So Lyrical

Don't say what you really mean...

You left the motor running/but I know you’re so attractive

One of my favourite lyrics of all time. Seriously. Seriously? Yep. I adore not just what’s said, but what’s unsaid. Like the Unbirthday in Alice in Wonderland. You could argue, and you may well do so, that the elevation of mind, body, and spirit that comes with a great piece of music – whether it’s The Ace of Spades or Ace of Base – comes from music’s indefinability, and so to try and describe that process, the cause and the effect, will vampirically suck the life out of the exact thing you’re trying to laud. Lordy, there’s a sentence. That if you break down the elements you destroy the whole. To which I reply, with maturity and intellect: bullfuck.

Disentangling what makes music tick has been my life’s work, and tearing it apart and putting it back together again has given me massive pleasure. It has, I would hazard, sustained me. And because music itself, especially contemporary music, has sustained, stimulated, surprised and excited me for too many decades to count, and because talking about the whys, the wherefores and whether David Byrne was right to insist Tina Weymouth play three notes rather than two at the beginning of each bar in Once in a Lifetime with other like-minders has also brought me great joy for many years, I, you know, felt like sharing.

So here we are. Or, and there it is/and there it was. Thank you, Rob Thomas. See, the lyric writers put it better.

That opening line was actually from one of the most remarkable lyricists of the last (gulp) forty years, Elvis Costello (Declan, to his mum). From 1978’s This Year’s Model those eleven words are not even his cleverest from that era, but they serve my purpose here, which is to look at inference rather than a factual rendering. Art is always better when it’s suggestive rather than prescriptive, wouldn’t you say? The juxtaposition here works a treat, also. But it’s that ability to capture a myriad of meaning and layers of emotion in a few simple words that makes great lyrics so powerfully attractive. And the simple shades of what’s said here, bring me back to the beginning, to a typically apocryphal-but-probably-true story, one that centres on an exchange between Lennon and McCartney. And it concerns the opening track on the Beatles’ debut album, which makes it kinda significant in the rich pantheon of rock and pop.

I Saw Her Standing There. So simple, so effective. But there was some debate over that first line, apparently, an exchange of views that speaks volumes about the two disparate personalities involved. Paul had,

She was just seventeen/never been a beauty queen

Ho hum, scans well, rhymes OK, if I dare critique such a legendary figure in pop music. (I do. No one’s sacred. Not even Elvis. And, anyway, isn’t he living on the moon with Jim Morrison?) And John said, hmm, nah, it’s kinda missing something. So he said, how about

She was just seventeen/you know what I mean

And right there, I venture, rock n roll was really born. Through what wasn’t said. Through the, especially for its time, hidden yet also overt sexual reference, the slightly raised eyebrow. And what’s also exquisite is the inclusiveness of it. What’s most effective about a great pop song is its relatability, how we can identify with it, either the mood or the sentiment. John says, and yes, revisionism will tell us its sexualising young women, very young women, etc, a debate for someone else to deal with on X, but what he’s saying is, hey, you’re in on this, aren’t you? I would also venture he’s saying it to young men and women, both who bought The Beatles’ early records by, as we know, technical measurement term coming up, the fuck-tonne.

Critical to that one five word insertion, too, which is tied to the exclusivity of it, is the immediate “you’re in or out” message being delivered here. Rock/pop/contemporary music was always meant to be generationally divisive – you do not want your parents to like the music you do, OMG – and Lennon gets that bang on with that phrase also. Your Dad didn’t know what Lennon meant. And that’s the point. America might have invented the teenager, as social commentators insist, but The Beatles sure sold their dream back to them. Beautifully.

Purists will shudder, hell, purists always shudder, but there’s an echo of Lennon’s phrase in a song that totally chimed with me when I was a young adolescent. The Cars’ Let’s Go, and yes, I am comparing the Liverpudlian legends with the boys from Boston, arrived with a chime in 1979 and I just fucking loved it. Ric Ocasek, who was well into his thirties even at that stage, is another remarkable lyricist, if an oddball one. But he captured the same sentiment as Lennon in that song about nuance and lust, suggestion and potential surrender.

And she won’t give up/because she’s seventeen

Of course. No further explanation needed. She’s seventeen. That’s all we need to know. (Oh, okay, Ric drops in a further substantiation along the same lines:

She’s so beautiful now/she doesn’t wear her shoes

Love it.)

Given our current climes for outrageous reaction to anything deemed to be suspiciously ill-intended or just plain unacceptable, a brief swerve to cover off anyone who might consider all this a little “unsavoury” or even “offensive”. Que? Oh, you know, John and Paul in their twenties, Ric Ocasek, heaven forbid, in his thirties when that song was written, writing lustful thoughts about teenage girls. (Is that a yawn I see before me?) So let’s get this out of the way: just in case the fairly obvious escapes you, oh offended canceller: songwriters, like dramatists, novelists and, indeed, actors, are very rarely the “I” in the song. They are writing from a perspective, they are playing a part, reflecting on an observation. To think it’s “gross” for a Ric to write about a teenage chick (!) is to miss the fucking point entirely. These are characters, scenarios, imaginings.

This line of lyrical expression, from wee Elvis through to big Ric, suggest to me something far more seemly than plain old lust (although plain old lust is fine, hell, rock n roll was built on it FFS) – it’s about trying to capture something ephemeral, about the elusive grasp for an illusion, it’s about what Shakespeare did when he wrote, “shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Yep, even the greatest writer in the English language had to start with a comparison when trying to describe his romantic yearnings. All the good lyricists reach, maybe over-reach, in an attempt to capture that thought. As Paddy McAloon, one of the greatest pop lyricists ever so beautifully put it:

Words are trains/for moving past what really has no name

And the reason I love these three examples, is they do so in the fewest words possible. Concision is admirable.

If you want a more direct expression, songwise, with what I’m getting at here, we can finish with Jerry Harrison, the ex-Talking Header (and Modern Lover, let’s not forget) who, although the song title Man With A Gun gives no hint of it, captures explicitly and exquisitely the whole concept of trying to put in words something almost indefinable and unexplainable.

A pretty girl, a pretty girl
Can walk anywhere
All doors open for her
Like a breath of fresh air
Her beauty, it precedes her
First class on the plane, closed door of the club
All faces turn, all faces turn

Indeed they do, Mr Harrison, indeed they do.

Stay tuned.