Greetings, gentle readers.
Once, long ago, I promised that I would get around to my taxonomy of musical lyrics. This is me rather belatedly following up on that promise/threat. Years back, I was making a chronological mix of Beatles tracks, and began to notice a pattern that seemed to parallel the development of Lennon and McCartney's increasing artistic acumen. I meditated on how later Beatles songs had an entirely different lyrical feel to them, and wondered how to track the stages of the movement from their early, chirpy, pop-esque songs to their later ballads and introspective rhapsodies.
The answer as I saw it was based on the pronouns in the lyrics.
Early Beatles songs from the first LP releases were predominantly filled with lyrical content like the following from 1963:
Misery -
"I've lost her now for sure / I won't see her no more / It's gonna be a drag.../ Misery."
Please Please Me -
"Last night I said these words to my girl / I know you never even try, girl."
P.S. I Love You -
"As I write this letter / Send my love to you / Remember that I'll always / Be in love with you."
Love Me Do -
"Love, love me do / You know I love you / I'll always be true / So please, love me do."
Easy pattern to spot, really. The trend is even pronounced in the titles: "If I Fell", "I'll Be Back", "I'll Cry Instead.", "I Wanna Be Your Man.", "I'm a Loser", "I'll Follow The Sun," and "I Need You."
First person declarative lyrics, describing first hand emotions and events are de rigeur for this stage of lyrical development. At this level of maturity, the focus is on the lyricist and his experiences. Audiences are invited into the songwriter's world and try and sympathize with his situation. Essentially an ego-centric attitude is portrayed - one which integrates all experience into personal and reactive responses.
The next stages follow logically. As the songwriter is integrated more and more into the world of others, and learns to respect the feelings and perspectives of people outside of the self, the focus of the songs begins to change towards projection rather than interpolation.
The Beatles reach this stage around 1964-1965 with the LP "Help", driven I suspect by John's expanding imaginative capacity. There are a couple of early examples, but they don't become prevalent for another couple of years. "She Loves You" for example, wasn't even included on a Capital LP during its initial release. The following demonstrate the diversification of the narrative voice:
You've Got To Hide Your Love Away -
"Gather round all you clowns / Let me hear you say / Hey, you've got to hide your love away."
You're Gonna Lose That Girl -
"You're going to lose that girl / If you don't take her out tonight / She's going to change her mind."
Tell Me What You See -
"Open up your eyes now, tell me what you see / It is no surprise now, what you see is me."
The trend continues further through 1966's "Rubber Soul."
After starting to give more than token attention to other people outside of the self, the third stage is to integrate the self into a sense of community. The self and the second person merge into a second-person plural. "We all live in a yellow submarine.", "Two of us Sunday driving, not arriving, on our way back home.", "Why don't we do it in the road? No one will be watching us..." are all prime examples of how the lyricist has incorporated the world of others into his perspective. "All Together Now" pretty much sums it up.
The fourth stage, and you should all be way ahead of me on this one, is total third-person. No reference to the self or to the audience - just a story about someone outside of the emotional immediacy of that relationship, but within the universal emotional confluence of the human situation. The songs are no longer about "me" and "you" or "us" and "them", they are stories that exist in the greater social dialogue and provide insights varying according to the perspective of the observer. The Beatles no longer merely wanted to hold their fans' hands, or sail with them on a yellow submarine. instead, we are introduced to a whole cavalcade of characters, and what we think and make of them is our business and our prerogative. Father McKenzie, Eleanor Rigby, Maxwell Edison, Mother Nature's Son, Mean Mr. Mustard and Polythene Pam exist as individual literary entities, and any interpretations of their actions takes place entirely outside of the Beatles. We can negotiate however we like with them independently of personal involvement from the songwriters.
Finally, we reach Stage Five, which abandons characters and begins to speak in imagery and metaphor. Suddenly, we no longer need people to illustrate emotions, we can skip straight to sensory appeals and the general situation of negotiating with the world around us.
Across The Universe (1970) -
"Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup / They slither while they pass, they slip away across the universe."
We no longer have to sympathize, empathize, relate, or pity characters, we can face the situations ourselves, and experience the emotions first-hand. Rather than watching someone and negotiating with what they're feeling, we find ourselves instead listening to blackbirds singing in the dead of night, and what we feel is real, because we create it.
Junk (1969) -
"Motorcars, handlebars, bicycles for two / Broken hearted jubilee / Parachutes, army boots, sleeping bags for two. "
This is the most advanced and mature lyrical structure for a song, and not surprisingly, the least commonly found.
So there you have it. My guide to the post-modern criticism of popular musical lyrics.
Now, if you'll forgive me, I'm going to begin working on my analysis and interpretation of Liverpool FC's last couple of matches, and my predictions on the conclusion of the Champions' League. Too much aesthetics gives me a headache. Time for some athletics, instead. Congratulations to everyone and anyone who managed to wade through this whole pile of tripe and emerging with any viable cognitive sense. My love goes out to all of you. Cheers,
-mARKUS
^+Justice for the 96+^
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1 comment:
Hey everybody.
Just thought that I might add some addenda to the above treatise. I was getting sick of my own pedantry and wrapped the thing up before I could really get into the application and delineation of the system I outlined.
First of all, it should be stated that emotional maturity does not necessarily equate to a better song. A lot of my favourite Lightning Seeds songs rarely venture beyond stages one and two, but they are enjoyable because there are many other factors to consider in the totality of a work - rhythm, harmony, melody, sound layering and arrangement, etc.
Another important distinction that ought to be made is that songs are often not characterized by a single stage - "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" for example, has a lot of stage four writing, but the song itself is essentially structured as a stage two ("picture yourself") work.
And although it probably need not be stated, the taxonomic system only applies to music with lyrics. In a way, instrumental music can be far more psychologically mature in its appeal, since only sounds are used to communicate feeling.
Finally, it would probably have been a good idea to cite examples of songs outside of the Beatles archives. "Jump Around" by House of Pain is quite possibly the most archetypical stage one song I can imagine, "Like You Do" is a great stage two composition without any self-referential content from the Lightning Seeds, "Life in a Northern Town" by the Dream Academy is a very good example of stage three, while there are numerous stage four songs that followed the Beatles' lead - "Jack and Diane" by John Cougar Mellancamp and "Veronica" by Elvis Costello are obvious demonstrations; and finally, it's tough to find a lot of stage five songs, but there are a whack of Manic Street Preachers songs the lyrics of which read like an incisive commentary on abstract emotion in the middle of a Political Science lecture. I guess that I would say that those count. There are some other songs with a strong fifth stage influence, like Derek and the Dominoes' "Thorn Tree in the Garden", that should get an honourable mention. Anyway, must fly. Back soon.
By the way, what's in Sammamish? I know it's a sleepy suburb of Seattle, but that's about it.
Cheers,
-mARKUS
^+Justice for the 96+^
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