Fruit-Covered Nails

At some point in 1997, I bought issue no. 1 of “Music” magazine for $4.00 plus tax at 33 Degrees in Austin. It was an obscure fanzine with a strong graphic sense and an avant-garde bent focused on a NYC/Tokyo axis. The pages included ads for Boredoms Super Roots 6, interviews with Gary Numan and Christian Marclay, poetry and prose by Nam June Paik in tribute to David Tudor, a two page photo of Sugarloaf Mountain with text about Caetano Veloso above, and Yamataka Eye interviewed by Takehisa Kosugi.

In addition to these was an essay by Abigail Susik and Mark McManus regarding the lyrics of Pavement. The essay is of an academic nature, which can sometimes be rather dangerous ground. However, in this case, even with bullshit detector fully engaged I found the article extremely insightful, and it echoed some of my own thoughts on the matter. The magazine is long since defunct, and I couldn’t find the essay on the internet anywhere. Thus I feel it’s valid to present it below to allow for modern analysis of the subject. As I noted, the essay was written by Abigail Susik and Mark McManus; if either of them wants it taken down, please feel free to contact us.

I learned the truth
The truth in the words
Truth I made for you
Because its just as good
And if I spit it out
Before I chew up the ring
I’ll rearrange it
‘Till it looks just right today.

Lies and betrayals
Fruit-covered nails
Electricity and lust
Won’t break the door
I got a heavy coat
It’s filled with rocks and sand
And if I lose it
I’ll be coming back one day.

- Steve Malkmus, “Trigger Cut”

As cheeky as it may sound, it may not be completely off-base to say that Pavement’s “Trigger Cut” isn’t laying down the law for how a lyric should be written — instead, it seems to be reveling in the “spit” of the writing process. At the risk of categorizing what doesn’t need to be categorized, “Trigger Cut” could be considered a song that makes the leap from Modernism to Postmodernism (and, perhaps, beyond) all at once: besides being self-referential and concerned with the more formal aspects of writing lyrics, “Trigger Cut” questions the idea of the conveyance of singular “truths” and thereby acknowledges the autonomy of language. The song writer describes his task as “spitting” out words, “chewing” them up, and “rearranging” them: a description which voices the song writer’s desire for a verbal re-situating which will alter the surface area, the “look” and sound of the lyrics. At another level, “Trigger Cut” is concerned with the malleability and multiplicity of a song writer’s “message”: “I learned the truth/The truth in the words/Truth I made for you”, suggests a move away from one-sided logic and rhetoric, into a thought process that is not based on the simple communication of singular “truths”. Malkmus implies with his personal version of “truth” (“Truth I made for you”) that there can be many truths in many separate words which have various meanings themselves, all of them “just as good”. Malkmus’s truth can even change on a daily basis; he rearranges a song “‘Till it looks just right today”. But, where “Trigger Cut” actively switches from one mind-set to the next, from what is “Modern” to what is “Postmodern”, is in its change from self-referentially speaking about the innate value of “words”, “truth”, and language, to actually demonstrating the ideas in the lyrics: “Lies and betrayals/Fruit-covered nails/Electricity and lust…”, is not merely nonsense language, or the offspring of arbitrary Surrealist experiments, but a more semiotic exploration of language and all of its flexibilities. It is this activation of “the truth in the words” that allows the lyrics in “Trigger Cut” to take on a certain reverberation and sonic quality of their own.

True, singer/songwriters such as Bob Dylan have previously addressed self-referentiality and employed lyrics that stretch the limits of everyday language; but, where contemporary songwriters such as Malkmus depart from their predecessors is in their forementioned Postmodern sensibility and in the particulars of their lyrical structures. Whereas artists such as Dylan and, in their farther reaching moments, the Beatles, may have incorporated free association and other avant-garde elements into the formation of their imagery, the sentence structure of their lyrics operates in accordance to standard convention. For instance, in “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”, John Lennon writes, “Picture yourself in a boat on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies”; despite the obviously Surrealistic content of it’s [sic] imagery, the sentence structure of the lyrics retains a consistent verb tense and “correct” subject-verb agreement. It is true that, often, especially in Dylan’s case, the “conventional” structures of these songs are stocked with a super-charged approach to phraseology; but, as colorful and as rich as the sound of their choices may be, their structures still stay within the borders of the standard lyric.

Without questioning the entire history of the lyric and its importance in the popular song, it is feasible to argue that Pavement, among other mainstream pop artists, such as The Pixies, and Beck have begun to pay more attention to what could be called “the integrity of the word”. Rather than including the lyric merely as a component of a catchy rhyme scheme, or even as a more involved particular of a narrative “story”, such artists have begun to use the sheer sonority of words to create more of an effect or experience than to relay message or commentary. A quote by poet Joseph Ceravolo may be helpful in explaining this round-about manner of communication.

Ceravolo once said of his own writing that he “didn’t so much express emotions as observe the linguistic constellations that grouped themselves during or around an emotion”. Ceravolo is discussing the web of meaning that encircles every word and the strings of association that branch into other words: language as an infinite network of connotation. The “integrity of the word” acknowledges this network, as well as the material and sensory qualities of a word (such as the way it sounds), while allowing the word to function in a more expansive way than the referential, use-value system of every day communication.

Even if bands such as Pavement and The Pixies do not fasten themselves permanently to this mode of writing, they do touch upon it in a number of songs. To suggest that popular music may be heading there does seem to be a discernible leaning, however categorizable that may be (i.e. young, white, suburban, middle class), to a different way of saying things. Exactly what has influenced these artists can really only be known by the artists themselves. Whether it is modern poetry that has affected these lyrics (Stephen Malkmus is said to be influenced by the poetry of John Ashbery), or just the fragmentation of every day life in late 20th-century America, their regard to language and its function within a song is taking the lyric in interesting, if not ground-breaking, directions.