Keith wrote some stuff about a great big party at the 13th Note this Friday for
people who like REAL MUSIC. Sounds like the new Knebworth. I can't wait! I'm
going to Glasgow for a conference this weekend you see, and was wondering what
to do with myself. Now I know.
Helen was wondering about what kind of cool it was to cover a Disney song.
Well, I don't think it's cool of the 'I don't give a stuff about coolness'
variety. Maybe I think too much about these things, but I think if there was a
time for 'serious artists' covering Disney songs being cool, it was several
years ago. There was a compilation called 'Stay Awake' that came out in about
1989, which is a bit patchy but has some real gems and manages to hang together
pretty well as a whole. Sinead O Connor heavy breathes her way through 'Someday
My Prince Will Come', Tom Waits turns 'Heigh Ho' into an portentous protest
song, and Ringo Starr rounds things off in a kind of White Album 'Goodnight' way
with 'When You Wish Upon A Star'. It's also got Natalie Merchant, the
Replacements and Los Lobos on it. And lots of others - I must dig it out when I
get home. *Anyway* the point is, it might not have reached covering Abba
proportions, but I don't think covering Disney songs for 'ooh - aren't we
unconcerned about what's cool' kudos (props?) really cuts it. Too obvious.
Mind you, covering Abba might be cool in a new 'look, surely we've got over the
kitch thing by now - this is just a brilliant song and we want to sing it' way.
In other new, for those who are confused by all this talk of M. Petits Pantalons
in the papers, here's the story. There's been a fair bit of blathering in the
media of late because the Poetry Society's National Poetry Day had a poll of
'the nation's favourite pop lyric' as one of its strands. 'Imagine' won,
prompting Peter Hitchens to point out that people can't really have listened to
the words properly because the utopia it describes sounds to him like 'bloody
Soviet Russia'. Anyway, in his capacity as hip-to-the-kids spokesperson at the
Poetry Society, Stevie has been wheeled out to address the public on a few
occasions. For example, in last Thursday's Independent, he mewled as follows:
07 Oct 1999 Right of Reply: The co-editor of 'The Message: crossing the
tracks between poetry and pop' replies to David Lister's
criticisms of comparisons between pop lyrics and poetry: The
Independent
By STEPHEN TROUSSE
DAVID LISTER recently rose above the 'postmodern jumble' of debate around
this year's National Poetry Day, and re-asserted critical standards with the
suggestion: 'Steady on, chaps, some of those Oasis lyrics are a bit ropey,
aren't they?'
Maybe it's the function of the columnist to reduce a complex set of ideas to
a quick gag and a bit of moral posturing. But I can't remember anyone ever
suggesting that, say, the Eiffel 65 single should be put on the English
A-level syllabus alongside Carol Ann Duffy. In fact, part of the point of
choosing the theme of this year's National Poetry Day was to open up a
debate that went beyond the tired old face-off between Dylan and Keats or
Percy and Pete Shelley. If the notion of the lyric has historical ambiguity,
what do the two forms have to learn from each other today?
Should we dismiss song lyrics as juvenile doggerel? I have been co-editing a
Poetry Society publication mulling over the whole relationship between
poetry and pop, and the issues are far richer than I had imagined.
Lister suggests that poets are deluding themselves by claiming pop stars as
brothers and sisters. But for those of us who are curious about the life of
language and the pulse of culture, it seems perfectly sensible to consider
the new Magnetic Fields CD in the context of New York School poetry. For
Lister, who seems to have given up on pop music around 1972, this may seem
to be a postmodern jumble. But maybe the real issue here is who gets to
police the borders between high and low culture.
Marc Bolan once said that 'the pop song should be a spell'. A lot of the
time it doesn't even give us cheap magic.
But if there's one thing this National Poetry Day has shown, it's that the
form still has the capacity to infuriate and delight and start arguments.
IND
Comment 2
The Independent
Copyright (C) Newspaper Publishing Plc, 1988-1997
See how casually the prankster manages to slip a gratuitous reference to the
Magnetic Fields into a national newspaper! Personally, I think it's high time
we got around to considering Belle & Sebastian in the context of Glasgow School
poetry. Or Playgroup poetry. Sadly, Stevie then got a bit a kicking from
Charlotte Raven in her weekly column in Tuesday's Guardian. I think she
pictures him as a bit of a precious poetry ponce with a perpetual sniffle.
Which he isn't, of course.
'How Dylan hoaxed the poets'
On pop and the profound
Charlotte Raven
Tuesday October 12, 1999
A great many girls must have voted in last weekend's BBC poll to find the
nation's favourite song lyric. I was surprised by the results, announced on
Saturday, because women tend to think that the kind of music they like is, by
definition, crap and are therefore inclined to leave the qualitative assessments
to the "people who know better" - ie men.
This self-denying ordinance has given men the freedom to define the classic
song. List after tedious list is produced without reference to pop's primary
consumers - a fact which might go some way to explaining why profundity rather
than pleasure is the sine qua non of a classic, and why a song that prompts
website discussions about its meaning is likely to win hands down over something
that wears its significance more lightly.
There are numerous websites devoted to Bohemian Rhapsody. Almost 25 years after
the song's release, people are swapping theses on the origins of "scaramouche"
and correcting each other's spelling of "bismillah". Having visited a few of
these, I am now even prouder than ever of the girls who so unblushingly
suggested that Robbie Williams' Angels is the best song ever written. Their
uncharacteristic faith in their own convictions lent a slightly surreal quality
to the nation's favorite lyric debate. Unprepared as they must have been for
Angels to come in second - ahead of Bohemian Rhapsody, ahead of Yesterday, I am
the Walrus and every other Beatles song - the BBC seemed somewhat embarrassed.
Lavishing praise on Imagine, which it considered a "deserving winner", it
sounded a note of caution over the rest of the list. Anxious to reassure us that
this didn't mean that Angels was good, it emphasised the list's democracy and
praised the British public's "enormously wide tastes in music".
Presumably, this wouldn't have been necessary if Angels had come in 44th and
Queen had performed more respectably. For all its many faults, Bohemian Rhapsody
is still allowed the dignity of being thought of as a proper song. At least it
has some ambition, runs the argument. At least it goes the distance. And at
least it addresses big themes such as life, death, birth, death, life and
fandangos. Angels has nothing to say about fandangos and must therefore be
dismissed as disposable. It wouldn't be considered for inclusion in the Poetry
Society's canon of "poetic" (for which read good) pop lyrics. Like the BBC the
society was keen to distinguish its elevation of a certain kind of pop song from
the impulse which gave Williams his trophy.
Having said from the outset that it wanted to move the debate "beyond the tired
old face-off between Dylan and Keats" it was then faced with the problem of
finding someone else it approved of.
Michael Stipe was mentioned, but not very loudly. The poetry community, if such
a thing exists, generally seemed more concerned with defending itself against
imagined accusations of dumbing down. "I can't remember anyone suggesting that,
say, the Eiffel 65 single should be put on the A-level syllabus alongside Carol
Ann Duffy," wrote Stephen Trousse, concerned to firm-up the boundaries he had
only so recently blurred. Any remaining confusion was cleared up by Andrew
Motion who declared that most pop lyrics are "repetitive and banal" and only
worth discussing en route to the more interesting question of what exactly makes
Bob Dylan an "exception to this general rule". So Keats versus Dylan it was
then.
As the muse-a-thon got underway, it quickly became clear - as it always does -
that this was no high-low debate. Motion hates popular culture and Dylan is only
accepted because, in spite of his popularity, he has dealt with enough fandangos
to be thought of as a serious artist. That is to say that the least appealing
bits of his oeuvre are replete with cod enigmas, rich in impenetrable images and
stuffed to overflowing with big themes. When you are 15, all that crap about
four-legged forest clouds and curfew gulls sounds deep. Dylan's great skill - in
his worst work - is to manage to imply profundity while placing the onus on his
audience to ride with it, or admit their stupidity. It never occurred to me
until recently that lines I knew off by heart were elaborate, well-wrought
hoaxes.
It's easy to see why Dylan is Motion's hero. In a piece he wrote some time ago,
he described how the death of his mother had caused him to look to poetry as a
way to address a number of "unanswerable questions". These were: What is self?
How is it made? Is the weight of love as great as the fact of death? Admitting
that he didn't know (all) the answers (yet) Motion resolved, at that moment, to
approach them by "indirection". The resulting "poetics" could therefore claim
the kudos of confronting big issues head on, while always deferring delivery of
the point. This certainly made life much easier since Motion, like Dylan, has
been able to divert attention away from his interpretive ineptitude by focusing
on the sunlight and the hedgerows rather than the matter in hand. In his TUC
poem, he describes a walk he took along the Thames. We hear about the breeze,
the dust, the clouds, the water, the buttery sun and all manner of other natural
wonders. Motion doubtless wants us to assume that these images are pregnant with
significance, relating to the theme of liberty mentioned en passant towards the
end. I will probably be accused of literalmindedness, but I couldn't make the
connection. Motion's buttery sun, like Dylan's grey flannel dwarf, is an image
with nothing behind it. Both evoke depth yet neither can fulfill its promises.
No wonder he doesn't like pop music. In spite of various brushes with everyday
subject matter (he recently wrote a poem about a passport queue) Motion is on
the side of fandangos. The straightforwardness of proper pop music must sound to
him, rather facile. All that "love me do" and "let me be" and "be with me" - all
those little feelings expressed with such economy. "I met him on a Monday and my
heart stood still" - a phrase which, like the best pop lyrics, surrenders its
meaning without the aid of a dictionary, a degree or an online discussion. This
modesty - the fact that it has no need for indirection - has always made the
genre look slight. Few would claim that Depeche Mode's delightful "I just can't
get enough" - currently revived on the Gap ads, is in any sense a modern
classic. "When I'm with you baby, I go out of my head" is not what you might
call poetic.
But if poetry means describing the boat masts when one of your friends is dying
(as Motion does in his poem about Hughes) or Dylan's masked ball of characters,
or a thousand permutations of bismillah - I'd rather take the low road and leave
the scenic route to them.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 1999
I hope this has been of interest. Bye now.
Nick xxx
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