Pipe: recontextualision of the Ballad.

The Ballad of Old King Pipe

Old King Pipe is a fearsome sight
His beard is long and grey
He warns you of his raids by night
with the texts he sends by day

We know his eyes are black as thunder
We know hair theft is his career
But how the hell he got your mobile number
remains unclear.

So beware!
Guard your hair!
He comes in the night
A knock at the door! A crash! A roar!
but who IS Old King Pipe?

-Lhunni Bin

Interpretation number one
While on holiday with friends, a certain Fred Crawley set out to disrupt the memorisation of Italian by intoning the first chant that came to mind. The result was "Old King Pipe, Old King Pipe, coming to eat your hair". As the trip progressed, a murder-mystery situation grew up with the object of uncovering who among us had a secret identity as Old King Pipe. The finale of this joke was capturing Fred's phone and changing my address book entry, so that when I sent him a midnight text message it appeared as

From: OldKingPipe
Coming to eat your hair, OK?

The cabin shook with a shriek of laughter. Most effective jape ever.

Interpretation number two
The author of the ballad can be confidently identified as a member of the Kulak class in eastern europe or Russia: probably in the final days of the communist regime, if the rendition of "text" and "mobile" is accurate. If, more plausibly, we assume that a telegram is the intended image then the author may have lived at any time but we can be fairly sure he must be writing after 1949, since the influence of George Orwell is clear.
Who is Old King Pipe? He is Marx (with his beard that is 'long and grey'), but a grotesque monster: the monster that (the author believes) Marxism became in our time.
Pipe: the symbol of priviledge in the ruling bourgeois classes and of deals done by the fireside. King: a bitterly sarcastic use of revloutionary ideals, which of course centred on removing the Tsar. Old: it is clear that the author thinks that the Soviets are not just a new king, but the same corrupt power structure in place before the revolution: "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which".
The echoes of totalitarianism are loud and clear: the midnight raids, the secret surveillance (you cannot hide your idenity), the shorn hair of the forced labour camp prisoners. The plainative call of "Who is Old King Pipe?" is the sound of an atmosphere of fear and paranoia. Any seemingly innocent person could be an informer or secret policeman- to be a personification of Old King Pipe.

We might cautiously identify this time with the final years of Stalin's rule, and the author as a kulak: one of the rural middle classes who worked as middlemen and brokers. This class was famously victimised by Stalin, and the rural influence is unmistakable. Framing his art as "a ballad" and it's singalong rythm are the work of an unlettered poet: moreover, the author conflagrates his fear of the despotic state with forced industrialsation that so characterised Stalin's "five year plans". 'His eyes are black as thunder'- but thunder is not black: coal is. Thunder, though, is how industrial machinery (those 'dark satanic mills') might haunt a countryman with modernity forced upon his way of life. Whatever the mode of communication is intended, it is one that is inhuman, delivered by machine. It is also a mode that allows no reply, a bald statement of authority. In short, it is everything a small rural town might associate with Moscow.

Even the very premise of the poem is from the rural mindset. The Soviet Union is simply too large and powerful to be comprehended in the world of the farming village, and so it is mythologised, made concrete: made human. the result is Old King Pipe.

Interpretation number three
Old King Pipe is nothing less than than a personification of patriarchal hegeonomy.
Quite apart from it's status as a phallic symbol, the pipe is the ubiquitous accoutrement to "gentlemen's clubs"- the symbol of established power. Age is also a clear factor, as is the uniquely male appelation of 'King' for authority- a position, more over, hat can only be inherited father to son. Old King Pipe has in his grey beard what the mountain gorilla has in his silver back: a simple status symbol, a symbol of his supreme masculinity.
Morover, his seemingly puzzling obsession with hair- an atteck that is, after all, physically harmless- is obvious in this light. to be shorn of one's hair is the traditional punishment for aduldtresses and prostitutes, most recently expressed with women accused of sleeping with occupying servicemen in wartime Europe. Hence a woman's hair is a potent folk-symbol of her sexual independance. Old King Pipe does nothing less than to rapaciously devour said independance, and by attacking at night, he is attacking in the bedroom.
Who is Old King Pipe? He is none other than the Judeo-Christian-western patriarch.