POP / Riffs: Fine and dandy

I consider ``Yankee Doodle Dandy'' to be like the B-side of the American national anthem - this traditional, familiar, American song which everyone gets to learn at school. Except ``Yankee Doodle Dandy'' has the advantage of being a lot easier to sing: the national anthem goes up and up, and if you start out in too high a key, you can get into big trouble by the end. Also the national anthem is this long, convoluted question. It's surprisingly muted and non-triumphal for a national anthem. ``Yankee Doodle'' is kind of the affirmative flip-side. I'm not really up on the historical references of the song, if it has any. It's wonderfully strange, though. ``He put a feather in his cap and called it macaroni.'' I mean, that's surreal. If you can take that line, then you're ready for pretty well anything the avant-garde can throw at you.

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