"smell like a sound"; or, how i discovered the fart humor in '80s pop music

it happened this past sunday. Katelyn, my brother Ethan, and I were driving through Hartford on the way to my grandparents' 60th wedding anniversary. Katelyn had put in a mix CD with alot of good, old '80s new-wavey stuff on it. One of the tracks was Duran Duran's Hungry Like the Wolf.

As I drove along, listening to the lyrics, i heard it; one verse that stuck as both irritatingly obtuse and yet, at the same time, almost blindingly simple: "smell like a sound".

My mind seized on this image the way it tends to do with most abstract things. Almost instantly, i saw what it meant, what it HAD to mean.

"Smell like a sound" can only mean one thing: a fart.

think about this. a fart is the only thing that is at once a smell and a sound. You can walk into a room and exclaim that it "smells like a fart in here", and yet at the same time you can say that something "sounds like farts". There is nothing else on earth, at least that i can think of, that fitts these criteria.

And i tried to think of other things, believe me. I thought, you can say something smells like fish, like soap, like ass, like dirt; but you cant say that something sounds like any of those things.

Converseley, you can say that something sounds like thunder, like a scream, like a freight train, like a whisper. But if you name one thing that smells like either of those i'll eat my hat.

and yet, the Fart. a smell like a sound. Jesus.

I didn'd get how it fit in with the rest of the lyrics, which seem to be about sexual conquest, until i remembered that the members of Duran Duran were at least probably bisexuals. Im going to leave it at that for the sake of decency, which is something i do very, very rarely.

that is all.