Opinion
Something asinine today, king?1 In the spirit of Watcher’s top five beatdown I thought I might meander through something that’s been plaguing me for however many years I’ve been in fandom: song lyrics.
The National. Florence + The Machine. The Mountain Goats. Phoebe Bridgers. Mitski. I’m sure you could name more, but off the top of my head these are some of the keynote speakers in fic-naming conventions (a pun! a pun!). Song fic has been a thing forever, as has making graphics and edits based on lyrics. In the wider world, lyrics exist as black text on white twitter screenshots with quote tweets saying ‘so true bestie 😭’. People have them tattooed, which, sure, it’s no back piece of Message to the Public, but I guess I can see why they would do that.
What’s the relation of these lyrics to the music they come from? One comparison might be the relation of a film script to its cinematography, although I’ve always found that the divorce of lyric from song is so much more prevalent than the divorce of script from film. Even on your garden variety cinema quote daily instagrams you’re more likely to get a screencap of when the quote was said than black Courier New text on white; in this sense, the script defers to its visual in a way that lyrics don’t often do to melody.
Part of this deference might stem from the fact that you generally do need a script to make a movie.2 You don’t need lyrics to write music, and you may not need music to write lyrics. One famous example is the Beatles’ Yesterday originally being ‘scrambled eggs’. Another is that other great darling of fandom, Sappho (if you’re on tumblr or into fan culture in general you cannot tell me that you’ve never seen ‘someone will remember us / I say / even in another time’).
Greek lyric, to do a disservice to my history training and cite directly from wikipedia, generally refers to poetry ‘composed for public or private performance by a soloist or chorus’, i.e. either with musical accompaniment or to be sung.3 Indeed the origin of the word ‘lyric’ was probably from the Greek ‘lyre’.4 How we read Sappho and other ancient lyric poems, however, is as poems; they’re removed from whatever music they might once have been set to.5 And that’s how the term developed, too, in the sense of ‘lyric’ being used to describe sonnets or odes around the Renaissance and then really hitting its stride with the Romantics.6 (Shoutout to That Dope Ancient Vase.)7
This gets a bit into the muddy waters of ‘is songwriting poetry’, although I’d guess the average consumer of Sapphic fragments doesn’t think of them as songs.8 Anyways, this brouhaha was brouhahaed when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and isn’t really the point of this post insofar as this post has an actual point. Which is that lyrics don’t matter.
Gasp! Horror! Agent Provocateur!
Ok, that’s a slight exaggeration for the Bit. It’s not that they don’t matter, but that I’m not all that bothered about them as much as I care about the music. To me it’s either a secondary thing - in that it matters mainly in context of the melody - or a completely separate thing - hence the instagram posts, and the way the weight changes as a printed quote vs. something you listen to. I’m sure I have favourite lyrics (although I genuinely can’t think of any right now) but they aren’t related to favourite songs.
Way back when, someone on twitter (the aptly-named DJ!) asked people to send in the songs they thought were most beautiful. I love that resultant playlist. It’s one in a long line of other playlists and reddit threads about the beauty of song, and what I’ve noticed about them is that they tend to focus on sound. Take this reddit thread and OP’s explanation of what they mean by ‘most beautiful song’: “I love harmonious, melodical sounds. And if the song possesses some great lyrics, that blend perfectly with the melody, for me that is paradise.”
That’s how I feel about songs, I think. I don’t really care what the words are as long as it’s a beautiful melody, or rhythm, or general musicality. (It’s why I know the lyrics to approximately five songs, two of which were National Day Parade songs we had to learn in school.9) Great if they’re gorgeous lyrically! Totally fine if they were just saying ‘I’m a spaghetti meatball man’ nine times in a row! To me a song can be beautiful if it doesn’t have lyrics, or if its lyrics are terrible; a song can’t be beautiful if its melody is terrible, even if the lyrics are the second coming of [insert your favourite poet here]. It’s also why covers exist, right!10 One version of the same song can resonate so much more based on the change in music even if the lyrics are exactly the same. It’s why I grudgingly use youtube instead of spotify for Bruce Springsteen’s If I Should Fall Behind - the acoustic version is vastly superior.
Ode to an American Boss, by the way. (Going to say something sacrilegious here. Mea culpa. I’ve been for concerts! I love Bruce!) The reason I was thinking about this was Greetings from Ashbury Park, NJ, which I think someone on twitter said had the most beautiful lyrics or songs or something. The lyrics, of course, are talented, brilliant, incredible, amazing, showstopper, spectacular; the music I find ambitious at best, convoluted and messy otherwise, and is why I couldn’t agree with that assessment.11
I’m aware this is a) inane and b) probably in some kind of 2% minority. From fanmixes and playlists it seems that people do care a lot about lyrics and are able to associate them with things in the same way I’m unable to, and so I don’t suppose that this makes for particularly compelling or relatable reading.12 Sorry about that! I’m playing my usual card - yes, the something something excuse about making you think about things you wouldn’t otherwise have [fingerguns] one again.
*One exception to all this is musicals, which I think have the added necessity of telling the story through the lyrics, and so are a different beast altogether. Although this gets a bit into the muddy waters of ‘are concept albums musicals’…
Music
On a somewhat related note, here’s something that made me happy recently: Charles Cornell breaking down John Williams’ score for Close Encounters. It’s a little technical with the chords, but his absolute (and I mean this in the way of ‘total’) exhilaration of the release of buildup starting around 13:15 is just such a joy to lose yourself in.
Design and Living
Like Allegra I have also been watching a lot of interior design videos, although I guess mine are more architectural as well? - namely, tiny homes. I love putting on a Never Too Small vid in the background (although I agree that some of these aren’t particularly small; their ass is not placing 64 tiles on a sims lot). Unfortunately, the number of books I own / continue to buy will never allow me to live in a stylish, comfy, spacious yet tiny house. I have made my peace with this.
As if anything I write about on this stack isn’t asinine!
There are exceptions to the rule, certainly, including nearly-completely-improvised films like Blair Witch Project, or films with very little dialogue like Playtime. Incidentally, have you ever thought about exceptions to the rule ‘there are exceptions to rules’ and done your head in?
Sorry profs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_lyric. I later found this reference, but wikipedia was funny to leave in: https://poets.org/glossary/lyric-poetry
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100120713
As I understand it (from another reputable source, reddit) we have fragments but not full songs, and I’d guess it’s fairly unlikely most of us will hear or have heard one of these. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/23p6n9/do_we_have_any_idea_what_ancient_music_sounded/
Side note: came across this quora question as well, which felt so naively West Superior! that I had to laugh.
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095905419
Sorry for the truly unforgivable number of footnotes in this paragraph that is not from an academic paper, but thinking about Grecian Urn made me think about that quora post and, possibly, the role the Romantics played in idealising / propagating the whole Greek/Roman culture as bedrock of western civilisation thing.
Anne Carson, the translator of the most famous version, also calls them poems; so too do contemporary accounts.
One of the others is, as you’d expect, Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire.
To that point: I love Tom Ball’s cover of Sound of Silence (sorry, Simon Cowell warning) - it’s absolutely gorgeous, musically - but it didn’t occur to me until I read a youtube comment that it doesn’t fit the lyrics of the song at all.
OK, I think Growin’ Up isn’t bad. Love me a piano riff.
Not that I haven’t tried! I’ve done my share of character fanmixes but I feel like I’ve never quite gotten the spirit in the same way people who love lyrics do, and consequently always feel a bit of an imposter.