Song-Poem Solicitation Literature

The mail you do receive from the song-poem companies tends to follow a familiar pattern. These companies love nothing more than to arbitrarily pack their envelopes with all manner of ill-designed collateral materials, typically including: a letter from the company president (usually under a phony name); a brochure obliquely describing the services they offer; a flyer rattling off the hyperbolic ravings of satisfied customers; half-off or two-for-one offers; vague information on their monthly or annual songwriting contests; a listing of related items for sale, such as the inevitable "How To Write And Sell A Hit Song" pamphlet; scattered details on their bogus Songwriters' Club; and a questionnaire subtly designed to excite the prospective customer into lofty dreams of songwriting glory. I once even got something useful from one of these companies -- a ballpoint pen! If at first you don't respond to this assault with a down-payment check, they will most assuredly try, try again, often lowering the price with each new mailing.

One of the things that makes the song-poem business such an amusing topic of study is the hilariously antiquated style of their promotional paraphernalia. Most of these pieces look like cut-and-paste jobs cobbled together from a half-dozen ancient predecessors, with only the prices typed in afresh. There is little rhyme, reason or organization to this collection of materials. Even the writing style evinces musty images of 1934. The interested song-poem fan can hardly go wrong by sending off to a few of these companies, if only to get some cheap kicks out of the mailings they'll receive in return.

To start the ball rolling, respond to the appropriate classified ads (usually listed in the "Musical" or "Poetry" sections) in the current edition of the National Enquirer or other supermarket tabloids. I recommend doing so using a one-time-only variant of your name, so you can track the parasites that will successively feed off the mailing list crumbs. Still more fun can be had by sending in the stupidest song-poem you can think up, to see just how bad a lyric has to be before it'll be rejected. In the off-chance you ever do get shot down, you win the game!

Following are illustrations of a few pieces from solicitation mailings sent out by song-poem recording companies in the past couple of years. I've chosen, for the most part, to keep the companies anonymous here, since they didn't exactly give me permission to reprint their literature.

I was tempted to provide all sorts of hypertext links describing the mailing's many typographical errors, its vague and obfuscatory phrases, and its frequent jags of wild illogic. I resisted this urge only out of respect for your intelligence and powers of perception; it had absolutely nothing at all to do with my own laziness, I swear.

Rest assured that while the specific absurdities of these mailings vary from one company to the next, the general tone, and the insulting implication that the reader is too ignorant to recognize the gaping holes of reason, is pretty consistent between them all.