At first I was hooked on "Sweep the Leg", which is a track that should be at least interesting to any child of the 80s, then "Zombie Me" eclipsed it, then "Mr. B" eclipsed that! I've gained a new theme song from NMK with "Michael (Jump In)", which puts it up there in the list.
I've settled on my favorite song from NMK, though. "About Schroeder" is, as near as I can tell, about Lucy and Schroeder from Peanuts (the song says "Sally Brown sits down," which is the wrong character, but whatever).
There's a couplet in the song that runs:
This is love at its finest.
This is love how it needs to be.
It got me thinking about Lucy and Schroeder, and about Schulz in general. His characters were very simple, drawings with little detail of children with little souls, each character essentially a set of caricatures. Yet, there's something profound about them: they act, through their simplicity, as a remarkable mirror for ourselves. I'm not the first to say this, of course: Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes fame said that "in asking us to identify only with children, Schulz reminds us that our fears and insecurities are not much different when we grow up." (source) Charlie Brown's persistence and Linus' security blanket are apparent in ourselves, certainly. All of the characters have as their primary characteristic some melancholy aspect of the human psyche we all share, save Snoopy.
The most interesting character to me, though, is Lucy van Pelt. She's crabby and she's bossy, but it is revealed time and again that she's tremendously weak. She asks Charlie Brown and Schroeder to tell her she's pretty often enough, and she falls to temptation with surprising regularity when Charlie Brown and a football are concerned. Topping it all off, she has an unrequited love for Schroeder of a purity that can only be found in the idealized world of the comic strip.
Here we have a person in love with another for what he does and what he is. She sits by the piano, learning to appreciate Beethoven for him, complaining, certainly, but returning, always, to listen. There is no infatuation here: she sits facing away from Schroeder, her only connection to him the piano music. In contrast, Sally Brown has a nearly neurotic attraction to Linus for no apparent reason, following him like a spaniel and always staring at him. Charlie Brown does not even talk to the red haired girl: he can only be infatuated with her.
Out of all the tragic characters of Peanuts, Lucy is the most eminently human. She is crabby and bossy and foolish and deceitful and cruel. But, above that, she is loving and wounded, scared and small.
It is no accident that she is the psychiatrist.
By my hand,
~Michael Akerman
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