As I read this week's assignments I was struck by the use of the word lyric. The the focal concept of lyric has, I believe, changed contextually for us. When we think of "the old days," we think of lyric as poetic verse(s) that has a song-like quality, that is, perhaps, meant to be sung. Currently, the word lyric is most often used to described those words that accompany the (instrumental) music in songs. Thus, to my thinking, lyrics have receded from the forefront of what we consider music to be. Lyrics have, in a sense, been somewhat removed from music and have been reduced (if we can say reduced) to just words.
We may say that this is the case, as Frith suggests and Citron exemplifies (for the most part), because lyrics as artful words, or "literature" (Burke) can be deconstructed in a familiar, formulaic method. Nonetheless, when deconstructing the efficacy of form (primarily lyric, but some instrumental), we may mistake certain procedures (such as repetition) as simple--the result of "unschooled common folk rather than sofisticated lyricists" (Citron 22). Still, these operations are effective in their ability to be remembered. We remember choruses and old folk songs based in repetition, while verses, despite their rhyme scheme, often escape us. The form of repetition may be simpler, but not lacking in sophistication, as more complex emotions (for which more contemporary writers may rely on lyrics) may be conveyed by the music (i.e. tone through melody, etc).
Bearing in mind our temporal removal from the origin of these songs (esp. those we listened to), what particular progression is prevalent in the fulfillment of form and how and to what extent are our desires fulfilled or confounded (through conflicting forms) in these songs?
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Evelyn, I think that your word choice here, "progression," is rightly chosen, in that it expresses at least one formal aspect of song that seems to be universal: movement. Generally, it is a commonplace to say that a song "moves" us somehow, that it affects us emotionally, but I am particularly interested in the way both Burke and Firth talk about actual movement and art (song) in terms of a pleasurable bodily experience.
ReplyDeleteWe all know that songs are built upon rhythm, which, according to Burke, "accentuates the repetitive principle in art" and also "establishes conditions of response in the body" (130). In terms of rhetoric, I can't help but think of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech and the way that it has a rhythmic musical quality that causes our hearts to beat faster or slow down at points—even without musical accompaniment or a melody. We are emotionally moved while our insides physically move. I would argue that this is just one example where the words alone are infused with music, corresponding with real actions/vibrations that are taking place underneath our skin, and blurring any notion of an easy words versus music dichotomy.
It was interesting to me that Firth picked up this idea of movement and the body as well, devoting an entire section of chapter 9 of his book to the voice as body, and saying outright that singing, as opposed to talking, seems to expose something more bodily, more natural, and more revealing than talking does ("Songs as Texts" 173). While I read, I visualized vibrating vocal cords in motion, and as I listened to the songs this week, I found myself appreciating the steady rhythms of the Blues songs and nodding my head or tapping my foot in response. Is it possible that the rhythmic forms of these songs create a recognizable manifestation of something happening on the inside that we need to express? (And if this is the case, where was Frith's discussion of song's relationship to dancing?) Is this at all akin to Aristotle's version of mimesis?
It seems moot to analyze the lyrics of these songs divorced from their sounds—whether that be the melody, musicality of the instruments or the tone of the singer, inflection, etc.; Frith says in “Songs as Texts,” “…we grasp that the issue in lyrical analysis is not words, but words in performance” (166). However, given that we have at least all heard these songs, and for the sake of answering the question posed, I’ll take for granted, for a moment, that the majority of material which demands analysis in the songs be disregarded.
ReplyDeleteThe Burke-ian approach, I suppose, would be to pick apart a song with his handy list: “I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground,” for example, contains repetition (“I wish I was a mole in the ground/I wish I was a mole in the ground,”) qualitative progression (probably the whole song, but for a pat example, how about “root that mountain down” and “let your hair roll down,”) minor/incidental forms (metaphor: “drink up your blood like wine”), and, I suppose, even some conventional form (the move from a mole underground to a lizard in the spring, signifying, perhaps, a symbolic seasonal change or something.)
Can (or should) songs be discussed in these terms? Does identifying lyrics’ functions illuminate the song for us? For me, the answer’s no. Maybe because the application of his tools to study literature doesn’t translate to a study of just the textual part of the song—i.e., the lyrics. These songs weren’t written for the page, so why should they be imprisoned therein? This smacks of that sledgehammer of a question always driven into the gut of poetry, “What does it mean?” Not, “What’d you say?” or “What are you doing?” or even “What the hell/what’s wrong with you?” Just WHAT DID YOU MEAN; no wait I know better than you, here’s what you meant: Bleh.
But poetry often subjects itself to the constricts of the page, minus an instrumental or even vocal accompaniment, with only spacing and punctuation to indicate how it “should” be presented aloud. But music’s different, and songs operate in a different set of rules—or better, bounds.
To return to the song, “I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground,” to read the lyrics on the page is rewarding, but to hear them sung and accompanied by instruments is another thing entirely. Just reading, you miss the cajoling tone Lunsford uses in the second “Capie, let your hair roll down?”; the laugh from the narrator, recounting Tippy’s, “Baby, where you been so long,” after Tippy realizes the $9-dollar shawl can be a dream realized; the accent of the singer. And the repetition of the verses seems unnecessary; to lump songs with poems begs the question, “Why songs then?” Why set words to music?
Frith at one point argues that song lyrics either function to affirm/validate/articulate our feelings and beliefs or produce &/propagate slogans (see Snoop Dogg’s work from the past 5 years for examples of this.) Implicit in Frith’s assessment is the fact that music makes words memorable and memorize-able (something a poetry prof once told me poetry should be, as well), but also: music/tone/voice conveys emotion where words fail, can also tease out/twist/emphasize/detract meaning.
To answer the latter part of the original question—to what extent are our desires fulfilled or confounded—well, what are our desires, anyway? Explanation instruction commiseration articulation affirmation entertainment distraction diversion denial? Or is the question based on what each song sets up for the listener—what promise(s) it makes, what question it poses or what tension is pulled taut? Which seems too big a question to answer in a pithy post. Ohhh this post exceeded pithy about 200 words ago.
... and here's the end of my already too-long post:
ReplyDeleteThere are a few issues that I’d like to discuss more: what makes music enjoyable or relatable? This one’s addressed in the articles we read, but I don’t think the question’s been fully answered. Another: Cathy mentioned in her post last week (I think responding to Evelyn’s question originally) why the difference on the part of Harry Smith between songs and ballads? I’d like to explore the use of repetition more, too: since, when singing in English, words can be stressed for emphasis, why all the repetition? (In my mind, the comparison here is to French, in which you don’t emphasize certain words… the sentences lilt up or down, and for emphasis, you repeat: “tu dois répondre, toi,” for example, unlike English, where you can just say, “YOU need to answer.”)
I’ll agree with Jackie that when we divorce a set of lyrics from their tune and analyze them in Burke’s terms, we rob them of their vitality. To quote Frith, “The issue in lyrical analysis is not words, but words in performance” (“Songs as Texts” 166), and I agree—lyrics require a musical context. I, however, find Burke’s definitions of form compelling if applied to both the lyrics and accompaniment as one single emotional or persuasive unit—one “utterance,” to use a Bahktinian term.
ReplyDeleteConsider a sample tune from the anthology: “James Alley Blues.” Richard Rabbitt Brown sings, in the last chorus, “Sometimes I think you’re too sweet to die. / Sometimes I think you’re too sweet to die. / And another time I think you oughtta be buried alive.” Obviously the first two lines constitute repetitive form, but that observation in itself is boring, just as those two lines would be boring if they really were identical. But they aren’t. The chord changes under the second “Sometimes I think …”, ascends one notch in the circle of fifths, and the melody shifts accordingly to a higher, more earnest pitch. It’s a buildup, a climb to the ironic, conclusive third line, which Brown then sings over a descending series of chords: the dominant, to the subdominant (sorry for all the technical music lingo—I’m sure everyone can essentially follow what I mean, though), and back down to the root where the song can satisfyingly end (or, if this hadn’t been the last chorus, start back over). It’s a simple, as Burke would say, “qualitative progression” where each line and the music it’s paired with thematically lead to the next coupling: statement, accentuated restatement, resolution.
Almost all songs written in the 12-bar blues format (and there are a lot of them on the anthology) follow this formula. And so, to answer Evelyn’s initial question, I’d argue that the old blues tunes, despite the “temporal removal,” continue to satisfy a certain desire of form because, consciously or not, we still recognize the AAB lyric paired with the 12-bar blues chord progression and we still respond favorably to its tandem rise and fall of lyric and music. Since the recording of the songs on the folk anthology, the 12-bar blues form has leeched irrevocably into virtually every genre of American music. And why? I’d say because on a fundamental rhetorical level, it just works.
I think Jackie and Mandy are hitting on two ideas that, for me, are connected in how I experience fulfillment in songs – whether they be the folk songs we listened to this week, or any number of folk, punk, or pop songs:
ReplyDeleteLike Mandy, I experience musical fulfillment as a physical reaction to the rhythms and sounds of the music, which as Frith points out on page 178 of “Songs as Texts,” provides sound, pace, and rhythm to the performed lyrics of the song. And like Jackie, I don’t think there’s much point in applying those tools that Burke uses in critiquing literature to song lyrics, nor does my fulfillment depend on what the lyrics mean. Frith discusses the balancing act between sonic logic and semantic logic that is always present in the printed text – whether the text is a printed poem, or lyric. The reader has a certain amount of freedom when confronted with the printed text; though the poet provides clues (by way of punctuation, stresses, line breaks etc.) the reader has a certain amount of flexibility in terms of making “her own decisions about ‘speed, emphasis, tone, accent and inflection,’” (Frith 178). We, as readers, Frith says, are “trying to make sense of the poem as we read it, we’re thinking about it, thinking back about it, rereading a line accordingly, shifting our emphases: the reading is the interpretation, and it is as much affected by a posited meaning behind the words as by the words themselves,” (Frith 178). This flexibility disappears once the reader becomes a listener and hears the poem being performed. This flexibility over sonic/semantic meaning is also diminished for the listener of a song. The lyrics are “scored” by the music and “the mind is chained to the vehicle of the moving sound,” (Frith 178). “We can’t stop the music,” Frith says. “We have to move from beginning to end and be satisfied with what we immediately perceive,” (178).
I’m wondering if musical fulfillment, for me, has something to do with this loss of freedom that comes with “being chained to the vehicle of the moving sound.” As a listener, rather than a reader, maybe I am more passive; perhaps I have less freedom to make my own decisions about things like speed, emphasis, tone, and semantic meaning – but, fore me, there’s a pleasure in this loss of freedom. This makes sense to me because the songs I personally enjoy the most have lyrics that are semantically unintelligible. I am most moved by songs in which the lyrics are not making any sense – either because the singer is delivering them in such a way that they sound mumbled and unclear and not understandable, or because the sung words are surreal and are not working in any logical/sense-making way and aren’t forming any significant meaning. I also prefer to listen to songs where the lyrics are sung in languages that I don’t understand. I do get a certain pleasure from the sound of the human voice though, despite the fact that I don’t understand the semantic meaning of what’s said; perhaps this goes back to Firth’s discussion on voice and how it conveys significations that go beyond semantic logic (gender, bodily etc.). I don’t know exactly why I gravitate toward these songs, or why they give me the most pleasure, but I think it has something to do with a pleasure found in the freedom from semantic logic and an inflexibility of sonic logic – the song is given to me and I have to go along for the ride.
My initial comment would really just at best echo and at worst ape what has been said, esp. concerning the separation of the alphabetic content and the instrumentation, so maybe I'll just offer a sort of secondary aside.
ReplyDeleteIn thinking about what desires are fulfilled by certain forms, I don't know that I can as of yet (or will ever be able to) rationalize the process openly. And of course I can only answer this question subjectively. I am very intrigued by the imagined kinesthetics of some of these songs. I think I am using the right word here--I am talking about a sort of visceral response to the phrasing of the notes themselves, especially the style of playing (clawhammer, fingerstyle, flat pick, etc). I know that this response is incredibly non-academic, but this interest in the kinesthetics is probably just influenced by the way I approach playing guitar, and the ways I try and fail. I am curious where kinesthetics or a sort of imagined performitivity enters into Burkian forms. Many of you are musicians and I am curious what you think about this. Do you find this a legitimate variable in your response to music, this sort of imposition of self within the performance?
I definitely subscribe to the idea that the lyrics of the song being tied to the music, but, like Evelyn was saying in her original question, it hasn't always been so. Were the lyrics to the "old songs" that we are now able to appreciate textually always written as a part of a musical song? If so, what has changed in music that we are now not able to separate the music from the lyrics? Are we missing an element to the "old songs" that we are getting with "newer songs"?
ReplyDeleteSong lyrics, of course, aren't able to stand without the music. The music adds a context to the lyrics. An interesting illustration of this is the different reactions to a certain song and a cover of that same song. Look at the difference between Dr. Dre's "Gin & Juice" to the country cover of "Gin & Juice" that everybody thinks Phish did. (Side note: How awful would it be to be this band who's one hit is a cover and is attributed to someone else.) Dr. Dre's song helped to usher in the gangster rap movement. It's lyrics graphically describe a party involving drugs, booze and sex. The Country Group's cover of this song contained the same lyrics, but became an anthem to rural kids smoking pot.
The difference obviously isn't in the lyrics, but in the form of music. The extreme change in the music is brought on by putting one genre's form into another genre's frame. Burke says that "a work has form in so far as one part of it leads a reader to anticipate another part, to be gratified by the sequence." (p. 124) The musical structure of a country song don't lead the listener to expect lyrics talking about "smoking endo" or "a pocket full of rubbers."
The form of the songs speak just as loudly as the lyrics. When we look at the text of a songs lyrics we aren't able to get the full context of the song. Upon hearing "C'es Si Triste Sans Lui", while I'm not able to translate the words in my head as I'm listening, the form of the song gives me some clues as to the context.
Ah, sorry to hop on the wagon with the rest of the crew. But I agree with Jackie. Separating the lyrics from the music (instrumentals) doesn't allow us to analyze how the progression is fulfilled. In folk music specifically, taking away the guitar, banjo, hand clapping, maybe even the audience singing along, would relieve the song it's ability to speak to the audience, to fulfill their desires (both the singer and the audience). And isn't the audience, for the most part (besides Blues, as mentioned in Frith's "Why Do Songs Have Words?") the ones the singer is attempting to reach? This might be too general to argue that desires cannot be fulfilled simply with lyrics (text, essentially, as they now stand alone). But the songs were meant to be sung, to be accompanied, to be performed. But on the subject of form....
ReplyDeleteI was pretty interested in the idea of why we remember lyrics, specifically folk song choruses or even whole songs, versus country lyrics or pop lyrics. There were pretty clear examples (although, yes, examples cannot speak for each genre entirely) in Citron's "Construction and Form" revealing the form of country, pop and folk choruses. What I found to be so interesting was that folk music, seemingly similar to spiritual choruses (question and identical answer) introduced the chorus much earlier in the song (after three or four verses), where pop or country tended to create form through storytelling. The answers or verses were delayed in country songs, so as to tell a story. The story itself might be easy to remember, if it allowed for some vivid detail, such as "Ev'ryone considered him the/ Coward of the Country/He'd never stood one single time/ to prove the county wrong./ His momma named him Tony. (94)" This contributes to the form so that there might be an experience through detail and description of the lyrics subject, but does it make the song more memorable? Does it allow the audience to remember the lyrics, the chorus and the verses better than a folk song like "Green Corn" (which is one of the shortest songs in the collection)? Or does it hold its' power in it's ability to tell a tale, rather than to repeat a beat, a sound, a rhythm that grabs the listener by the hand and insists they join the dancing/singing circle and become part of the song/performance itself?
I liked Rachel’s comment about what she appreciates in music, because it got me thinking about why, in different circumstances, such widely different types of music appeal to me. Sometimes I want to think about words, which is where Bob Dylan (I accidentally typed “God Dylan.” We’re reading Freud next week, right?) or Tom Waits come in. Sometimes I need to study and need energy but don’t want to be distracted by words so I put Ella Fitzgerald or Radiohead on.
ReplyDeleteWhen reading Burke’s lexicon, I wondered if there is a song that fits each of his definitions of various kinds of form. Though he says that the forms he defines apply to literature, which he defines as “written or spoken words,” I started to think of how music intervenes with form, and maybe creates it. For instance, his #8 (conflict of form) reminded me of the White Stripes, who sound pretty badass until you pay attention to the lyrics (raw and jarring guitar, sometimes bluesy, with words—generally--about wanting to be good and faithful, sometimes in defense of Rita Hayworth.) They might be an example of conflict of form.
On the other hand, with Frith’s argument that “music creates meaning” in mind (p. 159 of the course pack), I wondered if the music can’t help but contribute deepen a song’s meaning. Take the Beatles song, “For No One,” for instance: bouncy Bach-like music behind a droopy Liverpool boy’s voice singing, “she no longer needs you.” We get the sense, listening to that song, that the woman’s gone and left and probably bouncing around somewhere.
I then thought about how but how the singer’s delivery contributes to form. I’m not sure if some of it has to do with recording quality, though. I have a theater background, so I tend to think a song relies a lot on its delivery (in the same way I believe an actor can make words on a page mean just about whatever they want through inflection.) In Prison Cell Blues, for instance, Blind Lemon Jefferson has this perfect break in his voice at the height of each line, so that the tune + voice quality is doing most of the work, when meaning is concerned. (I keep wanting to call him Blind Melon Jefferson, which tells you something about my music past.) For this reason, I found that song to be one of the most memorable, even if I didn’t understand the words much.
Then again, I’m a writer and so I do think lyrics, often, make or break a song. Take Jewel, for instance—pretty voice, but I don’t think that it helps her get away with saying “I break the eggs and make a smiley face.” (Sorry Jewel fans.) But I can’t help but wonder if part of the reason that song irritates me is not only because of the strange description in the lyrics, but where it is in the song. Maybe it does have more to do with the way the words move in the tune.
But before I say that it’s futile to separate lyrics from a song and try to find meaning, I should probably bring up Paul Simon. His lyrics usually stand alone, right? Maybe that’s something that differentiates the ballads we listened to last week and the songs from this week—it seems like the ballads depended more on words than the ‘folk songs.’
Blind Melon Jefferson = deep fried gold
ReplyDeletethat cracked me up Nora