“When we called out for another drink
the waiter brought a tray
And so it
was that later
As the miller told his tale
That her face, at first just ghostly
Turned a whiter shade of pale”…
– singers/songwriters: Gary Brooker, Keith Reid and Matthew Fisher a.k.a. Procol Harum
IF YOU think this is all about those brown-skinned natives who wannabe “mestizas” smothering themselves 24/7 with those whitening soaps advertised to “bring out the mestiza in you”, almost but not quite.
And no, we are not talking about those pale-skinned boys down at PECO, neither are we talking about public officials with “puti itlog”.
Of course, any sensible person knows that to be a mestiza or mestizo has to do with your genes, more specifically the genes you inherit from your parents where one happens to be Caucasian and the other a native.
So no amount of skin whitening soap will bring out the mestiza in you as you’re not. The result, of course, from smothering yourself with these whitening soaps is a pug-nosed native with a face that’s a “whiter shade of pale” while the rest of the body is still “café au lait”.
Take note that of the current top international beauty queens, five of them are black or brown-skinned beauties from South Africa to Jamaica.
The newly crowned Miss Universe from South Africa and not Wakanda (pun intended) just flushed down the drain all those so-called whitening products and shamed all the users who want to bring out the “mestiza “ in them that was never there in the first place.
But so much for that. We’ll talk more about these wannabe mestizas in some other column.
And we segue to this song that came out in the late 1960s that was avant garde for that time, it was completely different from the pop songs of that era and to this day it still endured with its haunting melodies.
From that free online encyclopedia a.k.a. the internet:
“A Whiter Shade of Pale” is the debut song by the British rock band Procol Harum, released 12 May 1967.
With its haunting Bach-derived instrumental melody, soulful vocals, and unusual lyrics – by the song’s co-authors Gary Brooker, Keith Reid and Matthew Fisher
The song was performed and recorded at Olympic Sound Studios in London, England, with Gary Brooker providing the vocals and piano, Matthew Fisher on a Hammond M-102organ, David Knights on bass and Ray Royer on guitar. Drums were by session drummer Bill Eyden.
Reid got the title and starting point for the song at a party. He overheard someone at the party saying to a woman, “You’ve turned a whiter shade of pale”, and the phrase stuck in his mind”.
In an interview:
The author of Procol Harum: Beyond the Pale, Claes Johansen, suggests that the song deals in metaphorical form with a male/female relationship which after some negotiation ends in a sexual act. This is supported by Tim de Lisle in Lives of the Great Songs, who remarks that the lyrics concern a drunken seduction, which is described through references to sex as a form of travel, usually nautical, using mythical and literary journeys. Other observers have also commented that the lyrics concern a sexual relationship.
In a 2008 interview with Uncut Magazine, Keith Reid, the song’s lyricist, however said:
I was trying to conjure a mood as much as tell a straightforward, girl-leaves-boy story. With the ceiling flying away and room humming harder, I wanted to paint an image of a scene. I wasn’t trying to be mysterious with those images; I was trying to be evocative. I suppose it seems like a decadent scene I’m describing. But I was too young to have experienced any decadence, then. I might have been smoking when I conceived it, but not when I wrote. It was influenced by books, not drugs.
In the same Uncut interview, Keith Reid recalled the writing of the lyrics: “I used to go and see a lot of French films in the Academy in Oxford Street (London). Pierrot Le Fou made a strong impression on me. I was also very taken with surrealism, Magritte and Dali. You can draw a line between the narrative fractures and mood of those French films and ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale.’
Perhaps you should check out the song on YouTube who knows you might like it but if you fancy yourself a millennial I simply doubt it as your taste or the lack of it cannot measure up.
And what has this song got to do with wannabe “mestizos”, simply just a clever way to condescend on them. (brotherlouie16@gmail.com/PN)
