Miskatonic University PressToday I encountered two surprising “X is the Y of Z” comparisons.
On BBC Radio 3’s Sunday Feature, in a very good show called A Little History of Surreal Music, Anthony Joseph slightly misquotes Keith Richards that Lee “Scratch” Perry was the Salvador Dalí of dub (which he and the host characterize as surreal music): in a Rolling Stone piece in 2010 Richards said, “You could never put your finger on Lee Perry—he’s the Salvador Dalí of music.”
In the “Jukebox” column in the November 2024 issue of British music magazine The Wire, Margaret Chardiet (who performs as Pharmakon, and once opened for the band Swans, which is fronted by Michael Gira), says, “Michael Gira is the James Brown of industrial. He’s very much a band leader, and he’s like: ‘follow my cue’ and ‘we’re doing this like this, in this moment’ and his band has to know exactly what he’s thinking and feeling.”
You could do a good surrealist game, a variation of Exquisite Corpse, by having three people make up two names and noun, then combining them this way. Doug Ford is the Tintoretto of sandwiches. Clara Schumann is the Phil Silvers of vexillology.