Ugo
Group: Members
Posts: 5495
Joined: April 2000 |
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Posted: Aug. 28 2009, 18:06 |
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Maybe I expressed myself badly on both points. What I meant to say is that song lyrics cannot be compared to poems because of a couple of reasons: 1) what a poem sounds like is often just as important as what it means [e.g. there was a poem by Rimbaud - I forgot its title - where each and every vowel sound was associated with a specific meaning, and allitterative consonants also served this purpose], while with lyrics (which are meant to be sung) sometimes the meaning is subordinated to the sound of the words, to the way they sound; 2) when I said that pop lyrics aren't intended as poetry, I was referring to things that various singers/songwriters [we call them cantautori] used to say in the past - in the Seventies, for example. There were the two big Italians, Fabrizio de André and Roberto Vecchioni, who were firmly against the idea that song lyrics should be equated with poetry; in spite of this, their lyrics were often printed in school literary anthology textbooks - as poems. Of course They were very resentful about that: they said that they chose to be singers/songwriters and not poets because the words wrote were meant to be heard together with the music, they were meant to be heard as a part of a whole - not on their own. de André also said: "Up to 15 we're all poets. After 15, only two kinds of people write poems: poets and idiots. That's why I call myself a songwriter."  People like Paul McCartney and John Lennon wrote songs and not poems because it came natural for them to write words to a musical beat. (OK, Lennon wrote short nonsensical poems as well, but IMHO they're not on a par with his lyrics.) In other words, what I meant to say is that I always conceived song lyrics as belonging in a separate world from the one of poetry. Some lyrics, of course, may be very poetical - check out Van Dyke Parks' "Surf's Up" for Brian Wilson. But even "Surf's Up", by the writer's own admission, is a song lyric - not a poem. "Poetry is just something different from what I write," he says.  However, this is just my conception of things. It may be, of course, because of my education, which is one of the things that have ingrained in my mind the idea that poetry and lyrics are somehow widely apart from each other, and cannot be reconciled.
About Eliot, what I meant to say is not really that he wanted his poetry to confuse his readers - I was saying that he wrote extremely complex stuff, and sometimes (always IMHO) the complexity of what he wrote had no point except for itself (complexity for complexity's sake). Of course one had to be intensely well-read to follow Eliot's train of thought. I am well-read , but whenever I go through The Waste Land there are always a few lines here and there that really make me want to have a quick glance into the footnotes [either Eliot's or the editors'...] to get a grasp on what the f*ck he was trying to say... 
EDIT: As an addendum to the above, Tears for Fears' "Sowing the Seeds of Love" - again, by the writers' own admission - is a typical example of a song lyric where the way it sounds is much more important that what it means. Roland Orzabal described it as a "towering, elaborate, imposing, Beatle-esque pop song where the lyrics are just clustered - piled on top of one another."
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Ugo C. - a devoted Amarokian
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