7 hours ago
(This post was last modified: 6 hours ago by RiverNotch.)
While this would fit very well in the thread on the Beatles....
https://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/music/lyrics-che.php
For an essay published in 1967, a lot of what it says still rings true today, and not just over what it says about 1967. I encourage y'all to read the whole essay, but here are some snippets.
> A term like "Rock" is impossibly vague; it denotes, if anything, something historical rather than aesthetic.
> Poems are read or said. Songs are sung...."My Back Pages" is a bad poem. But it is a good song, supported by a memorable refrain....Dylan is a songwriter, not a poet.
> An art advances through technical innovation. Modern American poetry assumes (and sometimes eliminates) metaphoric ability, concentrating on the use of line and rhythm to approximate (or refine) speech, the reduction of language to essentials, and "tone of voice". Dylan's only innovation is that he sings....
> Not much better is the self-indulgence of the Doors' Jim Morrison....
> "Mass art" and "kitsch" are pretty vague as well....Kitsch is a more snobbish concept, and a more sophisticated product. It usually has the look of slightly out-of-date avant-garde in order to give its audience the illusion of aesthetic pleasure, whatever that is. An important distinction, I think, is that many of the craftsmen who make kitsch believe thoroughly in what they are doing. That may be true of the creators of mass art, too, but their attitude is more businesslike--they don't worry about "art," only commercial appeal....Paul Simon's lyrics are the purest, highest, and most finely wrought kitsch of our time. The lyrics I've been putting down are not necessarily easy to write--bad poetry is often carefully worked, the difference being that it's easier to perceive flaccidly--but the labor that must go into one of Simon's songs is of another order of magnitude.
> This kind of mindless craft reaches a peak in Simon's supposed masterpiece, "The Dangling Conversation," which uses all the devices you learn about in English class--alliteration, alternating concretion and abstraction, even the use of images from poetry itself, a favorite ploy of poets who don't know much of anything else--to mourn wistfully about the classic plight of self-conscious man, his Inability to Communicate....If Simon were just a little hipper, his couple would be discussing the failure of communication as they failed to communicate, rather than psychoanalysis or the state of the theatre. But he's not a little hipper.
> It is by creating a mood that asks "Why should this mean anything?" that the so-called rock poets can really write poetry--poetry that not only says something, but says it as only rock music can. For once Marshall McLuhan's terminology tells us something: rock lyrics are a cool medium....The only songwriters who seem really to have mastered it are John Phillips and Lennon-McCartney.
> Phillips achieves rock feel with his arrangements....Lennon-McCartney do it with diction. Their early work is all pure rock....By the time of A Hard Day's Night the songs are more sophisticated musically, and a year later, in Help!, the boys are becoming pop songwriters....Words like "self-assured" and "insecure" are not out of rock diction, nor is the line: "My independence seems to vanish in the haze." This facet of their talent has culminated (for the moment) in songs like "Paperback Writer," "A Little Help From My Friends," and "When I'm Sixty-four," which show all the verbal facility of the best traditional pop and none of the sentimentality, and in deliberate exercises like "Michelle" and "Here, There and Everywhere," which show both....Other songs like "Norwegian Wood," "Dr. Robert," "Good Morning, Good Morning" are ambiguous despite an unerring justness of concrete detail; little conundrums, different from Dylanesque surrealism because they don't fit so neatly into a literary category (Edward Lear is their closest antecedent)....Often the Beatles' "I" is much harder to pin down than the "I" in Donovan or Jagger-Richard....This concern with angle of attack is similar to that of poets like Creeley....Lennon and McCartney are the only rock songwriters who combine high literacy (as high as Dylan's or Simon's) with an eye of concision and a truly contemporary sense of what fits.
> [Lennon-McCartney] have written two songs which are purely colloquial: "She Said She Said" and "All You Need Is Love"...."She Said She Said" is at once one of the most difficult and banal of Beatle songs. It is a concrete version of what in "The Dangling Conversation" (despite all those details) remains abstract, a conversation between a hung-up, self-important girl who says she knows "what it's like to be dead" and her boy friend, who doesn't want to know...."All You Need Is Love," deliberately written in basic English so it could be translated, makes the connection clearer by quoting from "She Loves You" while conveying the ironic message of the title. Is love all you need? What kind of love? Universal love? Love of country? Courtly love? "She Loves You" love? It's hard to tell. The song employs rock-and-roll--dominant music, big beat, repeated refrain, simple diction--and transforms it into something which, if not poetry, at least has a multifaceted poetic wholeness. I think it is rock poetry in the truest sense.
> Maybe I am being too strict. Modern poetry is doing very well, thank you, on its own terms, but in terms of what it is doing for us, and even for the speech from which it derives, it looks a bit pallid. Never take the categories too seriously. It may be that the new songwriters (not poets, please) lapse artistically, indulge their little infatuations with language and ideas, and come up with a product that could be much better if handled with a little less energy and a little more caution. But energy is where it's at. And songs--even though they are only songs--may soon be more important than poems, no matter that they are easier too....Once there were bards and the bards did something wondrous--they provided literature for the illiterate. The bards evolved into poets and the poetry which had been their means became their end. It didn't seem to matter much after a while, since everyone was literate anyway. But semiliteracy, which is where people go when they're not illiterate any more, is in some ways a worse blight.
The general observations still hold true more than fifty years later. Modern American poetry is still aptly described as Christgau put it. Semiliteracy is arguably a bigger problem now than it was back in Christgau's time, considering the hell that is social media. And his particular observations on the artists he mentions are, I think, correct. I enjoy Dylan's songs, but they are difficult to anthologize as poetry: the Nobel got from him much more than he got from the committee. Ditto Paul Simon's songs post Garfunkel....with Garfunkel, I find him pretty dull. Jim Morrison's also pretty dull, but in the exact opposite way, pretending to the fundamentals as Simon and Garfunkel pretended to sophistication, and he sometimes gets so dull that he loops back around to being exciting again, though likely not as he meant. John Phillips does match the level of the songwriters Ella Fitzgerald meticulously anthologized in the late 50s to the early 60s. And John Lennon and Paul McCartney go beyond John Phillips, setting the standard for their era like Cole Porter or Irving Berlin did for their own.
Where things get really interesting, for me, is how the observations might also hold true for hip hop, as well as how exactly the torch was passed between rock and hip hop. I think I've attempted to highlight some rap songs in PotD before. When starting out, I believe I once made the mistake of posting what was effectively a Paul Simon or a Jim Morrison: good song, terrible poem. Then gradually I alternated between the levels of Dylan and Lennon-McCartney. I find it fascinating how Kendrick Lamar, probably the biggest rap star at the moment, is very much like Dylan in that, even on the page, his erudition is readily apparent, but his works are difficult to anthologize as poetry: as poetry, they perhaps depend on devices too archaic for modern sensibilities, however much his diction might suggest otherwise. Aesop Rock and Noname have proven surprisingly easy to anthologize....only Aesop Rock is white, and Noname once complained that her audiences very rarely featured people of the same race as her, to the point that she's had to feature Jay Electronica in her latest album. Which makes me wonder: is it just me, or is "Modern [American] poetry" a more or less white standard? But then, where do figures like Langston Hughes fit into this?
https://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/music/lyrics-che.php
For an essay published in 1967, a lot of what it says still rings true today, and not just over what it says about 1967. I encourage y'all to read the whole essay, but here are some snippets.
> A term like "Rock" is impossibly vague; it denotes, if anything, something historical rather than aesthetic.
> Poems are read or said. Songs are sung...."My Back Pages" is a bad poem. But it is a good song, supported by a memorable refrain....Dylan is a songwriter, not a poet.
> An art advances through technical innovation. Modern American poetry assumes (and sometimes eliminates) metaphoric ability, concentrating on the use of line and rhythm to approximate (or refine) speech, the reduction of language to essentials, and "tone of voice". Dylan's only innovation is that he sings....
> Not much better is the self-indulgence of the Doors' Jim Morrison....
> "Mass art" and "kitsch" are pretty vague as well....Kitsch is a more snobbish concept, and a more sophisticated product. It usually has the look of slightly out-of-date avant-garde in order to give its audience the illusion of aesthetic pleasure, whatever that is. An important distinction, I think, is that many of the craftsmen who make kitsch believe thoroughly in what they are doing. That may be true of the creators of mass art, too, but their attitude is more businesslike--they don't worry about "art," only commercial appeal....Paul Simon's lyrics are the purest, highest, and most finely wrought kitsch of our time. The lyrics I've been putting down are not necessarily easy to write--bad poetry is often carefully worked, the difference being that it's easier to perceive flaccidly--but the labor that must go into one of Simon's songs is of another order of magnitude.
> This kind of mindless craft reaches a peak in Simon's supposed masterpiece, "The Dangling Conversation," which uses all the devices you learn about in English class--alliteration, alternating concretion and abstraction, even the use of images from poetry itself, a favorite ploy of poets who don't know much of anything else--to mourn wistfully about the classic plight of self-conscious man, his Inability to Communicate....If Simon were just a little hipper, his couple would be discussing the failure of communication as they failed to communicate, rather than psychoanalysis or the state of the theatre. But he's not a little hipper.
> It is by creating a mood that asks "Why should this mean anything?" that the so-called rock poets can really write poetry--poetry that not only says something, but says it as only rock music can. For once Marshall McLuhan's terminology tells us something: rock lyrics are a cool medium....The only songwriters who seem really to have mastered it are John Phillips and Lennon-McCartney.
> Phillips achieves rock feel with his arrangements....Lennon-McCartney do it with diction. Their early work is all pure rock....By the time of A Hard Day's Night the songs are more sophisticated musically, and a year later, in Help!, the boys are becoming pop songwriters....Words like "self-assured" and "insecure" are not out of rock diction, nor is the line: "My independence seems to vanish in the haze." This facet of their talent has culminated (for the moment) in songs like "Paperback Writer," "A Little Help From My Friends," and "When I'm Sixty-four," which show all the verbal facility of the best traditional pop and none of the sentimentality, and in deliberate exercises like "Michelle" and "Here, There and Everywhere," which show both....Other songs like "Norwegian Wood," "Dr. Robert," "Good Morning, Good Morning" are ambiguous despite an unerring justness of concrete detail; little conundrums, different from Dylanesque surrealism because they don't fit so neatly into a literary category (Edward Lear is their closest antecedent)....Often the Beatles' "I" is much harder to pin down than the "I" in Donovan or Jagger-Richard....This concern with angle of attack is similar to that of poets like Creeley....Lennon and McCartney are the only rock songwriters who combine high literacy (as high as Dylan's or Simon's) with an eye of concision and a truly contemporary sense of what fits.
> [Lennon-McCartney] have written two songs which are purely colloquial: "She Said She Said" and "All You Need Is Love"...."She Said She Said" is at once one of the most difficult and banal of Beatle songs. It is a concrete version of what in "The Dangling Conversation" (despite all those details) remains abstract, a conversation between a hung-up, self-important girl who says she knows "what it's like to be dead" and her boy friend, who doesn't want to know...."All You Need Is Love," deliberately written in basic English so it could be translated, makes the connection clearer by quoting from "She Loves You" while conveying the ironic message of the title. Is love all you need? What kind of love? Universal love? Love of country? Courtly love? "She Loves You" love? It's hard to tell. The song employs rock-and-roll--dominant music, big beat, repeated refrain, simple diction--and transforms it into something which, if not poetry, at least has a multifaceted poetic wholeness. I think it is rock poetry in the truest sense.
> Maybe I am being too strict. Modern poetry is doing very well, thank you, on its own terms, but in terms of what it is doing for us, and even for the speech from which it derives, it looks a bit pallid. Never take the categories too seriously. It may be that the new songwriters (not poets, please) lapse artistically, indulge their little infatuations with language and ideas, and come up with a product that could be much better if handled with a little less energy and a little more caution. But energy is where it's at. And songs--even though they are only songs--may soon be more important than poems, no matter that they are easier too....Once there were bards and the bards did something wondrous--they provided literature for the illiterate. The bards evolved into poets and the poetry which had been their means became their end. It didn't seem to matter much after a while, since everyone was literate anyway. But semiliteracy, which is where people go when they're not illiterate any more, is in some ways a worse blight.
The general observations still hold true more than fifty years later. Modern American poetry is still aptly described as Christgau put it. Semiliteracy is arguably a bigger problem now than it was back in Christgau's time, considering the hell that is social media. And his particular observations on the artists he mentions are, I think, correct. I enjoy Dylan's songs, but they are difficult to anthologize as poetry: the Nobel got from him much more than he got from the committee. Ditto Paul Simon's songs post Garfunkel....with Garfunkel, I find him pretty dull. Jim Morrison's also pretty dull, but in the exact opposite way, pretending to the fundamentals as Simon and Garfunkel pretended to sophistication, and he sometimes gets so dull that he loops back around to being exciting again, though likely not as he meant. John Phillips does match the level of the songwriters Ella Fitzgerald meticulously anthologized in the late 50s to the early 60s. And John Lennon and Paul McCartney go beyond John Phillips, setting the standard for their era like Cole Porter or Irving Berlin did for their own.
Where things get really interesting, for me, is how the observations might also hold true for hip hop, as well as how exactly the torch was passed between rock and hip hop. I think I've attempted to highlight some rap songs in PotD before. When starting out, I believe I once made the mistake of posting what was effectively a Paul Simon or a Jim Morrison: good song, terrible poem. Then gradually I alternated between the levels of Dylan and Lennon-McCartney. I find it fascinating how Kendrick Lamar, probably the biggest rap star at the moment, is very much like Dylan in that, even on the page, his erudition is readily apparent, but his works are difficult to anthologize as poetry: as poetry, they perhaps depend on devices too archaic for modern sensibilities, however much his diction might suggest otherwise. Aesop Rock and Noname have proven surprisingly easy to anthologize....only Aesop Rock is white, and Noname once complained that her audiences very rarely featured people of the same race as her, to the point that she's had to feature Jay Electronica in her latest album. Which makes me wonder: is it just me, or is "Modern [American] poetry" a more or less white standard? But then, where do figures like Langston Hughes fit into this?