Did you know Jethro Tull is still around? Yes, the rock band with the flute that brought a decomposed version version of the Bourrée from Bach’s lute suite in e minor to the charts in 19691 is still touring and recording. In 2022, after a long hiatus, they released an entire album of new material. It was titled The zealot gene and they even made a music video for the title track.
The song is about the ever widening political divide between people and the horrid habit that some people have of taking things seriously. There is nothing more serious than chess, of course, so after a mid-song flute solo and an exploding cartoon bomb, an enormous chequered plane appears on which stick figure are dancing and in their middle an actual chessboard with the band’s front man behind it.2
Normally, I give a diagram here, but — well, actually, why the hell not:
Yes, it’s jut the starting position. Nobody ever moves a piece in this video. Although I’m being generous here: the pieces are all misshapen and different, so it’s impossible to say whether, say, the bishops and knights haven’t swapped places like in some medieval palace intrigue.
But if it took them over sixty years to reach the starting position, we might have to wait a bit before finding out.
Realism: 5/5 If this is what the zealot gene leads to, it’s perhaps not so terrible.3 Then again, it doesn’t seem to get anything done.
Probable winner: I guess a white victory is slightly more plausible than a black one, but the most plausible result is a draw. If they’re ever actually going to play, that is.
1. [MC Fioti managed something very similar some fifty years later. Can we expect another Bach flute piece in the hit charts in forty years?] ↩
2. [Here he’s really the back man, I guess.] ↩
3. [Or perhaps he‘s not so terrible. They may well be talking about a zealot named Gene.] ↩