Thursday, February 26, 2004
In Nick Hornby's Songbook, a group of essays on some of his favorite pop songs, writing about the song "I've Had It," by Aimee Mann, he observes:
'All art constantly aspires toward the conditon of music,' Walter Pater said, in one of the only lines of criticism that has ever meant anything to me...; music is such a pure form of self-expression, and lyrics, because they consist of words, are so impure, and songwriters, even great ones like Mann, find that even though they can produce both, words will always let you down. One half of her art is aspiring toward the condition of the other half, and that must be weird, to feel so divinely inspired and so fallibly human, all at the same time.He goes on to discuss the subject matter of pop songs, the kinds of topics that work and don't work, concluding that the subject of love works best. OK, that's obvious, but I like how he describes it:
But because it is the convention to write about affairs of the heart, the language seems to lose its awkwardness, to become transparent, and you can see straight through the words to the music. Lyrics about love become, in other words, like another musical instrument, and love songs become, somehow, pure song.Of course, words aren't "impure" next to sounds. Novels can be as pure as symphonies, as far as I'm concerned. But I couldn't agree more with him about the lopsided relationship between words and music in songs. I've often said that lyrics don't matter to me as much as music--even with my favorite bands I can rarely sing the lyrics all the way through (in the case of Stereolab, hardly at all)--but no one ever seems to understand what I'm trying to say. So I feel especially grateful to Nick Hornby for shaping this idea more effectively than I ever have.
