The Inarticulate Narrator

I got in an argument recently with a friend about lyric-writing. That friend is an actual musician and songwriter, so it was a pretty one-sided argument, but I remain convinced I made a valid point.

The argument focused on a song by the band Fountains of Wayne called "Hackensack." The song is sung from the point of view of a sad sack stuck in his hometown in New Jersey, remembering the beautiful girl from high school who went on to become a star in Hollywood.

My friend was annoyed by the song, because he felt as though the lyrics were hokey and inarticulate, particularly this verse:

I used to work in a record store
Now I work for my Dad
Stripping the paint off of hardwood floors
The hours are pretty bad

"That's the rhyme they came up with?" my friend asked indignantly. He was particularly upset because Fountains of Wayne songs often have quite clever lyrics, and he felt as though the band wasn't even trying on this one -- that they'd come up with a nice melody and that the band's lyric-writer had spent maybe five minutes on the words.

I disagreed, and tried inarticulately to make a case for the use of the inarticulate narrator in first-person songwriting. Most songs are written in the first person, though in many cases the character narrating the song isn't a character at all -- he or she is the singer, or someone just like the singer, or perhaps a personification of teenage angst or lust. But certain songwriters write songs in the voices of characters quite different from themselves -- Bruce Springsteen comes to mind, or John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats.

Like those writers, Fountains of Wayne's Adam Schlesinger writes a lot of songs in which he adopts a narrative voice different from his own. Sometimes that character is clever, overly so in fact, as in the somewhat fussy lyrics for the band's song "No Better Place," in which a lovelorn Mahattanite describes himself as being "Awake and trying not to be, wrapped around my pillow like a prawn." But sometimes that character is kind of dull-witted. The narrator of "Hackensack" isn't exactly stupid, but he is self-deluding and beaten-down. The plaintive chorus, delivered, remember, by a random dude in Jersey to a TV star who surely doesn't even remember his name, a girl he only knew from sitting together with her in one high-school class, goes:

And I will wait for you
As long as I need to
And if you ever get back to Hackensack
I'll be here for you

In light of how badly this character's been trampled by his life, I argued to my friend, it makes perfect sense that his description of his current job -- refinishing hardwood floors for his dad's company -- would be halting and half-assed. If you were that guy, what would you be able to find to say about that job while singing to the girl of your dreams?

My friend disagreed. If I read his argument correctly, he felt that a songwriter has an obligation to put great care into his lyrics and make them worthwhile regardless of the level of articulation his narrator possesses. It's up to a songwriter to take a character's feelings and make them artful, whether the character would relate them artfully or not.

To me, the pleasures of "Hackensack" lie in the tension between the gorgeous melody and the clumsiness of the narrator's voice. To my friend, the gorgeous melody is undercut by the clumsiness of the narrator's voice. Who is right? Listen and decide for yourself.

Another song that uses inarticulate narration in an interesting way is by a band called the Hold Steady. It's called "Chillout Tent," and tells the story of a guy and a girl who meet cute while coming down from bad drug trips in a music festival's recovery tent. The majority of the song is told by a third-person limited-omniscient narrator, whose voice is pretty similar to the voice in almost all of the songs written by the Hold Steady's Craig Finn. Finn, like fellow Minnesotan Bob Dylan, has an instantly recognizable narrative voice, as well as a set of recurring images and tropes marking nearly every song he's written (as memorably spoofed on the music blog Idolator).

The third-person narration in this song is a little different than most Hold Steady songs, though. Mostly lacking Finn's typical verbosity, the narrator tells the story of how the girl got into the chillout tent:

She drove down from Bowdoin with a carload of girlfriends
To meet some boys and maybe eat some mushrooms
And she did and she got sick
Now she's feeling way too shaky
She doesn't want to tell the doctor
Everything she's taking...

The narrator explains, similarly straightforwardly, the story of the boy:

It was his first day off in forever, man
And the festival seemed like a pretty good plan --
Cruise some chicks and get a suntan.

Bored, the guy takes more hits of acid than recommended, and with a wry bit of affection for his foolhardy character, the narrator tells what happens next:

So now my man he ain't that bored anyways
When the paramedics found him he was shaking on the side of the stage.

This narration is interrupted periodically by two different voices -- those of the boy and girl themselves, sung not by Finn but by a male and female singer, who sing in perfectly plain English their own versions of the story. "I got really high and then I came to in the chillout tent," she sings. "Everything was spinning and I came to in the chillout tent," he sings. They both add an observant detail: "They gave me oranges and cigarettes."

Finn's third-person narrator explains that the couple hooks up. The song ends with the two lovers singing the stories they'll tell their friends later. "He was kind of cute, we kinda kicked it in the chillout tent," she sings. "And I never saw that boy again." He sings, "She was pretty cool, we kinda kicked it in the chillout tent. And I never saw that girl again."

Unlike the narrator of "Hackensack," you get the feeling that these kids might have the words to express how they truly feel, but they choose not to use them -- they're inarticulate by choice. Instead, they downplay the day's significance, but the grandeur of the music and the echoes of each one's words in the other's give their offhand explanations an unexpected sadness.


Fountains of Wayne: Hackensack"
from Welcome Interstate Managers (2003)

The Hold Steady: "Chillout Tent"
from Boys and Girls in America (2006)

The White Blazer

James has a fantastic ode to the majesty of Miami Vice's gun battles over on Moistworks today:

What really left me flush was gun play. The mad dance of exit wounds, muzzle flash, spent casings pinging off the warehouse bitumen. No one choreographs this dance in the editor's suite quite like Michael Mann. For Mann, the bullet in flight is an Objet d'Art. Mann loved the MAC-10 too. With its short barrel and protracted magazine, the MAC-10 could introduce bullets into a scene faster and more inaccurately than any other weapon. And with Mann, the mastery was in the bullets that missed as much the ones that found the mark.

The music in Miami Vice was famously sleek and crucial to the show's moods, and James nails a bunch of the iconic songs from the show. But as a kid, I played and replayed one particular track from my copy of Miami Vice II, the sequel to the soundtrack: "Crockett's Theme," by Jan Hammer. More stately and elegant than Hammer's famous title music, "Crockett's Theme" played, a cursory Google search reveals, during many episodes of the show. I particularly remember the song, though, as playing during a climactic night-time shootout in, I don't know, some episode, in which the girl Sonny Crockett loved was killed. The shootout was shot in gorgeous slow motion, complete with Crockett yelling "No!!!" and the episode fading to black.

As a kid, I spent hours in my room, re-enacting this shootout alone, "Crockett's Theme" on endless repeat on my first CD player. For maximum verisimilitude, I used my best water gun, a jet-black plastic Uzi manufactured in the days before fear of hooligans rendered all water guns bright orange or cartoon-shaped. In slow motion I would aim, shoot, dive for cover, shout out to my beloved, take a bullet to the chest, scream "No!!!", all synched perfectly to Jan Hammer's synthesized beats. I must have been around twelve, and (I realize now) weirdly preoccupied with the artful choreography of death scenes.

Sadly, my love of Miami Vice extended past solitary, imagined shootouts in my bedroom; when my dad invited me to accompany him to the Wisconsin Press Club's annual dinner, which he was hosting, I wore a terrible outfit that appears to have been inspired by Miami Vice, with an added dash of Midwestern style:

Circa 1986, with Milwaukee radio personalities Reitman & Mueller

Tragic.

Jan Hammer: "Crockett's Theme"
from Miami Vice II (1986)

Jackin' Pop

To my excitement, I was asked to participate in the first annual Idolator Jackin' Pop music poll last month. That this is the first year I've been asked to vote in a music poll is a real shame, since this is the first year I've been almost totally unprepared to vote in such a poll. I am just behind the curve enough on pop music that it was only this fall that I really felt like I'd heard most of the notable releases of 2005.

Thankfully, mp3 bloggers were there to help me pick up the slack, and a flurry of last-minute downloading, purchasing, and listening helped me finish my ballot just under the wire. Certainly there were holes in my listening -- for example, I still haven't listened to Ys all the way through -- but I feel only a little unsatisfied with my albums list and very happy with my singles list.

Some of the songs on my singles list will be familiar to most music fans who listen to the radio, like the Justin Timberlake/TI song or the Rihanna song. Some others might be less known to you. Three of my favorites represent the evolving ways I experienced new music in 2006.

Marit Larsen: "Only a Fool" One side effect of learning about new music solely through mp3 blogs is that I now often grow to love songs by bands or singers about whom I know absolutely nothing. This never would have happened five years ago; then I read everything about every band in magazines and websites, and I got my music by buying CDs, which meant I could read the liner notes, look at the picture on the sleeve, and begin to form a context for the songs I liked or didn't like. But though I love this catchy pop song more than anything else I heard this year, I haven't gotten around to learning more about Marit Larsen -- who she is, where she's from, even what she looks like. Eventually I'm sure I will buy her album, but it hasn't happened yet, so I imagine her as a short-haired blonde in a calico dress, sort of a countryfied version of Helen Slater in Ruthless People.

Fam-Lay: "Skrunt Owt" Most of the hip-hop I listened to this year was either a couple of years old, or the same new stuff everyone else was listening to (Ghostface, Clipse, and other critical favorites). I found this song on an mp3 blog this summer and loved it every time it came around the shuffle. Again, I know nothing about the band, although their intonation sounds so Hustle & Flow that I assume they're from Memphis.

Paul Simon: "Father and Daughter" One of the few albums I purchased the traditional way this year -- i.e., I read something about it in an actual newspaper, I saw it in a record store, purchased it and brought it home in a bag and everything -- Paul Simon's Surprise was somewhat disappointing, but this song is quite lovely. Apparently it was used in a children's movie last year, and was even nominated for an Oscar. It's a sweet song whose effect on me confirmed that having a kid turns you into a big emotional doofus.

Marit Larsen: "Only a Fool"

Fam-Lay: "Skrunt Owt"

Paul Simon: "Father and Daughter"

May Be Qualified

I owned Prince's Sign 'O' the Times on vinyl, which makes me seem like a much cooler kid than I actually was, as I didn't like most of the songs and found the whole thing -- all the peace signs, Prince's mustache, "The Cross" -- a little bit embarrassing. One song I wore out, though, was "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man," an expertly crafted pop-rock song that tells a simple yet (to a 14-year-old boy, anyway) utterly fantastical story. The singer meets a beautiful woman in a bar who is crying because her husband left her. She sizes him up and immediately wants him. "I asked her if she wanted to dance," Prince sings, "and she said that all she wanted was a good man, and wanted to know if I thought I was qualified." The singer is flattered, and admits that he "may be qualified for a one-night stand," but he does the noble thing and refuses. "I could never take the place of your man," he sings, sadly yet firmly.

To a 14-year-old whose only previous relationship was a one-week muddle at (no lie) band camp, this story was endlessly fascinating. What was frustrating to me about the song was that Prince was singing it from a position of privilege. I read his nobility as slyness, because when you're Prince, it's easy to do the right thing and turn down a hot woman who needs a long-term relationship, because you know full well that in the next bar will be another, hotter woman who needs casual sex. Because I didn't even know how to talk to girls, I knew that if, by some miracle, I ever found myself with such a dilemma it would be a lot harder to be noble. I spent a lot of time dreaming myself into analogous situations, in which beautiful ninth grade girls left their boyfriends and came crying to me. It was enjoyable to imagine myself as noble. But it was much more enjoyable to imagine myself as not. I can, I can, I can take the place of your man.

There's something hypnotic about the rhythm guitar riff and keyboard line in this song, the way they climb the ladder for four measures and then slide down the chute for four more. Two songs that I later came to love echo this chord progression, and when I listen to the Mountain Goats' "Going to Georgia" and Superchunk's "Detroit Has a Skyline" I'm filled with a wistfulness for my teenage self that likely was not the intention of those songs' writers. "Going to Georgia" is fierce and openhearted; "Detroit Has a Skyline," especially this acoustic version, is elegaic and personal. Neither one has anything to do with my teenage romantic frustration. But that's how I read them now, thanks to their accidental echo of a perfect song written by Prince twenty years ago.

Prince: "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man"
from Sign 'O' the Times (1987)

The Mountain Goats: "Going to Georgia"
from Zopilote Machine (1993)

Superchunk: "Detroit Has a Skyline (Acoustic)"
from Hyper Enough EP (1995)