Rants about nothing

We can begin, as all discussion of modern pop must, with the Beach Boys's Pet Sounds: ``I know so many people who think they can go it alone./ They isolate their heads and stay in their safety zone. But what can you tell them? What can you say that won't make them defensive? Hang on to your ego! Hang on, `cause I know that you're gonna lose the fight.''(0) This is entirely clear and direct---and interesting, un-dumb lyrics.

But that was just before 1964, the year that pop decided to give up on coherence. Before: ``(Help!) I need somebody. (Help!) Not just anybody. (Help!) I need someone like you.'' After: ``I read the news today oh boy / Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire / And though the holes were rather small / They had to count them all.''(1)

Simon and Garfunkel, a decade later, tried to hold out: ``When you're down and out; when you're on the street; when evening falls so hard, I will comfort you.'' (2) But there were hints of disaster coming. E.g., they decided to omit the key line ``Love requires impossible tasks'' from Scarborough Fair. A few decades later, Paul Simon had lost it entirely: ``song dogs barking at the break of dawn/ lightning pushes at the edges of a thunderstorm/ and these streets, quiet as a sleeping army, send their battered dreams to heaven.''(3) Paul, what happened?

I think somewhere in there, the collective music authors of the world arrived at the system of equations: `clear=ditzy pop'; `obtuse=deep'. And people stick to it: the bands that are fun and poppy give very simple lyrics, with maybe a few tricks thrown in (e.g., Britney's ubiquitous eager battered wife song, `Hit me baby one more time') while the bands shooting for the fringe or the more adult market throw out a series of lines that sound related and hint at something the listener can't fathom E.g., anything by Smashing Pumpkins: ``I used to be a little boy/ so old in my shoes/ what i choose is my choice/ What's a boy supposed to do?/ The killer in me is the killer in you/ I send this smile over to you.''(4) At least it rhymes (boy/choice, you/you).

What I feel was lost was that there's an idea which drives the words, and not the other way `round. When Ginsburg wrote Howl, he had a specific person in mind and a specific story about hipsters going crazy (``Carl, while you are not safe, I am not safe/ And now you're really in the total animal soup of time.''). The words were not strict and digressed at times, but flowed from that central idea. I'm incredulous that Billy Corrigan---hipster gone crazy---had any one thing in mind when he was writing Smashing Pumpkins lyrics (especially having read his commentary in the Pisces Iscariot liner notes).

I imagine the marketing guys saying, `Kids these days, they want bands that sound like Ginsberg. They want music that makes them think. Stella, get me Ginsberg on the line .... Is he really? .... Well, OK, then how about Billy Corrigan? ... Well I can't tell the difference, and I have a Master's in marketing. How are they gonna know?'

There are certainly any of a number of bands or individual songs that strike a balance---good lyrics that are about something. Maybe the Flaming Lips or REM on a good day. [`Losing my religion' was about having a secret crush. Why was this so hard for people to work out?] My personal favorite has to be Los Planetas, Spain's answer to the alternatyve scene---notably their track `Si esta bien', a song whose lyrics basically boil down to: `If it's so easy/ If everything's going so well/ then why does it hurt like this?' They fail to describe exactly what `it' is, but in so doing, made a song which succinctly and clearly summarizes all of teen angst, relationship angst, and gallstone treatment procedure. And the guitar part rocks.

My main personal problem with that nether-region, where I can understand the words but not the meaning, is that the words become memorable enough that I find myself absentmindendly singing along to the tunes in my head: ``Alligator shoes, tarantula breath, all look good on paper, but they're scaring me to death.''(5) In other words, modern pop music has induced symptoms of schizophrenia in me.

(0) `Hang on to your ego.' The non-Brian Wilson beach boys thought it was too cynical and made him change this line to `I know there's an answer'.
(1) Sgt. Pepper really was the pivot point there. As well as nonsense like this, it did have Lovely Rita, meter maid. But there's already a clear divide between the `clear, ditzy' songs and the `obtuse, dark' songs. Compare with `Hang on to your Ego', which is `clear, dark'.
(2) Bridge over troubled water. I listened to that album a thousand times as a kid, and it is the basis of my stock and store of meaningless lyrics. `Tom, get your plane right on time.'
(3) This is off of the Rhythm of the Saints, but I can't tell you which track since the album so runs together for me.
(4) `Disarm', which played on the radio and always gives me happy memories of Chicago.
(5) Bob Schneider, who otherwise ``rocks this mothe*fuck*r like Stan Getz'' (Buy!!!)]