You have been given an opportunity to share in one of the most sought after illuminations that has illuded most of humankind for millineum after millineum.

Would that you could stop for just a moment, and rise above your self appreciating, self indulgent, self pontificating thought processes, and realize that…inspiration is not all at once inner enlightenment.

Instead it is, at times, an expression of Godly communication.

That we at times are not privy to the understanding of our own illuminations…

…But are only the conduit of its reality.

Please, do not become consumed with what you may have convinced yourself is a divination of self, a self ego central world view of an ontilogical view that surpasses all reality.

Mark

p.s: sorry, sipped a little rum…hee hee haa haa

mark@curbstonelive.com

I had a hard copy of both this page and the BBC article in my briefcase. If I’d thought about it sooner, I would have offered them to Fisher.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6146618.stm

It could have been Edmonton not Winnipeg…….

They are both west of me and really cold in the winter.

Brian in Canada

Hmmm. Or ‘multi-generic’? For film anyway. Oh I dunno. I’m just glad someone understood what I Was talking about!

Sorry to be pedantic. Your point is well taken as well. Forgive me–I have just come off a week of reading exams written by quasi-literates who call plays novels and novels plays and have no concept of poetry of any sort.

The term you’re looking for to describe this melding of genres is “interdisciplinary,” although that’s quite an unlovely way to explain it. But so are many academic terms. Intergeneric or cross-generic would work. 17th/18th c. opera is one of the great landmarks in mixing the genres. I find the concept fascinating and a lot of my research is along those lines; unfortunately, I teach at a very conservative private college that is about forty years behind the times–I’m pushing the envelope of what’s allowed when a show a film in one of my classes.

You see why I can get so grouchy at times.

Take your point. It’s a genre of literature. Or rather, it’s a genre of literature combined with a genre of music. Just like film combines theatre, music, and art.

I’ve been looking for the right adjective to describe these ‘combined’ arts, as oppsoed to pure forms like poetry and painting, and can’t find it. Perhaps you can help. It seems to me that all art forms have a period
of flowering: opera in the 18th century (I’m no expert), the novel in the 19th, theatre in the 16th, and so on. For film and song, it’s the late 20th century: those are the two great forms of our time (or rather my time. I’m just over the hill). Sure, there was song before Dylan, but it was either a folk form, or an offshoot of showbiz, or something composers of symphonies did to stretch their fingers.

Yes, I know: Cole Porter’s Strange Fruit. The exception that proves the rule.

I don’t like poetry much either. Or at least I don’t read it: I have something better to listen to. A good song lyric will never be as verbally colourful as a good poem, for good reasons: you have to consider how it’s sung. But it has one thing poetry will never have: the greatest form of emotional expression at our disposal - melody.

In the right hands, it’s a dynamite combination. Just ask Procol Harum.

Sorry, Tom. I’m writing an essay here.

Really, Mark, did you think a professor of English (c’est moi) could ignore a statement like this:

Songs - pop or otherwise - CAN be great literature. But they’re NEVER poetry, which is a completely different discipline.

Perhaps it’s just that I’ve read too many end of term exams and papers in the past week and my brain is now sodden, but I feel I must scream out that poetry is a genre of the discipline of literature. But it’s alright, I do understand. Ironically (and blasphemously), I don’t particularly like poetry and don’t teach it unless I must. (In which case, I force students to read The Waste Land, probably because it strikes me as being the stuff art rock lyrics are made of, even if T. S. Eliot is rolling in his grave over a statement like that.) Suffice it to say that I take a certain pleasure in rock music lyrics that no “poetry” (in its high culture definition) has ever given me.

No, the lyrics of “Whiter Shade” don’t make one bit of sense. Hence the plaisir du texte. Im sure I’d love to “wonder through my playing cards” or “trip the light fandango,” even if I’ve never figured out what that would entail. Still, I’d like to think I could if I wanted to. . . .

The whole clue to its meaning is: “She said there is no reason, and the truth is plain to see.” INDEED!

What Annie Lennox did with the song is complex and interesting. She brought out what was baroque about it (the harpsichord instead of the organ takes away that “bad religion” feeling), and somehow she manages to make the lyrics feel as if they make sense by imparting some sense of emotion (as if the trip to the edge of insanity at that “far-out” party gave her some sort of insight into the human condition).

I’m not going to make any good/bad judgement about the Lennox version. I’m not sure that such is the way to approach it. I’ll just say she gave in a new and original twist, and that she probably impressed many who would have hated the original, as she took the “art rock” ambience right out of it. But then I frequently sense that Annie’s performances have a certain sardonic slant that keeps us from pinning them down to any specific “meaning.”

Finally, a bit of trivia that was probably lost on everyone except sixteen-year-old girls in 1967. Shortly after the record topped the charts, Mary Quant put out one of her infamous phosphorescent lipsticks called “A Paler Shade of White.”

I’ve been so slow that most of what I wanted to say (especially re the whole poetry question) has already been said better. However, I did coincidentally hear this song yesterday, and I can sort of see the “bursting-for-a-tinkle” subtext in there, although I couldn’t help drifting off by the end of the song.

Oh, and BTW: this plus Eurythmics = Annie Lennox’s cover version of the song. Good or bad?

There goes that old ’song lyrics and poetry’ debate again. You know, the one that always gets our poet laureate in a tizz every time Dylan comes up in the conversation. Here’s my take on it:

Songs - pop or otherwise - CAN be great literature. But they’re NEVER poetry, which is a completely different discipline. Which is why it never works when somebody tries to set a recognised piece of poetry to music. It wasn’t written with that in mind.

That’s not to say the song lyric exists as literature in its own right. Song is a mixed media art form, just like film. It’s not about music, or about words: it’s about both. Good songwriters have always understood this - which in some ways legitimises ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’. Or at least it would if the lyrics weren’t so obviously the first words that came into his head as he took another toke…

Brian in Canada ( spending way too much time here, today ! )

wwolfe

- The nucleus of the band started as the Paramounts, an R&B outfit that had a hit with the Coasters’ “Poison Ivy” in 1964. (The Rolling Stones called them their fave British R&B band.)

- Singer/melody writer Gary Brooker and lyricist Keith Reid were introduced to each other by Guy Stevens.

I’m not sure which is odder: Mott/Clash producer Stevens as catalyst of an emblematic prog rock band, or the image of Gary Brooker singing, “It’s gonna take an ocean of Calamine lotion.” (I’d pay money to see the Coasters sing “Whiter Shade,” though.)

If they were smug bastards about it it riles me, too.

However I saw PH live ( a couple of times ) and I recall very good live shows that called on the classical influences and they were able to build some progressive rock around them. MAybe planting seeds for the likes of Genesis, Emerson Lake & Palmer et al.

They seemed to rock a bit more with Robin Trower on guitar and his riffs lead the band when the Piano & orgam are only in the background.

I think Trower left the band and the classical thing all came to a head when PH recorded an album with the Winnipeg Symphony and all the songs got the full blown treatment.

Brian in Canada

But it’s the nature of the chord progression, I think. It’s so symmetrical, or circular, there’s really no good place to stop, or to insert a bridge. I used to play this in a two-piece band, six-string guitar playing the changes and mandolin playing the melodic lines, and we had a hell of a time coming up with an ending. It just cycles…and cycles…

Musically, though, the oddest thing?you don’t notice them on first listen, or the hundredth, because that Hammond and that blue-eyed soul voice are so overwhelming?but apparently nobody told the drummer it was a stately ballad. He’s hammering away, all over his kit, crash cymbal all over the place, like Mitch Mitchell after three espressos.

The jazz cover of this (by King Curtis, I think) used iconically in Withnail& I, and by bleedover I associate the song with that same spent, weary, fag-end of the Sixties vibe.

Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

“Party Fears One”

PS Hopefully I can explain why the Smiths changed my life, but I’ll probably do it when the blog gets nearer that point - in 1967 my parents had just met, in fact I think Summer of 1967 was when they did meet, so any ‘me’ in the narrative is purely hypothetical.

But I do understand about the Smiths, too. They and the Eurythmics represented another life changing experience for me, too. Perhaps it was merely coincidence that they came along at the time I was ditching my respectable bureaucratic job to go back to graduate school in my mid-thirties. But their music seemed to be expressing exactly what I was feeling at that given moment.

(And for that matter, Ian, “Your Woman” marked one of my turning points in the 1990s–but that’s another story altogether.)

I’ll grant that it hasn’t aged as well as it might–how could it?–and you had to be there to fully appreciate it. But it remains one of my all-time 60s faves in spite of it all.

And some days I really wish I could meet up with the sixteen vestal virgins and leave for the coast. Just what coast really doesn’t matter . . . .

And blount is very right about the “when a man loves a woman” feeling, never noticed that one before; but as I noted in relation to “Standing Outside A Broken Phonebooth With Money In My Hand” versus “Your Woman” (and boy, do I hope both of those wound up topping the UK charts!) elsewhere, I have a perverse love for evocative mumbly whiteboy nonsense.