Lyrical Ballads

(Rolls neck. Cracks knuckles).

Right then.

Let’s not go full Paul de Man on this, because … well, Paul de Man.

But let’s at least gesture towards ideas of linguistic slippage and deferral - because it’s a more original way of thinking about lyrics than the usual mumbling musicians come out with.

Language starts out as a way to code and communicate our reality.

Past a certain point, language becomes a reality of itself.

What does that mean?

Well, let’s say we come up for a sound to describe the large pointy thing we can see from the village.

And that sound is mountain.

Mountain = large pointy thing we can see from the village / large pointy thing we can see from the village = Mountain.

Now, meaning in language is not intrinsic.

What that means is that we don’t call a cat a cat because the small furry feline creature that drinks our milk and poos in our flowerbeds has a certain intrinsic cattiness that means it has to be called a cat …

We call a cat a cat because our culture agrees that the small furry feline creatures that drink our milk and poo in our flowerbeds are to be called by that collection of phonemes.

A phoneme is the smallest unit of language. The thing that stops a fig from being a pig is not an inherent pork scratchiness in one and an inherent fruitiness in the other but that the phoneme f changes to the phoneme p. The rest is cultural consensus. We call the delicious bacon-flavoured animal that goes oink a pig because we’ve all agreed that’s what we call them - and they’re delicious. Even with figs.

Cultural consensus is why even if we’ve never seen the tall, pointy thing outside the village we know what someone means when they say the word mountain.

Cultural consensus / learned understanding means we can call up an idea of the thing even if we’ve never seen it. Tiger, mountain, shark, badger, bacon sandwich …

All thanks to language.

But the point where we can call up the idea of the thing without any knowledge of the thing is when language becomes its own reality.

Now, Paul de Man would say, and did, that this represents the gap between the word and the thing - and the gap represents an act of slippage, or linguistic deferral. The word refers to the thing, gives us an idea of the thing, but can never be the thing.

So, language is symbolic. Even when it’s isomorphic, the word might refer to the thing, or designate the thing, or be culturally agreed to represent the thing, but it isn’t the thing and will never be.

The word is a linguistic banknote; a unit of currency; and it’s good for as long as we agree on what the unit of currency means.

Ok.

With me so far?

I thought so.

We don’t need to get into signs, signifiers and signifieds, systems of significations, etc, Sassure, Lacan, Barthes, Bakhtin. We really don’t. You don’t want that, and I certainly don’t ever want to go back there. There’s a reason why certain people invented these ideas, and we have a much better understanding of mental health issues now than we did then, so let’s just leave them where they are. Let sleeping linguistic jargons lie …

So, here’s the thing.

I write. I write a diary every day. I’m working through The Same River Twice for my agent and publisher. Charlotte and The Magic Blanket is good to go and off to the publisher’s shortly. To the outside world, it appears as if I have something of a linguistic facility, or a way with words. To me, profoundly dyslexic and with a post-Covid drop in my IQ that’s proving tough to shake, I don’t see it. Writing for me is an act of Sisyphean labour. Thankless, hard, never finished and (I’m increasingly thinking) absolutely and utterly pointless.

Why?

Because.

Because made things are always lesser than real human connections.

Because no matter how well I write, no matter how polished or considered or passionate the words, the words never come close to recording or communicating the lived experience.

And no matter how many words I spend writing it up, none of them come close to expressing the joy and happiness a single moment with my children brings.

And that’s the point.

You can have all of the words in the world and the ability to use them, but even if you were to write down everything that happened as it happened, all of them together wouldn’t add up to a hundredth of a life well lived.

We lose sight of that reality: the reality that most of the things we do and spend so much time and energy and effort on are nothing compared to the moments we have with other human beings.

I already knew this.

But increasingly I’m realising it more and more.

And where does that leave me, this realisation that language is no substitute for reality, now I’m facing my first collection of songs with words in them?

Well, it’s funny you should ask that.

I’ve been thinking about this the same way I think about music culture; and recording processes.

Too much.

But to put it simply, I think most of the lyrics musicians offer up are crap. They’re generally such a sh1tfit of six-to-five and pick ‘em cliches, stock phrases and memeification passed off as profundity that when you hear good ones they really stand out.

So, let’s look at why this is.

Well, it’s because within language, there are other symbolic orders of language - where meanings are culturally agreed.

All language works because the meanings of the words are agreed, but a symbolic order of language is one where a further layer of meaning is also agreed.

Like in poetry, where a swan is simultaneously a bird of the genus Cygnus of the family Anatidae; a Spenserian symbol of purity and virtue; a reference to classical verities via Leda; and a large white bird that can break your arm with a single blow of its wings even as it craps everywhere.

Poetic language, like poetry, is a dense system of signs and symbols working with an art form with rules and requirements, which is why … :

Free verse isn’t poetry, just inchoate arse candle.

The thing is that song lyrics aren’t poetry and (most) lyricists aren’t poets - not least because the ubiquity of music means that there are more lyricists than poets working at any one time; and most lyricists aren’t coming at the words from a deep knowledge of the symbolic language of poetry and prose, the history and cultural interactions and decisions that inform it, or even the history of pop lyrics.

By and large, they’re just trying to get something that fits down - and there’s a big stockpile of cultural cliches they can help themselves to when they get stuck. That’s why people still sing about walking down lonely roads and being down on their knees and begging please because there’s no sunshine, no clear skies, and the rain is pouring down, but if we hold on, we’ll break through, we’ll fly, and it won’t matter if we hear the whistle of the lonesome train, or that someone is as cold as ice and it cuts like a knife because you were born to be my baby …

Here’s the thing about most pop music lyrics.

For me.

They’re so lazy.

The job of the artist is to reconcile the interior and exterior life - which means that the gaze has to look out as much as in. It has to reflect felt emotions, sure, but it also has to reflect the lived experience of the individual and the communities they’re part of.

So why are we still using the lazy cliches that first came out in the fifties? Where are the songs about (takes deep breath) the train being late again; the spreadsheet not loading properly; the team leader who leads through micro-aggressions that anyone else would call bullying; that George is still drinking coffee even though he hasn’t paid into the office pool for six weeks and what’s the point anyway? It doesn’t pick you up anymore, it just makes you feel older, more tired, and more like everything is just too much …

I’m talking about the older forms - you know, the stuff with guitars in it: rock, pop, folk, blues, and so on.

This is, of course, a very white version of the pop lyric. Black urban music dealt in far-grittier realities than newly-rich white boys armed with guitars rather than guns and if soul and gospel music had its own fair share of retreads of Moon / June / Spoon type constructions, rap, hip-hop and other forms originally spoke truth to power to the point where Gangsta had to be invented and its lyrical preoccupations with bitches, hoes, gangs and guns sold all over the mainstream - because otherwise people would start wondering why black people in America were still getting the shitty end of the stick decades after emancipation.

When you realise what the pop lyric can do when done well, it makes you wonder why we still hear the same constructions over and over again. The best are personal, and therefore universal; the best speak of the moment, and in doing so become timeless; the best offer a new twist or turn on something that makes you see it in an entirely new light. When we hear them, we know. It connects on a level beyond intellectualisation. And yet still we are beset by walls that keep tumbling down because he / she is never going to find someone like you / but it's okay because we're being lifted / and we will survive / because a fire has been lit inside / and it is written in the stars above / and so on and so forth.

And that, as the song once sang, is when I reach for my revolver.

Whether a music lyric should be considered and deliberate might be something someone else would debate. After all, the pop music lyric is a curious thing. It is, by its historical origins and nature, disposable and throwaway. The pop culture movements of the 1950’s and 1960’s that created the forms, structures and sounds that still underpin and inform the music we listen to today unrelentingly focused on the new, the now, the hip and the of-the-moment. Things – clothes, music, art, literature – were designed to be engaged with and enjoyed fleetingly before moving onto the next new. This relentless hunger for and consumption of the fresh, the exciting and the new can be seen as a reaction to the post-war years of austerity, rationing, queuing, hoarding and thrift – symbolised in the world moving from black-and-white to technicolour in film stock.

Pop music’s cool, as it originated and developed in the 1950’s and 1960’s, was predicated on it being fast, fresh, up-to-date, of-the-moment and ultimately disposable. From Hound Dog to around the time of With A Little Help from My Friends it was never for all time. It was only ever for now and how it made you feel in the moment you heard it and sang along.

Two things changed this:

First, the fact that people didn’t die before they got old. Instead, as Pete Townshend found out, stroppy teenagers and the heroes they threw up the pop charts grew up. As adults with fledgling careers and young children, that generation still bought music. And as the boy-bands like The Beatles and The Who they grew up on grew up too, they found there were still bills to pay ... so they kept doing the only thing they knew how to do: make music, which they sold to their newly-grown up adult audience.

Second, the industry model moved from the 45 single to the album. The teen-dreams remodelled themselves as 'serious' artists tackling 'serious' subjects. Ironically, as the albums got longer and the concepts got bigger and the form moved away from prizing and cherishing succinctness and concision, an industry that had prided itself on finding and discovering the new increasingly saw the power and money involved in nostalgia. This can be traced to 1968's Elvis: The Comeback Special, when a man who had never been away was suddenly declared to be back. It did so by ignoring a decade or so of questionable work in Hollywood to tap into the primal throb that had made him the Big Bang that started the whole business off in the 1950's in the first place.

Nostalgia is why the boy-bands of the 1960's (The Beatles, The Rolling Stones et al) went on to have long, successful and financially-rewarding careers as 'serious' artists, even while they played their teenage hits night after night to keep their audiences happy. Ladies of a certain age in glitter deely-boppers singing along to Back For Good in a muddy field somewhere after one white wine too many are no different to boomers going to see Pete windmill his way through I Can't Explain.

Again.

The impulse and connections are the same. It's why bands who were massive in the eighties like Def Leppard and Metallica can still sell out stadiums. Legacy acts with enough units sold to guarantee a turn-out on any given night.

Another reason is because of something that every working musician worth their salt has known since humanity first came down from the trees and started banging two rocks together, what Noel Coward called the potency of cheap music. It's why everyone knows She Loves You and only those who really give a sh1t and want you to know it know Working Class Hero. One is a powerful and profound statement and comment from an 'artist' that no-one dances to at a wedding and the other says absolutely nothing at all, but is an explosion of sheer exuberant joy and energy that everyone does, from four-year olds who have never heard it before to Grannies who remember hearing it for the first time while they were working in Woolies. It is the event horizon of the Big Bang from which the second wave of the pop revolution began, whose ripples are still spreading out and whose influence we still feel today; an explosion of primal happiness that completely nails what it means to be young, alive, and in love for the first time with SOMEONE WHO LOVES YOU RIGHT BACK in one full-throated brilliantly-crafted roar. It's the very fact that pop lyrics are meaningless and ephemeral that means that when we hear the right one at the right time at the right point in our lives ... it stays with us forever.

Of course, there is money and longevity in it for you if you can write a generational anthem. Queen knew that, as did The Queen, which is why one moved from being an interesting prog-rock band into a bland stadium-filling punch the air during the choruses machine and the other became the longest reigning monarch of her most famous tune despite being a historical anachronism.

(Hands punching the air in unison in a stadium during a big show full of noise and light while we all shout the chorus? Does anyone remember Nuremberg?)

But is that really the best we've got to give? Lazy generalities that make it look like your lyrics were written by throwing darts at a rhyming dictionary? I mean, yes, it worked for Noel Gallagher, but by the time people worked out that he didn't actually have anything to say worth listening to and that he wasn't even the best songwriter in Burnage let alone from his generation his brother Liam had done a brilliant job of selling nonsense as guttersnipe poetry and magpie genius and he'd made his money and secured his slot on the legacy circuit.

I’m not pointing fingers. I’m just thinking that … can’t we reach into the grab-bag of language and … do better?

Part of the problem is that we have surfeit of singer-songwriters - which is great. Everyone should do what they want to do, of course - but people should realise why they do what they do. If they’re doing it for fame and fortune, well, statistically that’s not going to happen. If they’re doing it because they can’t not … well, that’s something. And if they’re engaged to the craft and the art … well, that’s something too. The reality is that the vast majority of people who pick up a guitar and start writing and playing are doing so because they want external validation and / or they’re looking for some form of physical and emotional freedom. And (most of) the successful ones peddle cliches, and (most of) the unsuccesful ones peddle cliches too, setting the stuff that they should be telling their counsellor to music. It takes time to learn to play an instrument. It takes time to learn its history, its corners, its language and then it takes even longer to develop your own voice and tell your own stories - and that’s before you get into the world of language and ideas and culture and cultural representation … and even then, it’s no guarantee that people will want to listen to you tell it.

People think they’ll find validation and physical and emotional freedom from being a musician - but here’s a wake up call for you: being a musician doesn’t give you a hot line to the divine, or any particular great insights about the human condition. It’s like being a plumber, or a surgeon, or a baker. It’s a skill-based occupation that requires a lot of learning and a lot of work and long, long hours. That’s why most people who do it do it for a few years and then go ‘bugger this’ before heading off to be a teacher - which is much more important, rewarding and needed … and better paid.

English people, and I can speak with authority about this because I’m Northumbrian rather than English, rarely write songs about England or being English. It was known as the land that music forgot during the days of its highest zenith of economic and cultural power because all it could come up with were music hall belters and Gilbert and Sullivan. Most of the British popular songwriters you’ve heard of post-Second World War were aping the music and musical language of the American rock n’ roll, skiffle and folk that had originally turned them on. The thing that made the fame and fortunes of the McCartney’s, Lennons, Jaggers and Bowies was the unique wrinkle of their selling American music back to America with an English accent, a cheeky grin, and post-war rationing physiologies that meant that they appealed to girls raised on beefy American jocks as being something that they could simultaneously lust after and mother at the same time. They also tended not to write songs about England because they were canny enough to know that if they did, their only market for them would be England - a place that all of their fame and fortune never stopped reminding them of where they came from, who they were, and that they were really no better than they ought to be.

England’s like that, Britain simply being England times four. There is, at every level apart from the very top and the very bottom a lingering sense of shame and embarrassment attached to being from a small damp island in the North Atlantic whose best days were 120 years ago when we’d conquered a quarter of the world and used it as a captive marketplace / cash cow / supply of resources. There’s a reason why the songs of Ray Davies, who some people laud as a poet of Englishness, are small, mean, and littered with references to ordinary people with ordinary lives in a way that shows the writer’s contempt for what he’s writing about.

But in all of the globe-conqueror’s work, England runs through it like a stick of rock.

Take something relatively innocuous like Penny Lane.

Yes, it’s a song about Liverpool - a place that prides itself on not being part of England, as being anti-establishment, where every man is a poet and every woman a princess and every interaction an example of wry, tough, working-class Scouse wit and philosophy (even though all of these qualities are found in every port town in the UK, including London).

Penny Lane is one of The Beatles many strokes of genius. Where it differs from their later quasi-spiritual three everyday lines and a gnomic one approach to lyric writing is that wrapped up in a spry, jaunty and incredibly infectious tune was a desperate attempt to recapture their shared collective memories of Liverpool as their rocket ship ascent to fame and anointing as the voices of their generation was fast eroding them. At the height of their fame, when their records sold in the millions and were pored over from everyone from teenyboppers to cultural philosophers their lyrics weren’t an easy trans-Atlantic melange of babys, open roads, cool cars, and endless love. They were crammed with references your average American, and while we claim them as ours, their cultural heft comes from the fact that America literally adopted them overnight as their own following their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. America was their primary market, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the place so big that for decades afterwards their success in a few short years there kept them rich forever more.

The song has roundabouts in it.

The song references the poppies old every year in memory of the millions of Commonwealth soldiers who died in two World Wars. There’s a barber, giving out short, backs and sides; the middle-class banker drives to work in his car while the working-class kids mock his suited and tied pretensions; the fireman in his blue uniform polishes the brasswork of an old fire engine; and there’s the opaque reference to what might happen at the bus stop after the last bus has gone in the ‘four of fish and finger pies …’

The lazy generalities would come later. There are only so many short syllable words you can push and pull around the remarkably narrow harmonic structures of a pop song, after all, and you’ll only ever be twenty-four years old in the best gang in the world with the confidence that anything you do will be magical once.

And they were.

It’s possibly the most English song ever devoured by a global pop market and none of the lyrics are lazy. In fact, the entire construction is taut, hook-laden, and almost impossibly catchy. Everything is a hook. The bass line, the lead line, the flute at the end of the first verse, the piccolo trumpet break, the backing vocals. It’s a masterpiece.

It’s pop music. It’s a turnaround jump shot, it’s every generation throws a hero up the pop charts. It’s medicine as magical and magical as art, like the boy in the bubble and the baby with the baboon heart. So, no, you don’t have to dig into it with a knife and fork. If all it does is prompt you to sing along, it’s done it’s job. But if you’re interested, yeah, there’s some thought and consideration there; some appreciation of what’s gone before, and how, and who, and why …

And that’s something, right?

As I’m recording Songs for Separation this is what I’m thinking about: don’t be lazy. It might be reflexive Northern working-class guilt kicking in, but it’s more likely that I know enough to know that for the music to be honest rather than a job of work the things that prompted me to write the songs have to be in the lyrics and the lyrics and the music have to align to the emotional states that prompted me to write them in the first place. What happened happened to plenty of other people at the time, but it’ll only reflect their lived experience if it actively reflects mine. It can’t be lazy generalities.

Music now is like English Literature in an earlier age - an endless shell game where you have to know what went before to play. I know what the lyrics on Songs for Separation are about. I know when I’ve deliberately used a metaphor; made a literary reference, or taken something from my own lived experience. I’ve worked hard to align linguistic meaning to the emotional landscape created by the sounds and vice versa and I know when I’ve stepped out from that, deliberately. I’ve deployed certain images; looked at the way syllable and metrical counts work within the pockets of groove created by the other instruments and how my lyrical delivery works in those contexts.

But that doesn’t mean that they mean anything or that what it means for me will be what it means for you.

That’s the point Pete Townshend keeps missing when he keeps banging on about Tommy. The author-gods who rule what they meant are dead. It is the audience brings meaning to the text. What you get from the music and words might not be what I get, or even what I intended to depict.

And that’s fine.

The pop music lyric can be anything. It can be throwaway. It can be a variation on a theme. It can be made up nonsense that means nothing but something to you and your tribe. It can be completely meaningless, or your considered take on life, the universe and everything.

That's fine.

The one thing that it can't be is lazy.

Part of the mythos of the musician is that we don't think about it and we never explain what we mean, because in both instances we just feel it, man.

This is deliberate. For one thing, as Tony Wilson (a man who once met me and spoke of it ever after) once said, most musicians are idiots. They couldn't explain what they do or how they do it if there was a gun to their heads. He said it in a spirit of exasperation: that they can create the art that is deepest below all of the other arts and supreme over them but can't explain how or why.

And even when they can, they don't. I just feel it, man is a get-out-of-jail-free card, allowing the artist to suggest that they are tapping into a deeper truth and bringing it back for the benefit of humanity, like a hunter-gatherer finding a conch and knowing its valuable without being able to say why. Given the if you don't understand it, man, that's because you don't get it line is the oldest trick in the book for narcissists, sophists and bullsh1t artists, it's no surprise to find it so constantly in use in the music business, which has more than its fair share of all of them. If one of the easiest ways for fools to appear wise is to say nothing, because then others will write wisdom into their sage silence, then one of the best ways for a musician to claim insight beyond measure is to say something vague about feeling it and not explaining their work. Why do you think Bob Dylan is revered as he is? If he'd been able to explain his work, as any half-decent poet can (and indeed any half-decent plumber, painter and decorator, engineer, cardiothoracic surgeon and school teacher) then he wouldn't have half the mystique, catchment and audience he still has - and canny and smart operator that he is, he knew it.

So.

Why explore this subject at all?

Why not just play the game?

Well, I'm working through this because given what's coming out of me musically, I, yet again, am puzzling through the how and the why.

Maybe that disqualifies me from being a real musician.

Maybe when I'm next asked what my latest songs are about I should say I don't know, man. I just felt them.

I won't, however.

In any other field, dedication to learning and advancing your craft is a sign of engagement, connection and professionalism. Only in music is it seen as a sign that you don't love what you do.

Furthermore, the reasons why we do things are just as important as what we actually end up doing.

Right now, I'm writing a lot of music with lyrics. It's interesting.

©℗ A. I. Jackson

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Origin(al) Stories was first launched to show some of the thoughts, decisions and processes that went into the writing, recording and release of the Northumbria album.

Following the launch of The Landing Stage, which brings together some of the things I do, I’ve continued adding to Origin(al) Stories.

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