If song
lyrics are a kind of literature, then the Nobel Prize Committee is right. Bob Dylan
is a Nobel Prize quality songwriter. Frankly, measured against living American writers in any genre, whose voice has had a bigger
impact?
Novelist
Michael Chabon made the case a a few years ago in an essay published in "The New
York Review of Books" that song lyrics are a kind of literature. Not the
same kind as poetry, and they live harnessed to their music. But their own kind or category of
literature. I thought that was a brilliant insight and still do. Has there really been a
more influential American writer than Dylan in the last 50-plus years?
Chabon, the
author of "Werewolves in Their Youth," "The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier and Klay," and "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" -- to choose
my three favorites out of more than a dozen works of fiction -- examines his
own literary influences in the essay titled "Let It Rock." He recalls
receiving a book of song lyrics from an English teacher, in which he was happy
to find the printed lyrics by songwriters such as Dylan, Joanie Mitchell and others. From this
anthology of influential songs by Sixties-type songwriters he learned that the
first line of Dylan's fairly early lyrical ballad "Chimes of Freedom
Flashing," a song whose lyrics I've wrestled with myself, was actually “far
between sundown’s finish an’ midnight’s broken toll”....that is, not "broken
toe," an image that had caused him some pondering. Now I kind of like
"midnight's broken toe" -- you know, midnight stumbles out of bed and bumps
into the china closet, causing a heavy earthen keepsake from an old potter
friend's first year on the wheel to fall off the shelf and land right on the
toe. Some late nights feel that way...
Let's be honest. Those of us who loved
songs in our youth -- whether 'werewolvian' or Wordsworthian -- embraced what
we were hearing even if we were not hearing it completely right.
Nevertheless,
Chabon has a larger point to make: "Now when I think about [a teacher] and
the book he gave me, back when he was trying to teach me how to be a poet, the
question of whether or not Dylan’s lyrics are poetry feels irrelevant. Dylan’s
lyrics are writing, and as writing they have influenced my own writing as much
as if not more than the work of any poet," apart from a special few. "In
fact, song lyrics in general have arguably mattered to and shaped me more, as a
writer, than novels or short stories written by any but the most crucial of my
literary heroes."
The key
idea is that song lyrics are writing.
They are a kind of literature that is not identical to poems written to be read
by themselves, unaccompanied by the other elements songs are necessarily part
of -- the music, and the act of singing.
I want to
make two other borrowings from Chabon's marvelously predictive essay that bear
on the question of whether the Nobel prize for "Literature" can
reasonably be awarded to a songwriter. (If you want to read the entire essay
here's the link: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/07/11/let-it-rock/)
He points
out that song lyrics stripped of their aesthetic identity as songs and left naked
on the page frequently fail to make the grade as poems:
"I saw
that rock lyrics could not really be poetry because when you took away the
melody, the instrumentation, and above all the voice of the singer, a song
lyric just kind of huddled there on a page looking plucked and forlorn, like
Foghorn Leghorn after a brush with the Tasmanian Devil."
A sentence,
if I may put in my two cents here, that shows a novelist's flair for the kick
in the pants life-giving image.
My last take-away
from Chabon's essay involves an admission that many (if not all) of us given a
youth in the era of classic rock or its succeeding decades will probably cop to:
committing to memory many more song lyrics than lines of 'great' poetry.
"Song lyrics [Chabon writes] are part of
my literary firmware, programmed permanently into my read-only memory.... Not
just words: writing. Tropes and devices, rhetorical strategies, writerly
techniques, entire structures of allusion and imagery: entire skeins of the
synapses in my cerebral cortex by now are made up entirely of all this
unforgettable literature."
This is
simple truth. I can't remember my own poems nearly as well as I can summon
lines and sometimes whole verses and choruses of the songs consumed by a
youthful psyche. Memory is a talent of youth. Particularly exact memorization.
Knowing all or most of the words of a song that stirred us, and may still do, is
a function of hearing them over and over again. But what else have young people
done since the dawn of electronic media but play (or wait for) their songs and
listen to and dig them again and again? In the days when the transistor radio
was your only personal app you waited for the Top 40 station to play your song
yet again. Then you switched to the next top 40 station on the dial in the hope of
catching it there.
In the
digital age, you already 'possess' this song somewhere and you play it whenever
you've got a spare minute. If you have a lot minutes you are free (as Spottify,
for one, exults) to play it "again and again and again."
And since
song lyrics in this age of the world have an especially strong appeal in our
youth, those that have imprinted their strategies, techniques, allusions and
imagery on the brains on those who read and/or write literature throughout our
lives... are still around. When I think of the lyrics that "speak to me,"
I realize they began speaking to me more decades ago than I care to remember.
For example:
"... Even when Germany fell to you hand,
consider dear lady, consider dear man,
you left them their pride and you left them your land,
But what have you done for these ones?"
...
"Break up, To make up, That's all we do/ ...
That's a game for fools."
...
"Baby, baby, bay, where did our love go? .. . ..."
...
"... Is your money that good? Will it buy you
forgiveness? Did you think that it could?"
[And pretty much every other line in "Masters of
War." Which, it pains to realize, is as completely relevant today as it
ever was.]
...
"Same as it ever was"
...
"You were talking while I hid
To the one who was the father of your kid
You probably didn’t think I did, but I heard
You say that love is just a four letter word"
To the one who was the father of your kid
You probably didn’t think I did, but I heard
You say that love is just a four letter word"
[as recorded by Joan Baez]
...
"All along the watchtower
Princes kept the view
While all the women came and went
Barefoot servants, too
Outside in the distance
A wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching
The wind began to howl"
Princes kept the view
While all the women came and went
Barefoot servants, too
Outside in the distance
A wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching
The wind began to howl"
(Preferably Hendrix version: If you've ever read any fantasy
novels, that's what they all say, only they take hundreds of pages to get
there.)
...
"My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums,
should I leave them by your gate?
Or, sad-eyed lady should I wait?"
...
"Your faith was strong but you needed
proof.
You saw her bathing on the roof.
Her
beauty and the moonlight overthrew you..."
...
"I keep hearin' mother cryin'
I keep hearin' daddy through his grave
'Little girl, of all the daughters
You were born a woman
Not a slave'..."
...
I keep hearin' daddy through his grave
'Little girl, of all the daughters
You were born a woman
Not a slave'..."
"He's the universal soldier/ and he really is to blame/
His orders come far away no more/ They come from him and yo and me/ and brothrs
can't you see/' this is not the way we put an end to war." ....
"Got up some time in the afternoon
And you didn't feel like much"
[Judy Collins version]
...
"I am leaving/ I am leaving/
but the boxer still remains."
[Don't we all, though?]
...
"The dangling conversations and the superficial
sighs..."
...
"And take off your thirsty boots,and stay for a while/
your feet are hot and
thirsty/ from a dusty mile."
(I had no boots. I walked no dusty miles. Did Eric Anderson?
But he wrote this song and something in me believed it was intrinsically true.)
...
"I'm so glad, I'm so glad
I'm glad, I'm glad, I'm glad"
...
"To be where I'm going/
In the sunshine of your love."
...
"Come, hear Uncle John's Band/ by the riverside
Got some things to think about/ here beside the rising
tide..."
...
There are scores and scores of these song lines, lyrical fragments,
including some I can't recall without a prompt, but
often do return when some phrase, or image, or musical phrase starts them up
inside my memory, brain, or whatever part of one's heart will always be
"tangled up in blue." The first
two or three notes will serve. The first two syllables uttered in a crooner's voice.
Chabon's most
original point may be that these permanently imprinted influences serve the
creator/thinker/feeler within you ("and without you") by demonstrating what language is capable of. So do poems, novels, short stories, essays and
even the occasional column in a newspaper or magazine. To me this recognition
puts an end to the argument over whether song lyrics belong to the category of
written literature or not.
They obviously do, they are arrangements of words. They get
hold of some nexus of sense and sound; of brain cell and emotive response. And
they don't let go.
[From the top: The songwriters of the lyrics above, in order: Buffie St. Marie; Stylistics; Supremes; Bob Dylan; Talking Heads; Dylan, Dylan, Dylan; Leonard Cohen; Laura Nyro; Buffie St.Marie; Judy Collins version of Leonard Cohen's song; Paul Simon, Paul Simon; Eric Anderson; Cream re-arrangement of Gospel song; Cream; Grateful Dead]
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