It is a very small fact, ignored by most of the known world until now, that I have been living with a Dub Brock painting for the past decade point five I have been with my wife. She is the proud owner of the loose canvas “Wildlife Elvis with Cryspy Chick,” originally displayed on the floor of her miniscule Lower East Side NYC studio apartment when we met. I even saved it from the fate of kitten urinal a few months later. It now resides in full glory in our bedroom where its bizarro content was enough to enrage one redneck Roto-Rooter sub-tech one-third my age (name of Aron, of course) with its unusual rendering of his King.

This whole Brock-a.k.a.-Bobby Lounge act is fun, too, as retiring outsider artiste weirdo sneaks into his “iron lung,” serving the same metamorphic assistance as Clark Kent’s phone booth, to emerge bravado ragster channeling The Killer as a Pink Flamingos walk-on. But the Bobby Lounge reality here, at least on his sophomore studio effort, is just fun, for all the hoopla. The paintings are a lot sicker.

Granted, I am steeped in an almost 30-year-long investigation into murder ballads, racist Bible chants, whorehouse jingles and entendre-entendres, so when Lounge does a Franky & Johnny number where a central pregnant protagonist is well under the age of consent, well, I am a southern boy and have known that these things happens down here since I wuz well under as well. In the 21st Century, this is the kind of song Marcia Ball could belt out to a Harrah’s crowd. His best contribution to the oddball trad is his take on Despair as the noblest attainment of True Love in “I Don’t Care” and “Take Me to Angola”. The title number has some colorful images of How to Make Love to a Single Giantess indeedy, but when she leaves Bobby for a (tension – pause – buildup) 12 foot man, I saw it coming that many feet afore.

It is all good darkling wit and well pounded, but the repetitive nature of the rags threatens to turn into one-barrelroll-wonder land. There is nothing as twisted as vintage Tom Lehrer here, and perhaps this slashes to the discontent of my winter of.

For ump-something generations, (white, granted) southerners have consciously overlooked or secretly ulcerated over the fact that their “anthem” was penned by a northern songster name of Foster. And for those of us of a certain age and political tuning leftwards, a new anthem came half a century ago from that aforescribed Yankee dawg from MIT, “I Wanna Go Back to Dixie.” Be it ever so decadent—now that is a gauntlet that needs dropping. Mistah Lounge: howzabouts you pickin’ that up and runnin’ with it? Ain’t like it’s a pair of scissors, or that nine-foot woman in twelve-inch elevator heels who fooled you brieflike once.