Intellectual pretensions, over-reaching ambition, and impenetrable cryptic twaddle
Rock’n’roll used to be an innocent place, where even London School Of Economics students like Mick Jagger would rather imitate the unlearned tongue of a Mississipi cotton-picker than show off the fact that they had a half-decent set of A-levels.
However, by the late 1960s, when even Mickey Dolenz was requesting an audience with the Maharishi, scores of musicians – even a few drummers – were keen to show off their interest in eastern philosophies and radical politics, and tackle weighty subject matter through the medium of song. All leave was cancelled for the poetry police from thereon in.
By the time ‘progressive’ rock had thrown a hefty jewelled cape over the musical landscape, and vaguely mystical science fiction such as Tolkien had become required reading, this pseudo-intellectual cancer had become a faux-profound plague. And Sting wasn’t even famous yet.
All seemed very proud of their self-improvement. But pride comes before a fall, or at the very least, comes before song lyrics with all the grace and emotional resonance of a man slurping a Pot Noodle on a tube train.
Unless, of course, you the humble reader can succeed where millions have failed, and decipher some deep and lasting truths from the following passages. As James Joyce himself probably once said to someone about something at some point: ‘Best of luck’.
BOB DYLAN
Countless influences have been deemed partly responsible for ‘dumbing down’ our precious popular culture, but when it comes to who ‘clevered it up’ in the first place, we can surely slap a large dollop of the blame on the big-nosed bard from Hibbing, Minnesota.
His way with words has been compared to every great figure in the history of literature (with the possible exception of Pam Ayres) and there’s no doubt he lent new poetic depth to folk and rock alike. But listening to a song like this, you wonder if his reputation was enhanced by the fact that everyone thought he was way too cool to ever be guilty of obscurantist gibberish, but was in fact imparting cryptic pearls of wisdom, and it was up to us to decipher their meaning.
This celebrated anthem for a generation is a case in point. Not content with accusing the ‘Mr Jones’ everyman character of having ‘contacts among the lumberjacks’ (Ouch! Go easy with your satirical scythe, Bob!), he then rhymes ‘imagination’ with ‘tax deductible charity organisations’, and tells of a sword swallower in high heels who has borrowed someone’s throat. You can imagine presidents and prime ministers crumbling under the polemical weight of such metaphors, can’t you? But the best is yet to come, as he spits:
Now you see this one-eyed midget Shouting the word now
And you say, for what reason? And he says, ‘how?’
And you say, what does this mean? And he screams back, ‘you’re a cow’
Give me some milk or else go home.
Inspiring stuff, all allegedly ridiculing the confusion of the ‘straight’ world in the face of the brave new generation of whom he was a figurehead. And ridiculing the confusion of everyone else, in fact by, erm, confusing them with ridiculous words. In fact just writing it all down has inspired me to compose my own message for the disaffected youth of the 21st century:
The fair-headed chaffinch is shouting ‘Mind the mines’
and trying on a policeman’s hat that chimes.
You say ‘Where’s your chicken liver paté?’
And he says ‘in the Bay Of Biscay’
before retiring to the internet café
Stitch that, Gordon Brown!
LED ZEPPELIN
After beginning their career singing almost exclusively about women who done them wrong and shamelessly rewriting old blues numbers, Led Zep clearly needed some fresh lyrical inspiration on their second album, the imaginatively titled Led Zepelin II. It came in the shape of JRR Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings, a post-war children’s fantasy novel. ’Twas in the darkest depths of Mordor, claims Plant, I met a girl so fair. But Gollum and the evil one crept up and slipped away with her.
Of course we can all relate to the idea of being stuck in a mythical land on an epic quest to find some sort of ring, when a satanic force (say, Darren Day?) runs off with your new girlfriend. And this was just the start of Plant’s interest in fantasy. As yet, however, even the finest literary minds have struggled to pin down the passage in Tolkien which might have given him and his bandmates the idea for the infamous meeting between a female fan and a fish in a Seattle hotel room.
KING CRIMSON
Now we are nicely settled into the 21st century, safe in the knowledge that the world didn’t stop working due to a computer bug on Millennium Eve, it’s easy to laugh when we look back at predictions of what this century might hold. But King Crimson lyricist Peter Sinfield should have known he was taking a risky punt back in 1969 when he wrote Cat’s foot, iron claw, Neurosurgeons scream for more at paranoia’s poison door. 21st century Schizoid man!
Although the noughties are yet young, I would sincerely hope medics won’t reject modern technology and return to the use of cats’ feet and iron claws in the pursuit of brain surgery, just as I wouldn’t advocate the throwing of women in ponds to see if they were witches.
And while a 21st-century schizoid man might well find himself at paranoia’s poison door, he’d surely have every reason to be worried if he was being given neurosurgery instead of psychiatric treatment, and the people operating on him were having screaming fits and suffering from bouts of mental illness themselves.
No such problems for Sinfield, evidently, as he went on to write ‘The Land Of Make Believe’ for Bucks Fizz. Couldn’t he have persuaded someone to perform a bit of screaming neurosurgery on them too?
ZAGER AND EVANS
For all we know there could be plenty of 26th-century schizoid men walking around in half a millennium’s time, but these 1969 futurists saw a rather simpler vision.
Ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lie. Everything you think, do and say is in the pill you took today.
Really? And what about taking the pill itself? Did I do that of my own free will? Or did the pill I took yesterday make me wake up today thinking, ‘I really need to take my pill today?’ In which case, what made me start taking the pills in the first place? Another pill taker? And where are these pills coming from? Do they get delivered to my house by the government? And who is driving the delivery van? Is his pill telling him to make deliveries of pills to people? In which case, has he been given a different kind of pill? And by whom?
I could do with a few pills myself after such brain-aching considerations, but we must crack on. The song certainly does, at a rough rate of 1010 years per verse, and the future will develop further still, according to our soothsaying one-hit wonders.
In the year 4545, ain’t gonna need your teeth, won’t need your eyes. You won’t find a thing to chew, nobody’s going to look at you.
Well, no, because they presumably won’t have any eyes either.
We are then promised that by 5555, we won’t need arms or legs, because ‘some machine’ is fulfilling those functions. Crikey. So, without the power of sight, traditional foodstuffs or ability to eat, will humanity be evolving, or regressing into some sort of amoebic state?
At least things are looking up slightly by 6565, because by that time, we’re told, we’ll pick our sons and daughters from ‘a long glass tube’. And yet, that’s not really much use, is it? At this rate I’m going to be sat in ‘some machine’, a blind, unthinking lump of blubber, with the ‘pill’ having already decided I’m going to have a slightly rotund, unathletic son called Darryl and an anorexic jug-eared daughter called Esme. Great.
And so a simple futuristic scenario plunges us into a whole philosophical and logical can of worms. What’s the chances of a pill which would return pop to the simple pleasures of ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’?
JETHRO TULL
Despite the aspirations of progressive rock songwriters towards high art, they were still sleazy, skirt-chasing reprobates at heart, and so often they just couldn’t resist letting their base instincts get in the way. No doubt Jethro Tull’s bulbous-eyed, storm-haired flautist and chief lyricist Ian Anderson was, once again, just joking when he sang And your little sister’s immaculate virginity wings away on the bony shoulder of a young horse named George who stole surreptitiously into her Geography revision.
We are bound to ask, though: If this girl is ‘your little sister’, then just how old is she supposed to be? The fact that she is evidently of school age might not come as any great surprise to anyone reasonably well acquainted with the sexual politics of ill-shaven early-1970s rock stars, but if he is suggesting that her first sexual experience was with a beast of the field, then I find myself wondering if Mary Whitehouse ever had the pleasure of giving this magnum opus the once-over. Oh, and Ian Anderson now owns a successful trout farm in Scotland. Considering the bestial fantasies he has already outlined, do you think it’s worth a call to the RSPCA? Or Led Zeppelin, for that matter?
YES
Although few people could make any sense of the random pronouncements made by the prog-rock icons responsible for Tales From Topographic Oceans (literally meaning ‘tales from the blue bits on a map’), singer and lyricist Jon Anderson clearly felt he had a hotline to the man upstairs.
The Lord works in mysterious ways, but he obviously chose Jon to reveal some of his less palatable thoughts about the world he created, and inspired Anderson to warble, Craving penetrations offer links with self-instructor’s sharp but tender love as we took to the air, a picture of distance.
Aaaall together now! Crrrr-raving penetrations offer links with self-instructor’s …
OK, maybe it’s not ideal singalong material. So perhaps it’s more suited to serious intellectual analysis. For me, the ‘penetrations’ he mentions can only be referring to some kind of construction work, and ‘self-instructor’s sharp but tender love’ must surely be some kind of drill. He’s saying God is desperate for some drilling by the lead singer of Yes. Well, aren’t we all?
DAVID BOWIE
The man known to his mother as David Jones has undoubtedly had a massive influence on several generations of musicians, and it’s not hard to see why when he sings:
I ran across a monster who was sleeping by a tree, and I looked and frowned and the monster was me.
Well, I said hello and I said hello, And I asked ‘Why not?’ and I replied ‘I don’t know’.
So we asked a simple black bird, who was happy as can be. And he laughed insane and quipped ‘KAHLIL GIBRAN!’
Oh, to have been a fly on the wall (or possibly a nearby park bench) when all that took place. A skinny bloke in a woman’s dress (or I presume so from his appearance on the sleeve of The Man Who Sold The World, the album whence this song comes) conducts a conversation with himself, then attempts to include a blackbird in their discussion, only for it to make a philosophical in-joke and collapse in gales of mirth. Then later in the song, you’ll be interested to learn, he has sex with the devil. Like you do.
Rock fans the world over can only breathe a sigh of relief that no psychiatric professionals were nearby during this encounter, or Bowie might have been carted off to the funny farm there and then, and the history of British pop music would have been much the poorer.
As it was, no doubt the nation’s second-hand bookshops were later besieged by young pop pickers with feather cuts who had been inspired to buy Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, only to find it didn’t have half as many pictures as Look-In, and took a rather dim view of men dressing up as women and licking their guitarist’s crotch on stage.
THE POLICE
As a musician, one naturally wants to be taken seriously. But at the same time, when you are an intellectual and Renaissance man of Sting’s stature, it would be vulgar to show off about it too much. So he probably thought he was being relatively modest when he wrote in his story of a pupil’s crush on a teacher, He starts to shake, he starts to cough, just like the old man in that book by Nabokov.
He is careful not to patronise us, assuming that we know exactly what book he is talking about – Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. And yet there’s something about the slightly forced way that ‘cough’ and ‘Nabokov’ are rhymed that betrays his utter determination to tell the world that he has read some dead clever books.
He might have got away with it if he had tried to rhyme something with ‘Lolita’ – How about ‘She wants to learn but he’d love to teach her’? ‘She’s wearing quite a tight swee-ater’? ‘Is it hot in here or have my trousers been fitted with a nuclear-powered heater?’
No, all things considered, it’s best to just steer clear of this minefield of a subject – Oi! Sumner! Leave those kids alone!
THE HUMAN LEAGUE
Before they became slanty-haired pop icons in the early 1980s, The Human League were a rather dour electronic outfit for whom the celebration of emotional austerity and granite-faced, quasi-Soviet iconatry was paramount. Yet their Kraftwerk-style sheen of robotic efficiency sometimes smudged a little, due to statements such as Dehumanisation is such a big word – it’s been around since Richard The Third.
Maybe educational standards in South Yorkshire were a little on the shabby side back in 1979 when this song was released. So who can blame Ian Craig Marsh and Phil Oakey for considering the 14-letter word ‘dehumanisation’ to be big, when as the bloke on the corner table at your local pub quiz can tell you, antidisestablishmentarianism puts it to shame, at 28 letters long. And you can tell they’re winging it when they come to the line about Richard The Third. In those days when the information superhighway was not even a public footpath, they probably imagined they could get away with such wild statements. But we can confirm that the word dehumanisation has definitely been found in scripts from the early Plantagenet era, and different spellings have been recorded in texts dating back to the Domesday book.
OK, fair enough, we’re winging it too.
ELVIS COSTELLO
Pop has never been shy of asking searching questions of its listeners. Why does it always rain on me? Does your chewing gum lose its flavour on the bedpost overnight? Are we human or are we dancer?
However, the man who once called himself Napoleon Dynamite may have struggled to get a response when he mused A stripping puppet on a liquid stick gets into it pretty thick. A butterfly drinks a turtle’s tears, but how do you know he really needs it?
And that’s just your starter for ten, pop pickers! …’Cos a butterfly feeds on a dead monkey’s hands. Jesus wept, he felt abandoned.
I have to confess, so do I. One of the post-punk era’s finest songwriters has apparently taken leave of his duty as an entertainer to take a long and pointless trip up his own fundament.
But let’s not bow to our Philistine tendencies and dismiss his words out of hand. There are important questions thrown up by these lines. Do turtles cry? Does Jesus, for that matter? Do butterflies eat dead primates? Is FR Leavis in the house?
The answer would appear to be a simple ‘no’ on all those counts. Which leads me to conclude that while there may be some important TS Eliot-style symbolism in all this, creatively speaking, Elvis is ultimately just fiddling with his liquid stick.