cheap
| 'n'cheerful intro to lattices in 5th grade.
| pdonis wrote:
| I've always thought his description of the principle behind
| the New Math was priceless: "In the new approach, as you
| know, the point is to understand what you're doing, _rather
| than_ to get the right answer. "
| jrockway wrote:
| Is that a bad thing? I don't make a lot of arithmetic
| errors in M-x calc or whatever.
| XMPPwocky wrote:
| > Math is hard, and hard things can only be mastered through
| discipline.
|
| There are certainly some things you can only learn
| effectively by _doing them a lot_. There are also other
| things that you 've sort of got to learn by rote memorization
| (e.g. times tables, various formulas). I'm not aware of
| anything you can only learn effectively by _the threat of
| physical violence_.
|
| For what it's worth, I was taught logic and set theory well
| before I learned things like long division. Somehow, it made
| me like math more, and I had no problems with long division
| either. Maybe it might have helped more if I'd been beaten
| though- not sure.
| TheFreim wrote:
| "So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III)" by Tom Lehrer is one of
| my favorites.
| elihu wrote:
| I didn't know he had released sheet music and lyrics into the
| public domain. That's amazing.
|
| https://tomlehrersongs.com/
| cyco130 wrote:
| "I Got It from Agnes" is the funniest song ever written and I
| will refuse to socialize with anyone who thinks otherwise after
| hearing it. What a brilliant mind.
| bambax wrote:
| The article is nice and interesting but doesn't answer the
| question of why did Tom Lehrer stop.
|
| It's possible he thought he didn't have anything more to say. But
| I doubt that's the whole reason he stopped making songs and
| performing.
|
| He lived through a time when the US defeated Nazi Germany, and
| then... hired prominent Nazis to work for them. This is what the
| Wernher von Braun song is about.
|
| My take is, he thinks humanity as a whole doesn't deserve him --
| which may very well be the case.
| dekhn wrote:
| See the book "Operation Paperclip" for an in-depth writeup on
| the Nazi scientists who were smuggled out of Germany at the end
| of the war. I was not aware of, and was completely sickened by,
| the description of the Mittelwork factory where they worked
| slave laborers from nearby concentration camp to death to build
| V-2s.
| jedberg wrote:
| TL;DR: He didn't answer the question.
|
| Still a fun read though.
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