Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Songs? Maybe and maybe ...




First-Time Visitors

If you don't know Paul Simon's Surprise, listen to Outrageous before proceeding.

You have to read this blog as it was posted, earliest first. Start with "Cracked 2 More" ('06, Nov.) and then work your way down the list. The fully cracked explanations are in the comments, not in the blogs (for those who want to do their own cracking).


I've spent a long time calling the tracks on Surprise "tracks" as opposed to songs. That they are tracks is a simple fact. Whether they are songs is open to discussion.

"Sure Don't Feel Like Love," for one example, starts with "Registered to vote ..." and then totally drops the "Felt like a fool" issue as it goes on with different music and lyrics on other topics. Many of these tracks appear more to be built with fragments of different songs than to be single songs. If we are going to call them "songs" then we are going to be redefining that word to include these tracks, assembled as they are from disparate elements.

For instance, "Sure Don't Feel ..." is built from these elements:

1 - Felt like a fool
2a - Who's that conscience
3 - Chemistry of crying
2b - Who's that conscience
4 - A voice in your head
5 - No joke, no joke
6 - Yay! Boo!
7 - Wrong again
8a - Sure don't feel like
8b - (track ends, sung acappella) It sure. Don't feel. Like love.

Calling them "tracks" does nothing to communicate what kind of tracks they are. Tracks include songs, comedy album bits, recipes from cooking shows. We need a word that says "pieces of music made from disparate lyric, melodic and harmonic bits." I'll coin one: disparongs.

The advantage of calling them disparongs is that it conveys that we have something here that is not the same as plain songs. It means musical tracks pulling together disparate bits. The disadvantage is that people will look at you funny and have no clue what you are talking about if you call them disparongs.

Our choices are two: we either agree that we will extend the definition of "song" or we need to define a new word. (Note that the tracks themselves are completely unaffected. This is a discussion of word definitions, not of the tracks.)

I'd like to have a new word, as this would let us point to the tracks on this album and similarly constructed tracks, such as "A Day in the Life" and "Bohemian Rhapsody". One critic noted Surprise's "odd song structures." (That's putting it mildly!) On the other hand, in interviews Paul Simon calls them "songs."

In the end, I think Simon rules. He's pushed the envelope on what a song is, but if he says these tracks are songs, then the rest of us have little authority to dispute the new definition. He's the one making the art, so he should be the one who decides how he wants his art named.

On the other hand, if you want to use the word "disparong" that word is now defined, within the confines of this blog, as a subset of the word "song." Wish disparong didn't sound so much like "wrong." These disparongs are as right as a soft, summer-solstice rain.

3 comments:

Reg said...

Martin says that the line "God will. Like he waters the flowers on your window sill" is not reassuring. I continue to wonder if Simon is being ironic here. I wonder, Martin, if there might be more here than you have realized. The way the speaker states it ("God will") doesn't sound ironic. He continues: "Take me. I'm an ordinary player...And my will was broken by my pride and my vanity." He speaks of a humbling experience, of the sort that those who come to belief in God often recount. As to "like he waters the flowers on your window sill," well, sometimes the rain waters those flowers (God sent?), and sometimes we open the window and use the watering can. But when we do life-sustaining, life-affirming actions, are we not acting as the hands of God? This is an idea I often encounter in my religion, which I am reminded I must now attend to. (Time to join the other sheep and pantomime prayers. Oh, yes, we were born to do much more than just that: we must also water those flowers, keep an eye on them children in the pool, etc.)
I'll add here with little comment that the video for the song Outrageous has a delightful story line. The song sure do feel like love to me.

Martin Rinehart said...

Reg,

Your comments are correct re flower boxes, which are outside, but that's not the line. The song says "windowsill." The sill is indoors.

Reg said...

Martin,

I checked a few online dictionaries and your implication that sills are always indoors is questionable. Definitions I found stated that a sill is at the bottom of the window; no definition specified indoor or outdoor. My sense of the word is that a sill can be outside. (My take on the line, that the song's flowers are watered by rain, may be influenced by city experiences of my youth of negligently leaving a window open and having rain come in. I wouldn't say that's how the song's speaker gets his flowers watered, however.) By the way, Simon's choice of "sill" rather than "box" may be simply a matter of euphony.

I believe the crux of the issue is whether the song indicates irony as to belief in God. ("God will/like he waters the flowers on your window sill.") As I argued before, I have a sense that the speaker in the song expresses a sense of humility and transcendence. And, besides, even if we water the flowers, we can be "hands of God."

I will add that the recurring line "Who's gonna love you when your looks are gone?" literally rings as an open-ended question at the end of the song, inviting the listener to share the experience or realization that the song's speaker has had. But I'll admit that my interpretation is not a certainty. The entire album probably needs a fresh listening by me. (I was surprised to hear three or four songs from the album on a compilation CD I had in the car the other day for my commute. Man, this album stands up the repeated listenings. The world really missed the boat on this one. I say this because I don't think the album got that much attention.)