“Hey There Monkey”
by Sky Saxon's U.S.A.
1991 song
A snappy synthetic percussion track and thin, buzzing guitar sets the tone for "Hey There Monkey", a song from the unusual 1991 CD Flashback by Sky Saxon’s U.S.A. featuring Dana Smith. While Sky Saxon does his burned-out best with the unremarkable lyrics he largely doesn’t seem to have written, Smith joins him on vocals on this gleaming, studio-pro duet.
"Hey There Monkey" is a paean to a woman, but the “monkey” in the heart of the writer hasn’t been able to inspire anything but the most insipid poetry in him. “You’re my fire, you’re my flaming desire, you touch my soul oh baby,” is the general idea. One only suspects the magic pen of Sky Saxon when the lyrics veer off into more idiosyncratic territory as in lines like “Mars, Venus, Mercury, Earth, maybe we’ll take another birth” and “you are still eating the king’s cows, you got me howling now.” We’ll call it a draw.
Delicate and cold, "Hey There Monkey" is typical of Flashback but quite unlike the sweaty garage rock of Sky’s usual output.
