Your lyrics is what really makes your song, where I’m concerned. It’s not the music; it’s the lyrics.

—the Rev. Willie Morganfield, this issue, p. 68.

 

So this is the way it is with music—sometimes the music give you more enlightenment than the words.—Ibid

_One reason to grieve for Rolling Stone magazine is that many of its newer writers don’t know how to write about music. Your average Rolling Stone mod has learned that sounds are elusive and thus difficult to pin down on paper (save as musical notes). It’s far more manageable to write about lyrics, so he writes about lyrics—but if the goal is to get at the heart and soul of music, isn’t this something of a fuzzy aim, even a perversion? Just because it’s easier for a writer to fasten onto lyrics, to the exclusion of trying to describe what a song or album sounds like, doesn’t mean this is the way people normally react to music. Isn’t it the melody, or the rhythm, that folks judge when they first hear a song? They’ll hum a tune regardless of whether they know the words that accompany it. A person strolling down a hallway, on the other hand, doesn’t absentmindedly recite song lyrics in a monotone.

So an argument could be put forth, I’m venturing, that lyrics are secondary, in popular music, to the pull of a song’s sound. Of course, that’s not the same as saying that lyrics can’t be poetic or that they can’t elevate a song.

Let’s loop back to Rolling Stone. So what if the editors and writers there are lazy? Maybe Rolling Stone is not even, properly speaking, a music magazine anymore. Look at who’s been cast on the cover recently: Jerry Springer, Jack Nicholson, the crew of South Park, Buffy the Vampire, Tori Spelling from Scream II. (If you didn’t see that last one, it was a Rolling Stone classic: the naked, blonde offspring of TV schlockmeister Aaron Spelling, dripping wet in a shower stall, horrified, hysterical—but still sexy—about to be raped and knifed. The irony and camp were so “trenchant” you could almost hear the Rolling Stoners predicting how we dummies would miss that it was (1.) a clever send-up of all the violence that TV perpetuates, (2.) a spoof on Psycho, and (3.) a scathing statement about society. Phew! Thank God for visionaries like Jann Wenner!)

I must be straying, right?

A Rolling Stone writer named Neil Strauss was hired, in a September ’97 issue of the magazine, to interview RZA, the “main producer and de facto leader” of Wu-Tang Clan, a popular rap group. Wu-Tang Clan was, at the time, opening—or “riding shotgun” in Rolling Stone parlance—for the popular hard metal group Rage Against the Machine. Mr. Strauss asks RZA, “So you’re into stuff like the Zapatistas cause?” to which the rapper replies, “Say that again?”

Rolling Stone: They’re the rebel farmers in southern Mexico that [Rage Against the Machine] sings about.

RZA: OK, right. I’ve never heard of that.

Rolling Stone: Maybe it’s unfair to ask you about Rage’s lyrics. I’m sure they wouldn’t understand a lot of yours...so let’s talk about your lyrics...

Mr. Strauss begins quoting lines from Wu-Tang Clan songs that he then asks RZA to explicate.

Rolling Stone: How about this one: “Bigger d—sex enigma, pistol fertilize your stigma/Stink box, order from Pink Dot”?

RZA: That’s all slang. “Bigger d— sex enigma”— that’s bragging about my s—. “Fertilize your stigma”—the pistol is going to fertilize your stigma, your p—. Your stink box is your p—. I say “Pink Dot” ’cause I’m in L.A. I’ve got some p—, I’m going to order up some food from Pink Dot [an L.A. convenience store]...The words sound good, but to know what I’m f—ing talking about is a bitch.

It’s a good thing this stuff doesn’t influence young people; you sense it would positively warp them. Oh, but here’s something else:

Rolling Stone: You have two kids?

RZA: I don’t even know how many babies I got.

Rolling Stone: You must know. Wouldn’t all their mothers be hitting you up for money?

RZA: That’s what the money I make is for anyway. I don’t like to talk about babies. Say if I’ve got five babies with five women—I’m working for them. I’m not working for me.

Believe it or not, my aim here is not just to show off RZA as misguided. Later in the interview he talks about his childhood in such a way that it’s impossible not to see how he got to be, at least partially, the way he is. (“There were fires, and floods, and getting evicted. Damn, we were poor, too—and you’re getting shot at, and you’re getting robbed for 35 cents going to the corner store. That’s why I ain’t motivated by the same things that motivate other people.”) My problem is with Rolling Stone’s take: the insidious and knee-jerk glamorization of crude thinking and blatant tragedy. Rolling Stone offers a picture of eight Wu-Tangers, two of them holding their crotches; Rolling Stone puts RZA on the cover next to the caption “100% AGGRESSION ”; Rolling Stone, in short, offers up the whole package minus context—minus, really, meaning— as if all the Rolling Stone/RZA chatter is just more hip stuff, as if it doesn’t matter that RZA might have five babies by five girlfriends.

I’m not an aficionado of this genre of music, but I have heard rap that’s as complex and fetching as anything on the radio. And some reliable and insightful OA editors swear that there is a bundle of great rap tunes out there, and I believe them. But don’t ask me what Wu-Tang Clan sounds like. I’d have to buy one of their records before I could answer that. The only thing I have a hint about is their lyrics.

I’d argue that my ignorance about rap music is partly the fault of outfits like Rolling Stone, which refuse to enlighten me. Instead of pointing out what is laudable in RZA’s music, they simply present him, in all his vainglory, as a cultural hero.

_I began somewhat to doubt the potency of words in music during a fanatical period of absorbing the Rolling Stones (the band). For a while in my early twenties the Stones were just about all I listened to. I thought I loved everything about them. Then one day, while spinning their version of “Just My Imagination,” I had something of an epiphany. A line from the song—about a girl who’s “like a dream come true”—struck me in a new way.

For the first time I saw clearly—my youth having previously obscured the view—that the phrase was a puerile, egregious cliché.

Q. How does any singer with an iota of self-awareness sing such an embarrassing phrase?

A. Either poorly or well.

Here was the thrust of my new insight: by singing the words as if they were a secret line of poetry revealed newly and specially to him—and now, as a gift from him, to us—Mr. Jagger had breathed life (if you’ll excuse the cliché) into a dead thing. Listen to the track and you’ll hear what I’m talking about.

Anyway, I started to notice how vapid most of the Stones’ words were. Their songs had lyrical moments, but always they were just moments, and you had to dig through much that was offal—rampant juvenilia, tiresome sexual braggadocio, unthinking or deliberate misogyny, false rhymes—to get even that. But—sickly? wonderfully?—it did not matter.

The poetic power was in the groove.

_Along with the innovativeness of their music, R.E.M. gained notice in their early years for their “lyrical ambiguity,” for Michael Stipe’s blurred/slurred/mumbled vocals. Part of this seemed premeditated on the band’s part, a way of engaging people in an age in which, as Mr. Stipe once said,

Too, too often, these days [everything] is simply handed to an audience...There’s no room for imagination, no room for improvisation, for interpretation...No one’s able to find out anything for themselves.

But there’s always a catch. A number of listeners, and especially critics, began to let the words overwhelm the music, at least when they tried discussing the band.

Here’s another artifact from the Rolling Stone archives. Chris Heath, in an October ’96 issue, questions Michael Stipe about the song “Departure” from the R.E.M. album New Adventures in Hi-Fi:

I ask him about one image I thought I had heard in the song: “a hailstone brought you back to me.”

Rolling Stone: Is that—a hailstone—an airplane?

Stipe: [Looking perplexed] Hailstorm. It’s a hailstorm. It’s when hail comes down. Is that what you call it?

Rolling Stone: Sorry. I was being a shade too clever.

Stipe: Oh, you thought it was hellstorm?

Rolling Stone: No, not that clever. I thought it was hailstone. As a metaphor for an airplane covered in ice.

Stipe: No. That’s good. But it’s hailstorm. [Pauses] I think.

Rolling Stone: Oh, well. Sorry. Slap me.

Stipe: Let’s don’t and say we did.

You’ve heard the bounteous line of praise asserting that Nat King Cole/Lucinda Williams/Michael Stipe/Whomever could sing the phonebook and make it sound good. Well, in one uncanny song R.E.M. seems to have experimented with that idea. First, the band recorded the jaunty “Seven Chinese Brothers” for their album Reckoning. Then, a few years later, they released Dead Letter Office, a collection of outtakes and B-sides. On it was the song “Voice of Harold,” which featured the same music as “Seven Chinese Brothers,” but with new “extemporaneous lyrics” by the singer. Part of the lyrics seem lifted straight from the liner notes of a gospel recording:

J. Elmo Fadd, founder and leader of the Blue

Ridge Quartet,

For 23 years on Temple Records LST390

We are associated with the United Music World

Recording Company, Incorporated,

West Columbia, South Carolina.

The finest sound available anywhere.

This funny, somewhat eerie performance proved that an inspired singer can read the phonebook and get himself a hit.

_I do understand how the right lyrics can carry a song even higher. It’s not only the heartbreaking music and majestic singing, after all, that make Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” a masterpiece—the words do their part, too.

Still, a question lingers: Would we even be talking about “Ode to Billie Joe” if the music didn’t hold us?

There’s a song I put on the record player when I am in the dumps. It’s R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts,” which cannot be called the band’s most lyrical song. The words by themselves might even look cloying on a greeting card designed to send to a depressed neighbor:

When you’re sure you’ve had enough

Of this life

Hold on...

Don’t let yourself go

Everybody hurts...

Mr. Stipe clearly had other aims than to make rock-lyric history with “Everybody Hurts.” My impression is that he tried to write a song that would simply lift folks up from sadness. This cannot be an easy thing to do. His plan, I would further surmise, was to fix upon lean and guileless words and then use every bit of his musical genius to make the singing so powerful and right as to give the words a rebirth and the listener goosebumps. There is no faking on “Everybody Hurts" ; it’s just a pure combination of emotion and art, a deliverance beyond words.

In the new R.E.M. song “Why Not Smile,” which we are honored to present on this year’s Southern Sampler CD, there are some lines that I find oddly affecting:

I’d have done anything

I would do anything...

Just looking at the lyrics, I’m not quite sure why this moment in the song works on me. Is it the narrator’s almost imperceptible movement from a past-tense and arguably empty promise (“I’d have done—”) to a newer, braver vow (“I would do—”)?

Maybe the answer is hidden, or wrapped up, in the magic of the singing and the music.