Song Meanings

I'm taking yet another break from regular reviews today to discuss the meanings of songs. Now, the reason I'm writing this is because in researching a number of songs for 3 Songs posts, I've found people who do two things with songs which I'm beginning to disagree with: Firstly, many people write songs off as meaningless. Secondly, people take songs much more literally than they probably should be.

The first problem, people writing songs off as meaningless, is fair enough. I've been known to do this myself. There are several causes for this. The first is lack of effort. In many of my album reviews, I have written songs or even entire groups off as meaningless due to the fact that they seem to be meaningless upon first impression, and with 10-20 songs, I'm not going to scrutinise each and every lyric until I come to a conclusion, especially with many songs either being truly meaningless or basing themselves around a tired concept or often around an Ice Cream Koan.

Aside from lack of effort on behalf of the reader/listener, the next most common reason is that the song is needlessly abstract, to the point of just seeming to throw random phrases together in the hope someone will take something away from it. The song that pops into my head first here is "Cousins" by Vampire Weekend, which takes much more effort to understand than is necessary or fair. When the moral of your song seems to be "Fuck you, critics" there are most likely a million and one different and easier ways of writing a song about it. A lot of songs are a little abstract in essence, but this just is to make the song more interesting, rather than make it more difficult to understand. Rather than effort, the key word with this problem seems to be communication.

Now, songs that are truly meaningless. I absolutely believe there are songs that fall into this category, but I think much more common are songs with dull or rather idiotic meanings. With many of these songs, the pull is the music rather than the lyrics, which is enough for many people. I'm not judging people who don't mind stupid lyrics for good music. I'm about fifty-fifty myself. I don't demand perfection in either element, but I do insist upon a certain level of coherence and quality. Anyway, songs about relationships seem to go in this direction quite often. The problem with writing songs about relationships, especially relationship collapse, is two-fold. Firstly, many musicians inexplicably seem to think they're the first to make particular observations or feel certain ways about someone. They aren't. The second problem is that there always seems to be a market for this kind of song which thinks the musician is the first to make these connections and sing about these feelings. I will state this right here and now: There is no emotion or impulse in the history of man which has not been represented in music. None. This doesn't make writing a song for this reason less important, but everyone needs to realise this isn't new.

Moving on, let's have a look at taking songs too literally. I'm perfectly aware I'm in the complete opposite camp in regards to 3 Songs. I give songs a great deal of meaning when they probably don't deserve such treatment in a few cases. The opposite is about as frustrating, but is much more understandable. I'm not saying my strategy is superior, I'm just saying I seem to have a little more faith in songwriters. The problem with taking songs too literally is both that the individual songs become meaningless and that the artist as a whole loses status.

A lot of artists seem to use excuses akin to "My song is not to be taken literally" to cover sloppy songwriting. Both Ke$ha and The Rolling Stones have claimed that they were making "parodies" of other songs. I have never called bullshit as loudly in my life. In the time of the Rolling Stones, they wrote a rather controversial song that managed to be simultaneously sexist and racist. You can't write things like that and call parody. Same with Ke$ha, who wrote a song named "Tick-Tock" in which she describes the life of a ridiculous teen party-girl. Rule of Thumb: If your "parody" can be used as the anthem for the people you are attempting to "parody" you are doing it so fucking wrong, I don't even know where to start. When was the last time god-damn Weird Al wrote a sexist or racist song? Artists claiming that their songs are being interpreted incorrectly should be taken with very little notice most of the time, unless they have a good back-catalogue of music with interesting, worthy lyrics.

Finally, the main problem with songs that are taken too literally is that it's easy to do. A metaphor revolving around comparing something simple to something complex done well could easily be confused with a song about only the simple thing. No blame can be given to those who write these songs off as simplistic. If there isn't even a hint that your song is a metaphor, the listener is not to be blamed. At the same time, if a group writes a song about a car and claims it's about world peace, there are going to be people like myself who do give it more credit than it deserves. In the end, I suppose my conclusion is that it takes all types. Those more jaded then myself weeding out the poorly constructed and simplistic songs, with the over-analytical types giving good, thought out music the discussion and dissection it is worthy of. I'll be fucked if it ever works like that, though.

In the end, the only advice I can really give is to give songs a good deal of though before you discuss them in any capacity, as the worst things to bring to a conversation are mis-information and poorly thought out arguements.

H. Rourke