Wait. What?
Kilian's post, wherein he incongruously interprets this blog's namesake lyrics interspersed with fried squash blossom photos, got me thinking about whether people really listen to lyrics anymore. Well, actually I didn't start thinking about it until I sat down here as I do every Friday trying to think of something to write, but you get the idea.
For me, lyrics are secondary. When I listen to music I'm usually listening more to the way the sounds fit together than to the meaning of the words. I will usually only connect with a word or short phrase in a song's lyrics, often not enough to glean anything like meaning. So good lyrics don't often make a song for me.
By contrast, bad lyrics--assuming I can understand them at all--can ruin a song for me. There's nothing like bad Moon June poetry or dated political sentiment to spoil the mood. To my ears, Dylan is a particularly egregious offender in this department:
The Rolling Stones at least had the good sense to bury Mick's vocals down in the mix. I once read that Keith didn't actually know what the words were until he saw them scroll by on Mick's teleprompter. It's just as well. All you really need is a voice there anyway. Does anybody really care what Mick is saying?
The logical extreme of this, I suppose, is to fill the space that would usually contain words with nonsense syllables like Cocteau Twins or their slightly more modern counterparts, Sigur Ros, do. The latter recently released a song called Gobbledigook as if to state the obvous. And it's awesome.
For me, lyrics are secondary. When I listen to music I'm usually listening more to the way the sounds fit together than to the meaning of the words. I will usually only connect with a word or short phrase in a song's lyrics, often not enough to glean anything like meaning. So good lyrics don't often make a song for me.
By contrast, bad lyrics--assuming I can understand them at all--can ruin a song for me. There's nothing like bad Moon June poetry or dated political sentiment to spoil the mood. To my ears, Dylan is a particularly egregious offender in this department:
You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomatI may never understand why so many seem to divine deep meaning from Dylan in what I hear as embarrassingly bad verse. To each his own, I suppose.
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
The Rolling Stones at least had the good sense to bury Mick's vocals down in the mix. I once read that Keith didn't actually know what the words were until he saw them scroll by on Mick's teleprompter. It's just as well. All you really need is a voice there anyway. Does anybody really care what Mick is saying?
The logical extreme of this, I suppose, is to fill the space that would usually contain words with nonsense syllables like Cocteau Twins or their slightly more modern counterparts, Sigur Ros, do. The latter recently released a song called Gobbledigook as if to state the obvous. And it's awesome.
16 Comments:
Yeah Rock isn't the new high poetry. But a good anthem can be inspiring. Otherwise the lyric delivery can make a song.
I give you...Aint it hard when you discover that
He really wasnt where its at
After he took from you everything he could steal
Hi Justin,
Being married to a drummer, I know that some people focus much more on what is happening musically, as you do. But I listen to lyrics with great attention, and to me they are an integral part of the meaning of a song.
I like Dylan's lyrics, although I generally prefer more simple pop phrases than his stream of consciousness style. I think he draws a lot from modern poetry, and creates meaning through suggestive imagery rather than direct, logical expression.
And I *love* the Rolling Stones' lyrics. They don't get discussed as much as those of other bands, maybe because people spend so much time talking about their mystique and history instead. But Mick has absolutely no reason to be buried on account of his lyrics:
"Oh, I am sleeping under strange, strange skies;
Just another mad, mad day on the road.
My dreams are fading down the railway line...
I'm just about a moonlight mile down the road."
Absolutely wonderful. The song, too.
First, I had no idea Mick used a teleprompter.
Second, I agree regarding the 'Stones good sense as far as burying their lyrics go. With one caveat. When Mick has a killer line, he lets you know with perfect enunciation.
The best example of this is "Rocks Off" (from Exile, which I know you hate). He's nearly unintelligible for the entire song until he spits out "The sunshine bores the daylights outta me." Best line in the song, even after reading the lyrics. And he lets you know it.
I just got back from a talk by Greil Marcus about lyrics. Marcus might be the most obsessive of obsessive Dylan fans--certainly he is the most well known--and judging from Dylan's somewhat recent transformation into the "Old, Weird America" caricature of the Dylan that Marcus writes about, the feeling seems to be mutual.
Marcus was, in fact, here to introduce a new art exhibition called "Old, Weird America" ten years after the release of his book of the same name. Clearly he's going to beat that horse into the ground. Though, it's hard to blame him since it's a pretty interesting idea--and an idea with legs that many people have cottoned to.
The summary of his talk (treble interrupted by his own ringing cell phone) was that weirdness in art makes it constantly fresh. And while this was meant to apply to the things on the walls, most of the talk involved examples of weirdness from lyrics.
I think he's right, but I have a niggling uneasiness in the back of my head about whether his premise applies to something that is inauthentically weird (i.e., weird for the sake of weird) because that makes the thing much less weird to me.
I think this explains why that Dylan lyric I posted doesn't work for me. The diplomat carrying the cat is certainly a weird image, but that obvious rhyme shatters my suspension of disbelief and makes me think the image was created solely for the rhyme. And that's not very weird at all.
I thought about this some while watching Tom Waits last week. I really enjoyed the performance, but it's hard to escape the sense that Waits is affectedly weird--that what I was seeing was just shtick. Then again, maybe he's been doing that character for so long that he has become one with it, as the subject of David Byrne's "Seen and Not Seen" did.
So I guess sometimes I do listen to lyrics.
Waits is an interesting example though, because he seems to me to be a very conscious melding of music and theatre. I think what he does IS schtick, but I also think it's intended to be, in that he's playing a role. He was playing a role in his early days too, that of the drunken rumpled troubadour in some red light bar in some run-down harbor city, but that was kind of an obvious role that really anyone with a knack for the maudlin and the related cliches to that particular role could've done, whereas the one he picked up in the 80s when he married Kathleen Brennan, herself well versed in theatre, movies, and Captain Beefheart, was a lot more unique.
I'm not sure about Dylan, but I think there are a subset of musicians who cross over that line and really create a role that they're playing onstage... actually, now that I read that back it sounds TOO obvious... a LOT of musicians do that, it's just a matter of degrees. Where Mick Jagger is taking the role of "rock star" to a pretty decent degree, but not playing it up in an artier more theatrical way, Tom Waits is going full bore with the theatre. I've found sometimes that in some of his more structured live recordings sometimes the patter almost sounds rehearsed. Not to take anything away from him or anything, as I think this sort of thing is an approach that's certainly valid and interesting, and he's probably the best example of it.
I think some people listen to lyrics, and most don't. I also think that has been the case for decades. It doesn't hurt that most lyrics are either unintelligible if not downright worthless.
As for Waits, I like much of his stuff, but I tend to find it a little too affected if I listen for too long.
I always preferred Captain Beefheart for that sort of thing anyway, for the most part.
When it comes to Dylan, I am still at an almost total loss over him. I just can't stop seeing the naked emperor. Although, watching him humiliate Donovan in Don't Look Back was priceless.
Fucking bards...
Dylan's written thousands of songs. And the lion's share of them weren't simple, absurdist rhymes or pretentious wordplay.
Most people who say they don't or won't like Dylan are either thinking of a specific kind of Dylan song they hate or haven't grappled with the man's full catalog.
It could be you don't like any Dylan, but you have to have more than one reason. Because he's been more than one songwriter. Because the guy who wrote Blood on the Tracks is different from they guy who wrote Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. And neither is the guy who wrote "Positively 4th Street."
Hell, Love and Theft is a better record than 99.9 percent of songwriters will ever make. But when people talk about how they don't get why people dig Dylan, they either haven't bothered to hear that record, or that record isn't who they mean.
When you've written 45 years of music there's a lot to hate. But there's a lot to love.
I don't mean you shouldn't say he's overrated. He is. People tend to deify him for a small subset of musics he made. And it wasn't even his best work. But he doesn't have one lyrical style or one way of songwriting. He's put out really good records the worshipers never touch. If I were a person who didn't think I liked Dylan, that's probably where I'd start.
I wouldn't even begin to claim to be anything even vaguely close to knowledgeable about Dylan and his overwhelming catalogue. All I can say is that through the years that I have been interested in music, I have never been able to fully gain an appreciation for his work anywhere near the level of those around me (like you Marshall). It's not because he isn't worthy, it's more about me than anything.
I love Highway 61 Revisited, have a strange fondness for Before the Flood, and am drawn to much more. He's just someone who has slipped between my fingers so many times I am losing count.
Some artists come to me over and over, year after year, and I eventually pierce through and get it in a way that enriches me. Dylan has yet to do that. Having said that, I have a ton of respect for his influence, and for his body of work. I just refuse to work that hard to get into it. If it comes to me, then I will be waiting. If not, then so be it. God knows there's much more in life I will never appreciate as much as others.
What the who, eh?
Oh yeah, and the Band's version of I Will Be Released is devastating.
My own Dylan collection includes:
Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
Highway 61 Revisited
Blonde on Blonde
Blood on the Tracks
Live 1975 The Rolling Thunder Revue
Time Out of Mind
Love & Theft
The Bootleg Series Vol. 7
Modern Times
At one point I also had The Basement Tapes, but it was lost in the great break-in of 2001.
So it's not like I haven't tried to grapple with the breadth of his output.
Of these, I really only go back to Time Out of Mind repeatedly. That may be because of the Lanois production and Augie Meyers' keyboard work. By the way, Lanois also recorded one of my favorite Willie Nelson albums around the same time and it might be my favorite Willie Nelson album.
I like how the topic of Tom Waits shtick came up. At the show last week I wondered out loud whether he was eating beans out of can cooked over a hobo fire behind Jones Hall or finishing off cucumber sandwiches at the Four Seasons. The truth lies somewhere in between I am sure.
I wondered why Waits got a pass for such obvious affectations, such as the ready to kick up dust and in between song banter/jokes. I think his love for american music and his attempts to be a living historic amalgam of it is what makes him endearing in regards to his 'act'.
I see Dylan in an almost similar light except there you are dealing with someone who is keenly aware of the image and act he is delivering but is also combined with what I believe is excellent songwriting and poetic lyrics. As with poetry it tends to not age well unless the poet's cultural context is also considered.
I'm not in to Lanois - the Willie and the Dylan albums are the greatest Lanois offenders to my sense of taste. I think it's that his knob turning skillz are made to be so obvious.
Dylan talks about working with Lanois in Chronicles. I think you could summarize Dylan's sentiments as: "maybe that guy knows what he is doing but I couldn't get into it."
I think it's funny that you chose this particular Dylan verse since I find it to be self referential...so in affect he's laughing at himself along with you.
"maybe that guy knows what he is doing but I couldn't get into it."
Was he talking about the actual sound of the recording or Lanois' tendency to be sort of new agey? I can understand the latter for sure, but I like Lanois' production. Sure, it tends to be a little thick with the reverb, but it's generally pretty interesting. The double drummer tracks on Teatro are pretty darn awesome. I would have never thought to do that.
I like Lanois's production. I can't imagine that Dylan was that displeased with Lanois, since he ended up producing two of Dylan's records. He produced Dylan's Oh, Mercy too, and it's got some gems (e.g., "Most of the Time").
I'm a big fan of his work with Emmylou Harris. And Lanois's Sling Blade soundtrack is still one of my faves.
Hell, Love and Theft is a great record. Its the only dylan record i've listened with any consistency outside of Highway 61.
As for Waits, having just seen him last night in Knoxville, I have to say that to anyone that has an issue with his "affectation" (as I have felt myself at times, even while still loving his music), see him live and any issues with affectation disappear, it's theater, not affectation. Theater at its best, the script written over a 25+ year period. Awesome.
As for lyrics. I listen to lyrics. If you are going to have someone singing words on a song, then the lyrics matter. As do the other instruments used. If the lyrics suck, then thats going to hurt the song.
According to him, Dylan wasn't feeling it which is the problem I tend to have with Lanois.
It's been said of Willie Nelson that he sings ahead of the measure - it's part of his vocal style. He sounds contained on Lanois recording, so does Dylan.
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