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Musings on Music, #2
Kevin lately has been asking me "what does that song mean?" And that's a hard question.
Songs are so complicated. Good songs, anyway. Lyrics alone do not convey the full feeling, but neither does music alone. And when an eight-year-old asks you "what does that mean?" it can be hard to answer.
There are the ways in which lyrics themselves are complex. We've been listening to Flogging Molly's "Tobacco Island" a lot lately. The song is about being uprooted from your homes and being forced to sail away, but it's also about rage and despair. How do you explain that a line like "where the sugar cane grows taller than the God we once believed in?" says much more about the men than the height of the sugar cane?
Or another recent favorite, Eddie from Ohio's "Number 6 Driver." It's about driving across country. But it's also about searching, and being maybe not lost, but a long way from where you want to be. And you get some of that if you read the lyrics, but nowhere near as much as you understand if you hear the lyrics sung.
When music and lyrics clash, the results can sometimes be kitschy (prime example: Faith Hill's cover of "Piece of My Heart") or simply disturbing. I find Garth Brooks "Papa Loved Mama," seriously unsettling, because of its clash of upbeat fast-moving music at odds with its story of domestic violence and murder. Sometimes I find the contrasts interesting: I love Eric Clapton's Unplugged version of "Layla" precisely because the laid back bluesy guitar is at odds with the passionate desperation of the lyrics. It's almost as if Clapton is saying, "Hey, we've both been around the block a few times, we both know that nobody's going to die if you turn me down."
I'm not a musicologist, and there are people who written scholarly articles about all of this, I'm just noodling on this, and trying to figure out -- how do you teach love of music to children? And how do you answer "What does it mean?" The answer I find myself falling back upon more and more frequently, "What do you think it means?" seems somehow inadequate. Maybe they just need to grow up enough that they can figure the songs out for themselves.
Songs are so complicated. Good songs, anyway. Lyrics alone do not convey the full feeling, but neither does music alone. And when an eight-year-old asks you "what does that mean?" it can be hard to answer.
There are the ways in which lyrics themselves are complex. We've been listening to Flogging Molly's "Tobacco Island" a lot lately. The song is about being uprooted from your homes and being forced to sail away, but it's also about rage and despair. How do you explain that a line like "where the sugar cane grows taller than the God we once believed in?" says much more about the men than the height of the sugar cane?
Or another recent favorite, Eddie from Ohio's "Number 6 Driver." It's about driving across country. But it's also about searching, and being maybe not lost, but a long way from where you want to be. And you get some of that if you read the lyrics, but nowhere near as much as you understand if you hear the lyrics sung.
When music and lyrics clash, the results can sometimes be kitschy (prime example: Faith Hill's cover of "Piece of My Heart") or simply disturbing. I find Garth Brooks "Papa Loved Mama," seriously unsettling, because of its clash of upbeat fast-moving music at odds with its story of domestic violence and murder. Sometimes I find the contrasts interesting: I love Eric Clapton's Unplugged version of "Layla" precisely because the laid back bluesy guitar is at odds with the passionate desperation of the lyrics. It's almost as if Clapton is saying, "Hey, we've both been around the block a few times, we both know that nobody's going to die if you turn me down."
I'm not a musicologist, and there are people who written scholarly articles about all of this, I'm just noodling on this, and trying to figure out -- how do you teach love of music to children? And how do you answer "What does it mean?" The answer I find myself falling back upon more and more frequently, "What do you think it means?" seems somehow inadequate. Maybe they just need to grow up enough that they can figure the songs out for themselves.
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