I should hope no apology is needed that this month's column is
not about hi-fi as such, but about what hi-fi is for - music.
Next month's column will be about another novel idea for a
minimalist pre-amplifier. In the meantime I thought I'd take
"time-out" from electronics and talk about what is sometimes
(appallingly in my opinion) called , "the software".
The domination of the chart scene by dance music has had one
profound effect on popular music today and that is the death of
the lyric - indeed the threatened death of the popular song form
itself. Put in this way, I believe we ought to regard dance as a
"pure music" form - more akin to classical music than to the
aural song tradition which has formed the basis of all folk,
rock and pop music until now. Both the emphasis on the
exploration of electronic timbre and texture for its own sake,
and the use of sampling, betrays dance music's roots in the
experimental electronic and "music concrete" studios of the
post-war avant-garde. A very different kettle-of-fish it is then
to the tradition of the song which reaches back to the
pre-literate past. (Of course, rap music represents an important
exception but in rap, the message - albeit often distastefully
xenophobic and misogynous - is of such overriding importance
that this type of music is a form of poetry and not a musical
form at all.)
To me, this emergence of a pure, popular musical form is both a
good thing and a bad. Good, because the exploration of
pure-sound is very far from the meretricious experimentation
which it is sometimes accused of being. (Why should musicians
not blend sounds in a manner to delight our sense of hearing in
the same way a cook might explore different ingredients to
delight our sense of taste?) Bad, because it cuts us off from
the vital tradition of the finely crafted three minute song. Put
another way, where are the "our song"s of the future?
I don't suppose anyone can know exactly when the song-form first
developed but it was an invention every bit as important as the
wheel. (Although , come to think of it, where would Bruce
Springsteen be without both inventions?) The first songs I
remember were folk-tunes which we learned at school. And it's
odd, how thirty years later I discover that I learned highly
sanitised versions of these most early songs. For instance
although I remember singing, "She Moved Through the Fair", I
don't remember singing the final verse,
I dreamt it last night that my young love came in,
So softly she entered, her feet made no din,
She came close beside me, and this she did say,
"It will not be long, love, till our wedding day."
With the inclusion of this last verse, what a perfect blend of
everything a good song should be this becomes. It's delightful,
humorous in a way that is delicately self-mocking, erotic but
not licentious. These attributes are what attracts me to, what I
consider to be the great period of song writing, the
nineteen-twenties, thirties and forties. Whether it's Jerome
Kern's and Dorothy Fields' A Fine Romance or Cole Porter's,
There's no love song finer
But how strange, the change
From major to minor
Everytime we say goodbye.
where the delicate double rhymes and the musical prosody to
mimic the words "major to minor" shows a creative deftness which
is quite wonderful. Which brings me to Gershwin and Gershwin,
and my "desert island" lyric,
In time the Rockies may crumble
Gibraltar may tumble,
They're only made of clay
But our love is here to stay.
A characteristic of these lyrics, typical of the words of the
popular song during the twenties, thirties and forties, is their
air of urbane detachment. For instance, although it's
fascinating to speculate that perhaps that most urbane and
detached practicioner of all, Noel Coward, spoke a little from
the heart of his homosexuality when he wrote,
I'm mad about the boy
And I know it's stupid
To be mad about the boy
I'm so ashamed of it
But must admit the sleepless nights
I've had about the boy
....... but somehow I doubt it. Nonetheless the song finishes with as
brilliant an expression of unrequited love as I know,
Will it ever cloy
This odd diversity of misery and joy
I'm feeling quite insane
And young again
And all because I'm mad about the boy.
Now, I'm not for a minute suggesting that the art of great lyric
writing is dead - far from it. However the modern songwriter
just has to be so-o-o-o serious!
The boy child is locked in the fisherman's yard
There's a bloodless moon where the oceans die
A shoal of nightstars hang fire in the nets
And the chaos of cages where the crayfish lie.
It's brilliant but, blimey Sting, it's grim stuff - Samuel
Taylor Coleridge on 48 track digital! Neither is the eloquent
romantic dead either, at least whilst we still have Annie Lennox,
Stay by me
And make the moment last
Please take these lips
Even if I have been kissed
A million times
And I don't care if there is no tomorrow
When I could die here in your arms
but it is very earnest.
Of course teeny-pop still provides a lightweight alternative,but even the
titles don't
auger well for the following lyric. And when you listen to the
lyric, well.....your pessimism's not disappointed!
Meanwhile in Napoleon's Pizza House there are the ghosts of
Saturday night.
And a cab combs the snake trying to rake in that last night's
fare and a solitary sailor who spends the facts of his life like
small change on strangers pauses inside peekhole park for a
welcome 25 cents and the last bent butt from a package of Kent's
as he dreams of the waitress with Maxwell House eyes and
marmalade thighs with scrambled yellow hair and a rhinestone
studded monarch he says "Irene" as she wipes a wisp of dishwater
blonde from her eyes and the Texaco bacon burns on a steel
belted attendant with a ringing valve special crying "fill her
up and check that oil you know it could be the distributor and
it could be your coil".
Is it any wonder, when lyrics have reached this sophisticated
synthesis of James Joyce and Raymond Chandler, there's perhaps
nowhere left to go. Conceivably, that's why dance music has
emerged as a strong force. Not so much a denial of the lyric as
a reaction against a kind of brick wall brought about by the
polarization of the contemporary lyric between the high-brow
existentialist's creation of meaning and the puerile. Perhaps
rock has finally hit the same crisis which has hit all the arts
in the 20th century, the "Where do we go now?" crisis.
In my heart, I don't believe it has. After all Brucey can still
find it in his heart to write,
You can't start a fire
You can't start a fire without a spark
This gun's for hire
Even if we're just dancing in the dark.
I hope it hasn't because, to re-quote Tom Waits, if we don't
have lyrics all we'll have is
Poetry and prose and Martha
All I had was you
And all you had was me.
