Right Way / Wrong Way: Particularity
It’s a truism in writing workshops and English classes that deft use of detail in creative writing can improve your poetry and fiction. I’d say the same is true for song lyrics. Seems like the best songs will always include bits of the particular alongside the more imagistic and emotional generalities that necessarily underpin pop lyric writing.
As Edward Tufte recommends in his information design presentations, you should intertwine the general and the particular. Your basic premises and supporting details should reinforce each other and interact, strengthening the framework of your ideas so that your audience is engaged and can remember what you’ve told them. Yes, Tufte was talking about speaking engagements, but the same advice is well-suited to songwriting.
Wrong way
The strength of details is so obvious to amateur writers that it’s easy to go overboard. When I was getting my creative writing degree, I slogged through a ton of workshops with classmates who would focus so thoroughly on details they couldn’t move the plot forward or articulate their themes. They’d get caught up in product placement. Like unskilled versions of Bret Easton Ellis, they’d go on about the trim options on the protagonist’s Toyota Four Runner without specifying how it related to his mother’s death.
A skit on last Saturday’s SNL perfectly nailed the hilarity and tedium of using too much detail in your songwriting. That unexpectedly solid SNL moment, coming after Weekend Update, is what started me thinking about this subject. Because a great song should just about always include an entire UPS tracking number, right?
Right Way
Yesterday would have been the 110th birthday of the Belgian Surrealist, René Magritte. Google celebrated in typical fashion by reimagining their logo as one of Magritte’s most famous works, Golconda, which is part of Houston’s Menil Collection.
Before I had ever heard of Magritte, I loved Paul Simon’s “René and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War”. I first heard it when I bought Negotiations and Love Songs from BMG’s music club.
I was 17, so surrealist art hadn’t yet caught my attention. What did earn my attention was the way Simon painted this couple’s movements within a comfortable, prosperous, and new post-war West. The entire song is a litany of small pleasures that would have been magnified for anyone fresh from waiting out World War II in occupied Brussels.
René and Georgette Magritte
With their dog after the war
Returned to their hotel suite
And they unlocked the door
Easily losing their evening clothes
They danced by the light of the moon
To the penguins, the moonglows
The orioles, and the Five Satins
The deep forbidden music
They'd been longing for
René and Georgette Magritte
With their dog after the warRené and Georgette Magritte
With their dog after the war
Were strolling down Christopher Street
When they stopped in a men's store
With all of the mannequins dressed in the style
That brought tears to their immigrant eyes
Just like the penguins, the moonglows
The orioles, and the Five Satins
The easy stream of laughter
Flowing through the air
René and Georgette Magritte
With their dog après la guerre
This week’s release of Paul Simon’s collected Lyrics 1964-2008, is a reminder that his portrait of Magritte is only one example of Simon’s mastery. But his use of details here is particularly skillful, because it echoes some of Magritte’s own themes: his highly technical portrayal of objects such as hats and pipes (and menswear) separate and apart from their owners:
Side by side
They fell asleep
Decades gliding by like Indians
Time is cheap
When they wake up they will find
All their personal belongings
Have intertwined
It’s one of my favorite songs ever.
Labels: lyrics, Paul Simon
12 Comments:
When you listen to "Ode to Billy Joe" that SNL skit almost writes itself.
True. I've always loved that song, but it's an easy target. That's a swell Bobbie Gentry video, though.
I like Alice's Restaurant and Sacco and Vanzetti. I guess I'd argue there is no wrong way. You can get too tricky for your own good and I'd definitely say Paul Simon is guilty of that.
Decades gliding by like Indians?
I don't think Paul Simon is a lyrical master either. Hasn't done it for me since I was fifteen (fifteen year old me spent hours listening to old Simon & Garfunkel records).
It's not my intention to criticize songs that have tons of detail. I'm talking about songs (and writing in general) that resort to extensive detail for no good reason.
Also, I'm curious about the "Gliding by like Indians" line as well. But it doesn't dent the song for me.
I know the song doesn't specifically mention Galconda, but in the Wikipedia entry you linked, it says:
"As was often the case with Magritte's works, the title Golconda was found by his poet friend Louis Scutenaire. Golconda is a ruined city in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India near Hyderabad, which from the midfourteenth century till the end of the seventeenth was the capital of two successive kingdoms; the fame it acquired through being the center of the region's legendary diamond industry was such that its name remains, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, 'a synonym for 'mine of wealth'.'"
So maybe these "Indians" refer to the Indian kingdoms or something similar. That would be a lot of research for Simon, though, so maybe this is just co-incidence. I mean, it could be he was just talking about Indian motorcycles.
I find Simon's work for the most part a little above par. I can never really seem to get to interested in the lyrics because his melodies seem mostly uninspired or unengaged, though i think that this is mostly because he is pulling from some kind of anglo tradition that to me is just boring, like renaissance festival music or something (maybe Scarborough Fair looms too large in my image of him). Still even in his best stuff, he seems to communicate a certain detachment that i don't like to much.
And at least on Ode to Billy Joe, i get the sense that Bobbie Gentry at least knew what she was talking about (even though i'm fairly sure she never pushed anyone off a bridge). Simon talking about Magritte and his wife after the war? I guess Simon is trying to be surreal by putting Magritte as a new york immigrant dancing to the forbidden (?) music of the Five Stains, but if you ask me it's a fairly lame attempt at surrealism.
his melodies seem mostly uninspired or unengaged
I wonder how you reconcile this with your affection for Steely Dan.
It's true that Simon's early career was dominated by stuff from an Anglo tradition (which he borrowed from the Everlys and Louvins and, ultimately Scottish religious music), but I don't think you'd hear any of that in his non-Garfunkle albums.
And I actually think his lyrics are some of the best. They are descriptive in a way that, for me at least, creates entire scenes, as opposed to the clever-clever wordplay of somebody like Dylan (had to take that shot somewhere), which passes as complex, but is actually meaningless. I get that you can add your own meaning to Dylan's words, but as a means of communicating an idea, that's a failure. Worse, you end up with a bunch of Dylanologists congratulating themselves for figuring out what it all means. Heavy, man, heavy.
This article does lend credence to your idea that Simon is a dilettante, though.
Man, that article is hilarious. Gotta love Los Lobos.
But yeah, you're right, I'm pretty much talking about only a part of his catalog. Somehow, even without knowing the stuff the article mentions, I always felt his other stuff was kind of a rip-off, in the bad sense of the word, as in ripping off something and making it worse instead of better. Though if i had to choose, I like his more 'world' type stuff better (better rhythms, better melodies).
I think I always had the feeling he was sort of a thief and I do vaguely remember something about the issues he had with some of the African musicians he ripped off for graceland. But bottom line is that to me, he looks like a prick (and now i have an article to prove i was always right about it). thanks.
as for steely dan, i dont see the comparison. musically and lyrically superior, funnier, cleverer, original, cooler, and i wish I could sit in some coffee shop or bar with Don and Walter making fun of everyone in sight. sitting with Simon for any length of time just seems tedious, exhibit one, the colbert report clip above (what is up with his hair?).
There's no denying Simon is a descriptive narrator, unfortunately it's all base stuff fit for a teenager. Who else could find Sounds of Silence deep (or even interesting)?
Dylan on the other hand holds my attention to this day. I love it when I get to a new conclusion about what his lyrics.
Who needs lyrics to make immediate sense anyway - 99 percent of pop makes no sense at all. Delivery-wise Simon is nothing without Garfunkel baby.
No comparison - like comparing Judy Blume to Melville.
it's all base stuff fit for a teenager.
This is true for the Simon and Garfunkle albums because, well, they were basically teenagers. But you wouldn't say that about songs like "Still Crazy" or "Slip Slidin' Away," which deal with themes that don't occur to most teenagers.
I love it when I get to a new conclusion about what his lyrics.
While I'm sure this is a fun game for you, those conclusions are yours alone and weren't necessarily put there by Dylan. You might very well come to new conclusions about the ingredients on the back of a cereal box, too, but that doesn't mean that there is some deeper meaning there.
I can't comment on lyrics. It's not even that I don't have the words. It's just... meh.
Cereal box. That's funny because it's true ;-)
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