RFBX In-Depth Specials The Importance of Lyrics
By: Izzy James
[NEUTRAL MILK HOTEL]
“[music is]a phenomenon which the average Westerner's brain probably spends around twenty-five percent of its lifetime registering, monitoring and decoding.” (Middleton, 2000: 71)
There is no doubt about the importance of music in everyday life. Thanks to the evolution of technology, it seems as if each of our lives has a soundtrack which we can share with remarkable ease. Music, as a medium, seems to be the easiest, most obvious and effective way to define ourselves as an individual. Think about it - our music tastes have such an impact on who we seek to be our friends, where we go, what we do for fun and our dress sense; its influence on our lives is almost incomprehensible. Which got me to thinking: why? What is it about music and songs and noises and melodies that we love so much?
I know that the answer to this question for myself (and presumably many others) and that is that I am addicted to song lyrics. Yes, it’s a weird and wonderful addiction to have, and I for one am coming clean. Sod ‘good beats’, ‘beautiful harmonies’, ‘delicate instrumentation’ and all the rest of that stuff. As important as they might be, they just aren’t as important as what is being said. When we boil our addiction to music down, what is it that we find? Yes, we might become temporarily obsessed with a song because it has a catchy tune or we find ourselves wanting to tap our feet to it, but I think the real reason that we love music is because it has such an effect on the one thing we find so hard to understand, and that’s our emotions. Songs (and perhaps other forms of art to some extent) have such a strong effect and reaction upon our emotions that it is almost impalpable. They have the ability to make us jovial when we’re upset, cry when we feel fine and motivate us when we feel like hiding away, and there within lies the attraction.
“Emotion is transparently immediate in our experience of music and our awareness of its expressiveness is not separable from, or independent of, our following the music's unfolding in all its detail.” (Juslin & Sloboda, 2001: 30).
Academics within the field of popular music studies have tried for many years to find the answer to that oh so elusive question of ‘why and how does music make meaning?’ and the surprise is that they can’t really seem to find one. I personally conducted my own study for my final year dissertation by applying several complementary methods of analysis to the song ‘Oh Comely’ by the band Neutral Milk Hotel found on their album In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. My initial reason for choosing to write 10,000 words on this song was purely selfish. I believe Jeff Mangum, lead singer, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter to be one of the most overlooked and underappreciated lyricists of our generation. No, screw that, he’s one of the best ever, and yet the majority of people out there don’t know who he is and have never witnessed the absolute majesty that is the song ‘Oh Comely’ which I truly believe to show the very pinnacle of his song writing talents.
Of course, I am not the first to be awestruck by Mangum’s musical abilities. Since being released in 1998, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea has been championed by critics and music fans alike (so much so that Kim Cooper decided to write a very insightful book about it) and the lyrics contained have quite frequently been described as both extremely prolific and obscure. This focus on lyrics did inevitably lead to Mangum being asked about the ‘true’ meaning of the songs in interviews and on several occasions this led to him revealing that he felt particularly moved and inspired upon reading The Diary of Anne Frank, and that this had a direct influence upon some of the lyrics contained within the album. After discovering this information and with a swift revisit to the album, the clarity of just how much this book affected Mangum is tear-inducing. For example, one such lyric contained within ‘Oh Comely’ is this:
“I know they buried her body with others, her sister and mother and 500 families. Will she remember me 50 years later? I wish I could save her in some sort of time machine.”
Now, I am not under any preconception that this is the first literacy reference to appear in music; Bowie had his references to George Orwell’s 1984, Nirvana’s retelling of Perfume by Patrick Suskind in their ‘Scentless Apprentice’ and more recently we’ve had Klaxons’ homage to William S. Borroughs in Atlantis to Interzone, and Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow. However, what Mangum does that differs from most is that he directly puts his response to the work within the lyrics rather than just retelling the story or citing from the text. Along with the backdrop of a repetitive, folk-tinged acoustic guitar and some quite hoarse yet clearly emotion filled vocals, ‘Oh Comely’ features some of the most honest sounding lyrics which deserve the recognition and attention that the likes of Lennon or Dylan receive. Mangum truly lays his soul bare on this album, and particularly this song, and does so is a poetically beautiful way. The song is strife with enough linguistic devices to make an English teacher practically giddy. Case in point:
“Your father made foetuses with flesh licking ladies while you and your mother were asleep in the trailer park. Thunderous sparks from the dark of the stadium, the music and medicine you needed for comforting.”
Of course, not all meaning or emotion created by song is found within the song lyrics, (otherwise where would bands like Sigur Ros be? Or how would music with lyrics become successful in countries with a different native tongue?) but increasingly often in popular music, lyrics are taking a back seat to an annoyingly catchy tune which can satisfy our cravings for something new, but the desired effect only lasts a few weeks. Songs that we truly love, we know inside out. We know every single lyric and meaning behind it and exactly what the songwriter was feeling when they wrote it and we either empathise or relate to it, or in many cases both and that’s what makes us revisit it time and time again.
Yet the results from my dissertation told me that for the majority, the primary aspect of music where the listener gains their perspective of the meaning of the song in through the instrumentation. So, although my enthusiasm for lyrics may not be shared by everyone, I no longer cared. For whatever personal reason, 75% of the people who contributed in my study said that they enjoyed the song ‘Oh Comely’, with several people thanking me for exposing them to Neutral Milk Hotel, and joyously telling me that they were going to buy the album to hear more. I couldn’t ask for a better result than that. Being such a fan of the music of Neutral Milk Hotel, I revel in being able to talk about their work at length, and if that means that I have to write a dissertation on them, write this article about them and generally barrage the ears of friends with their music, then so be it. And if there are people who listen to Neutral Milk Hotel as a direct result of my influence, then I hope they listen to those beautiful and poignant lyrics, and I hope that makes them want to listen to those songs again and again because of a meaning that they’ve found that’s personal to them. That’s a part of an identity that we’ll share.
Artists in this article: Neutral Milk Hotel