Godspeed You! Black Emperor is a band that I discovered when I was a sophomore at the University of Waterloo. The professor of one of my Computer Science courses, Prabhakar Ragde, hosted office hours for students to ask questions in a one-on-one or small group setting, and he would announce these sessions by posting to the class newsgroup. He ended each of these weekly messages with a line like, “This week, I will be playing [name of album] by [name of musical artist].” I have a memory of attending his office hours with Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven playing in the background, and I’ve been a fan of the band ever since.
To best enjoy this musical about the six wives of King Henry VIII, it’s good to brush up on the history. The lyrics contain a lot of jokes and references that I wouldn’t have gotten had I not learned a bit about the real-life stories.1
The songs are catchy, though unexceptional. The best song for me is the one for Catherine Howard. Through several repetitions of the chorus, she comes to realize that men objectify her, and goes through an emotional journey from playful to tragic. The singer ends the song with a sob, a surely challenging feat for an actor.
Footnotes
by watching The Tudors TV show, which is not necessarily the most historically accurate, but close enough ↩
