So I was driving to work today, and since I had run out
of podcasts, I was listening to (gasp!) the radio. During
the commute, I heard four songs containing whistling…
the pucker your lips and blow kind of whistling. I’ll see if
I can find the specific examples I heard this morning…
(warning: pop music videos ahead)
Does anyone have any insight into this astounding
acoustic sound showing up among usually electronic
instrumentation? Was this a coincidental clustering
or has something sparked a trend? Anyone have any
more examples?
I noticed some lip whistling by a pop band on TV the other day too. Names escape me but it was stunning. My Dad is a lip whistler and as children we could always judge his mood, so lip whistling is a comfort sound to me.
It may have been different in the Boy Scouts of America, but the Scouts in the UK (in Ireland, in fact) used to have the requirement “A scout smiles and whistles through all difficulties”. They’ve revised it now, but it gave rise to a lot of arguments about whether it was possible to smile and whistle at the same time. Of course it is possible, if you whistle through your teeth. Once upon a time I disrupted a gathering by whistling through my teeth. There was a diligent official search for the culprit, but they didn’t find me. Once the whistling stopped, they offered an amnesty if the perpetrator would own up, they were so curious. They were true to their word!
That don’t sound like US scouts, must be some Post-Powell revisionism. We had to add two additions to the Scout Laws in the States just so the six fingered kids wouldn’t feel left out.
Hey, I know it’s happened in the past in one or
two songs every once in a while, but this is a
sudden clustering of several songs at once. It
just seems like a conspiracy must be involved.
