The other night I was in the bar and this band was just slugging through pretty much all of my least favorite songs: “Come and Get Your Love”; “Take on Me” and this terrible new pop song that goes “We’re up all night to get lucky.” And I don’t mean to sound misogynistic but this is the music a lot of drunk girls like: it’s light, easy, not too complicated, and it’s got happy, playful messages theoretically designed for the construction of a brief, artificial paradigm in one’s life of success and bounty.
And whatever: I’m not knocking people for listening to what they want to listen to. It’s the way the world works and we all, of course, want to be optimistic.
But I was thinking about the songs that have really had an effect on me over the years. Because of the lyrics, primarily, Everclear’s “White Men in Black Suits” came to mind. I thought of the lines “All I wanna do / Is lose myself in your room / All you want / Is just a slow fu** in the afternoon”. The song paints such a stark, vivid picture of life in San Francisco, but it’s far from flowers in your hair: another set of lyrics emits the narrative of “I still see those scary guys / When I’m all alone at night / I kiss the ring you gave me / Then I swing with all my might”.
It’s way more believable, that is, than someone coming and getting their love from the lead singer of a band named Redbone, with all due respect to that applicable party. And one thing that dawned on me just recently about “White Men in Black Suits,” with particular regards to how it functions, is that it essentially reduces humanity to a primate, more or less. The sum total of the themes handled within the songs lyrics, that is, amounts to sex and violence, both being activities of which any animal on the planet is capable, more or less. It’s a song about where the sidewalk ends [1]: the potential for human cooperation has been completely replaced by dystopic barbarism, leaving an unwavering orgy of vice and conflict to pervade the city.
Ideally, we’d like to approach and harvest positivity in our popular music, but I was just thinking of this other song I find to really stand out, which is “Cells” by the excellent Scottish twee pop outfit Teenage Fanclub. Amongst grim quips like “I don’t preach and I don’t pray / But I can feel the slow decay”, the chorus manifests the simple, vaporous mantra of “Breakin’ down / Cells / Breakin’ down / Breakin’ down / Oh no no”. It’s sad, bleak and perhaps even depressing, but it’s important to note that it’s phenomenologically sound in that it wields a very original musical tinge, and, what’s more, one that jibes with nifty authenticity with the unfavorable message being offered in the song’s words.
“Hotel California,” arguably the greatest popular rock song of all time, would be another example of the interface of a song’s lyrics representing, perhaps, not one of actual physical desolation, but an annihilation of the active self, which approximates the more basic element of loss inherent in “Cells.” The individual, obviously, has encountered a realm of sensory overload, and checked into a hotel from which they “can never leave.” The psyche has been subsumed with shiny grey matter which has occluded the conscious free-will aspect of the individual, resulting in automation to the Babylonian destination of Los Angeles. Pink Floyd’s “Time” and “Comfortably Numb” are two more examples of elite music tempering loss and mournfulness as their primary dispositions.
Writing a song with a positive message and doing so deliberately, for all our optimistic ambitions and longing for ourselves and others to succeeed, in a sense, amounts to the same sort of fallacy of “being a punk band” or “being a grunge band.” Those on this type of endeavor are bound to fail and the music will be meaningless because the music will exist on a closed circuit already active in the mind of the listener, beforehand. It’s actually worse than cliched: it’s clinically dead, a harborer of unadulterated entropy, and with a band like Nirvana, the very reason why the music works is its apparent, theoretical impossibility. The quality of the music which the left brain says can’t be achieved, the fusion of abrasive, Melvins-like punk with Beatles pop, is exactly what gives the music its zest and lasting value.
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[1] Forgive the reference: I probably rely discursively on Shel Sylverstein more than the average purportedly self-respecting 38-year-old male.
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