Right on the heels of my post on the toe-tapping Longitude and Latitude song, a bit of background information on my other favorite coordinate-oriented song, Map Ref. 41° N 93° W by Wire. I quoted a bit of the lyrics from this song in the Making Maps book, to close the Geographic Framework chapter:
An unseen ruler defines with geometry
An unrulable expanse of geography
An aerial photographer over-exposed
To the cartologist’s 2D images knows
The areas where the water flowed
So petrified, the landscape grows
Straining eyes try to understand
The works, incessantly in hand
The carving and paring of the land
The quarter square, the graph divides
Beneath the rule a country hidesInterrupting my train of thought
Lines of longitude and latitude
Define and refine my altitude
A email query about the song was answered by Graham Lewis (here, here),Wire’s vocalist/bassist:
In 1978 Wire made their debut in the USA playing at CBGBs in NYC for 5 nights. When this engagement was completed I flew to LA to meet my girlfriend of the time and have 2 weeks vacation staying with friends. At the end of this I flew back to New York to hangout.
On the return daytime flight the visibility was perfect and I experienced a stunning aerial view of the Rockies and the vast Mid-Western plains…this was the inspiration for the first part of the text. I studied Geography at both O & A level and developed a fascination for maps and their reading… On this occasion one was able to read the epic landscape…vast gorges, an incomparable 2D flatness, meandering rivers, levees, oxbow lakes etc….with an unrelenting gridded road system imposed on top).
Some months later I had a similar sensation whilst traveling by road through the reclaimed agricultural lands of Holland. Whilst in the US it had been the road system here it was a grid system of drainage dikes. The vast green/ glass houses also made a memorable impression sparkling in the autumn sun….”Crystal palaces for floral kings”
The two pieces of writing dovetailed to produce one text on 2 locations…the title was conceptual… notionally the very centre of the Mid-west…I guessed and found a place called Centreville nearby… this seemed appropriate, poetical yet hardly scientific!
I knew a geographer had to have written the song.
Map Ref. 41°N 93°W was Wire’s sixth single, taken from their third album (one of my favorite albums of all time), 154.
The cover for the single opens this post.
Other album covers with maps here.
The true “Map Songs” were sung by slaves to communicate to each other about pending escape from the plantations. Check this link for more info:
http://ctl.du.edu/spirituals/Freedom/coded.cfm
Yeah i’ve heard the slave song ‘follow the drinking gourd’ is an instruction to escaping slaves to head north at night by heading in the same direction as the big dipper
so does anybody know where 41° N 93° W” is located?
Iowa ???
41° N 93° W is here.
On one of my forthcoming releases ²3 (two cubed, i.e. ’08) and its follow-up, 3² (’09) will be the track 54’45″N 04’00″W, subtitled 14th June 1939. This orchestral piece involves 60 seconds of silence. From these clues you should be able to glean its reference to a tragedy just prior to WWII from which my grandfather was saved by the accident of his height.
The two-part collection is a 64 piece set of musical references encompassing the history of Liverpool, its people and its environs from the beginning (Berêshîth) through to the 750th anniversary of its charter (1207 – 2007).
Paul Crookall, composer, Liverpool UK, 23rd August 2008.
[…] Imagine our surprise when Marcia discovered that the point described by those latitude and longitude coordinates was about 100 miles from our home in Des Moines, down near Centerville, Iowa! When we got back here after our holiday, I did a little research and discovered why lyricist Graham Lewis had picked that point: here’s why. […]
Thank you – I’d always wondered where that song title came from, what the place was and how Wire got from one to the other. 154 is still a brilliant record 35 years on, and Map Ref always sounds to me like it should have been number 1, but possibly on Mars or in a parallel universe.
[…] Imagine our surprise when Marcia discovered that the point described by those latitude and longitude coordinates was about 100 miles from our home in Des Moines, down near Centerville, Iowa! When we got back here after our holiday, I did a little research and discovered why lyricist Graham Lewis had picked that point: here’s the story. […]
Such a great track…I linked to this post just recently: https://sidedishesblog.wordpress.com/2016/03/16/mullen-nebraska-pop-509/ – check it out, and follow along if you’d like!
[…] mappy of tracks – ‘Map Ref. 41°N 93°W’. Bassist and vocalist, Graham Lewis, describes how the song’s lyrics originated from touring and two plane journeys over the USA and The […]
[…] one of the great albums. Call it power pop, I guess, all angles and perhaps cold light. As for the map reference, I looked it up. It’s a placed called Centerville, Iowa, for no reason I can grasp … other […]