Have you ever had the experience of paying attention to the lyrics of a familiar song and thinking, “Hmmm. This doesn’t say what I’d always thought it did”? You might take a look at my post about the song “Oh the Days of the Kerry Dancing” in which this same realization took place for me.1
Anyway, you’d think from the title of this song that it would be about how wonderful it is to be in thrall to a particular set of notes or to musical rhythm in general, but that’s not really what the words say. Here’s perhaps the clearest statement about the rhythm’s deleterious effects on the speaker:
I know that once it didn’t matter, but now you’re doing wrong;
When you start to patter, I’m so unhappy.
Won’t you take a day off?
Decide to run along somewhere far away off, and make it snappy!
Oh, how I long to be the man I used to be!
Fascinating rhythm, oh, won’t you stop picking on me?
Let me say first off that the song itself has very little to do with the plot of either the 1924 stage musical Lady, Be Good! or the 1941 film Lady Be Good in which it appears. I’m not even going to try for a plot summary of either one; suffice it to say that the song provides an excuse for a big dance number in each. In the stage version Fred Astaire and his sister Adele performed their dance midway through and then as the grand finale. In the movie the great Eleanor Powell gave an astounding tap routine.
