You gotta be impressed with Kanye West when he starts his new album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy with an opening lyric that is a play on Roald Dahl's poetic rework of the Cinderella fable. You could call it his ubi sunt epiphany. Nicki Minaj does the voice over in an English accent:
You might think you've peeped the scene
you haven't
The real ones far too mean
The watered down one
The one you know
Was made up centuries ago
It made it sound all wack and corny
Yes, it's awful, blasted boring
Twisted fiction
Sick addiction
Well gather round children
Zip it listen!
Compare with Cinderella:
I guess you think you know this story.
You don't. The real one's much more gory.
The phoney one, the one you know,
Was cooked up years and years ago,
And made to sound all soft and sappy
just to keep the children happy.
Mind you, they got the first bit right,
The bit where, in the dead of night,
The Ugly Sisters, jewels and all,
Departed for the Palace Ball,
While darling little Cinderella
Was locked up in a slimy cellar,
Where rats who wanted things to eat,
Began to nibble at her feet.
Of course this has been done before. Let's look at a famous novel, Yellow Dog, by the acknowledged heavyweight of modern British literature, Martin Amis. The opening lines are:
But I go to Hollywood but I go to hospital,
but you are first but you are last,
but he is tall but she is small,
but you stay up but you go down,
but we are rich but we are poor,
but they find peace but they find.....
The reader is expected to supply the missing word "war." Now Compare Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities:
It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom...
