Now I wonder what Klingon Death Metal would sound like.

Not very different from Finnish death metal, I suppose.

I think Nina Hagen would be best suited to singing a Klingon Opera. And Diamanda Galas.

I think I'm embarassed on Enya's behalf.

Also, if she wanted to sing in a fake alien language, she could have saved herself a lot of effort and just sung in Klingon.

(ETA: This is what I get for taking a call and walking away before finishing a post -- everybody gets to the joke before I do.)

I think Nina Hagen would be best suited to singing a Klingon Opera. And Diamanda Galas.

Yes, of course.

But now I wanna hear someone poorly suited for singing Klingon Opera. Like Frente!

Also, I bet Björk could do some interesting things....

(What is Klingon for "I just laid an egg on the red carpet"?)

But now I wanna hear someone poorly suited for singing Klingon Opera.

Blossom Dearie.

Tiny Tim

Blossom Dearie.

Least Klingonian Singer Ever. That's a title.

More Slate music. Interesting review of latest Paul McCartney record.

His new album, Chaos and Creation in the Back Yard, has a few silly love songs, but they are all cast in a melancholy dye. After McCartney initially greeted the news of John Lennon's murder with "It's a bit of a drag," Lennon's ghost has hovered over many of Paul's most inspired moments. For this recording, McCartney expressed his desire for someone with the courage to say no to him, just as John used to. Radiohead and Beck producer Nigel Godrich somehow summoned up the nerve to do just that. The McCartney in the later pages of Spitz's biography is the egomaniac who wanted his in-laws to manage the Beatles and who sent George Harrison storming off in a huff after showing him how to play a guitar part. The bossy Beatle plays every instrument on Chaos and Creation, except that Linda is no longer around to give him a harmony and distract him from his breakup with John. He also gets to play the way he told George to play—even on the same Epiphone electric with which he usurped George's solo on "Taxman"—but now George isn't around to badger anymore. McCartney said that the feeling of George came over him when he was writing "Friends to Go," and Harrison's droll quips on the way to the grave (in a late song, "P2 Vatican Blues," Harrison sang of getting dressed in his "concrete tuxedo") feel like they've been channeled here, particularly when McCartney's own words fail him. As McCartney sang, melodiously but clunkily, "I've been sliding down a slippy slope," I cringed, but when he followed it up with "I've been climbing up a slowly burning rope," it could have even inspired a grin from the Quiet Beatle himself.

Godrich managed the quality control, essential for any McCartney product, and McCartney was pushed to write darker, more dissonant chords, providing the right chill just as certain lyrics threatened to become Hallmark couplets. "How Kind of You" opens with the wince-inducing line, "How kind of you to think of me, when I was out of sorts/ It really meant a lot to be in someone else's thoughts." But don't change the track yet. The key turns minor, and the musical interlude is so haunting you want to forgive Paul his schmaltz.

Unexpected chords turn up on nearly every track, just as the lyrics begin to turn soppy. "At the Mercy" modulates its way to dissonant harmonies, beginning with a traffic jam and ending with an apocalyptic image of watching "the universe explode." On "Riding to Vanity Fair," McCartney can be heard having a bitchy argument with someone who needs to be told "the definition of friendship" from a knight worth $1.5 billion. He says the song wasn't directed to anyone specific, but who else could get his goat like John? Godrich hurt Sir Paul's feelings when he initially told him the song was "crap," but Sir Paul slowed down the tempo and let the vitriol burn. "I'll tell you what I'm going to do/ I'll try to take my mind off you/ And now that you don't need my help/ I'll take the time to think about myself." McCartney, his voice more or less intact, can whine in his upper register, but he can also dig into the deeper notes with an ennui that could only come with age.

These are emotions that couldn't have ever come from the wunderkind who saw the Beatles disintegrate when he was all of 27. McCartney is communing with the dead on Chaos and Creation, but unlike Spitz's book, he actually has something new to say. On " This Never Happened Before," a song whose opening piano chords might owe a few quid to "You Never Give Me Your Money," McCartney is singing the song's title to Heather Mills, but really, hasn't he already written scads of silly love songs for Jane Asher, Linda, even his sheep dog Martha? What has really never happened before is that McCartney, in mourning for his fellow Beatles, is finally able to channel the dead in a new way, admitting that Lennon was his "soul mate." (continued...)

( continues...) This is part of getting older—a year away from "When I'm 64"—and maybe it's not too late to do something new. For a man who at the age of 23 wrote his most lucrative hook with "I believe in yesterday," McCartney at 63 assures us that it really hasn't been done before after all.

But now I wanna hear someone poorly suited for singing Klingon Opera. Like Frente!

Well, we've already seen the Frente! chick sing on other planets...

Tiny Tim

Have you heard his "Stairway to Heaven"? He could do Klingon.