ON STUPID SONGS

Brad Goins Sunday, December 22, 2013 Comments Off on ON STUPID SONGS
ON STUPID SONGS

The morning I wrote this essay, I was in my still-dark house preparing to give the dog his first walk of the day. As I did so, I sang an especially stupid song — “Mississippi Queen,” which was recorded in 1970 by the now forgotten band Mountain. I was singing it loud.

This is the song that begins with the lyrics:

 

“Mississippi Queen. If you know what I mean.”

 

No, of course I don’t know what he means. He hasn’t provided me with any context that would enable me to know what he means. Maybe if he’d used complete sentences, I would have known what he meant.

As I was doing my early morning singing, I complemented the sloppy lyrics with some sound effects, uttering, from time to time, noises such as UGHH or GUDD or DUGGUHH; I don’t remember what.

My wife yelled down from upstairs, “Why are you singing that?” And then she started trying to imitate my sound effects. She was really asking me why I was making these ugly noises — and making them so loud and so early in the morning.

I couldn’t think of a good answer, so I said something like, “Oh, I just thought it was a way of celebrating the fact that another day has begun.”

I spend a lot of time in my house singing stupid songs: in other words, singing popular songs. I do this because my wife expresses astonishment at her sense that I know the lyrics of every popular song ever recorded.

Once I heard her make this claim of my extraordinary knowledge, I started pulling up, from the treasure house of my memory, every dumb song I could think of — “Delta Dawn,” “Magic Man,” “The Night the Lights Went Out In Georgia,” “How Do You Do?” “Watchin’ Me And Scottie Grow.” I sang them all, front to back. I ripped through the Neil Diamond repertoire. After all this time, I’ve still never found a song more stupid than “You’re Having My Baby.” That one gets sung a lot around the home.

I mainly do this to demonstrate to my wife that I have memorized an awful lot of stupid lyrics. Every time I can pull something like, say, “Baby Ima Want You,” out of my head, I figured I’ve demonstrated this marvelous ability again.

For the songs that are so stupid they merit repeat performances, I feel it’s a little blah to keep singing them straight over and over. So I subject the dumb songs to dramatic alteration. I’ve already described what I did, on one particular morning, to “Mississippi Queen.”

Another song I especially like to mangle is Mac Davis’ anti-classic “Baby, Don’t Get Hooked On Me.” You may be unfortunate enough to know the chorus of this song, which begins,

“Baby, baby, don’t get hooked on me.”

Now, when I sing that, it gets quite a bit different. My version usually goes something like this:

“Baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, don’t get hooked on me.”

My wife sometimes makes the mistake of asking me why I sing it like that. That’s my opportunity to make up a story. I say Mac Davis originally wanted to record the song that way. But the musical innovation made the studio heads nervous. They were afraid the extreme repetition might spread through popular music and break their stranglehold on the pop song format. So they refused to let Davis release his daring version. But you can still find it on demos if you look hard enough.

Sometimes, I do it the backwards way around. Before I start singing, I say, “Hey, do you know how the Beatles originally wanted to record ‘I Saw Here Standing There’?” It’s always as if the record industry were in league against The Beatles — or whoever it might be — to prevent them from recording the stupid song the way they wanted to. I think if I tell these stories often enough, with enough embellishment, some of them will become legendary.

It might be asked — as a matter of sociological or anthropological curiosity, if nothing else — why I do know the lyrics of such pap as “Delta Dawn” or “I Never Promised You A Rose Garden” word for word. Is it that I have a really good memory?

I don’t think so. It’s just that I’ve always listened to the lyrics of songs. Why not? They’re there. They’re part of the song. My ears are working. Why not listen?

It’s always been that way with me. When I used to go to church, I was always the one guy in the church who was actually listening to the sermon. Why not? I’m there anyway. I might as well hear what the guy has to say, no?

One can occasionally learn at least little things by following this simple, common sense approach. One learns, for instance, that regardless of how often people use Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” as a patriotic anthem, the song is an anti-war song. It’s obviously an anti-war song. There’s nothing ambiguous about the lyrics. Here’s a taste:

“ … They put a rifle in my hand,

“sent me off to a foreign land

“to go and kill the yellow man …”

“Come back home to the refinery.

“Hiring man says, ‘Son, if it was up to me …’

“Went down to see my V.A. man.

“He says, ‘Son, don’t you understand?’ …”

“Had a brother at Khe Sahn,

“fighting off the Viet Cong.

“They’re still there. He’s all gone.”

How does a person get patriotism out of that? I’ll tell you how. He never listens to the lyrics. (More to the point, I guess, he only listens to the lyric that grabs his sluggish attention: “Born in the U.S.A.”)

Springsteen is one of the few songwriters who can put food for thought into a popular song. Even a song as dopey-sounding as “Hungry Heart” has some pretty thought-provoking ideas. Just listen to the words and you’ll see.

I pay attention to song lyrics  — and even to the worst song lyrics humankind has had the misfortune to hear — because I think it’s probably a good idea in general to pay attention: at least to the degree that one can. If there is something to life, and I pay attention to what’s going on, there’s at least a chance I may catch a glimpse of that something before it speeds past me.

And one learns, even from the worthless things. Perhaps the most singular thing I’ve learned about stupid lyrics is that they defy analysis. For once, there’s a phenomenon of life that it’s pointless to think about. Pop lyrics could be thought of as providing a relief from the ongoing chore of analysis.

As I’ve become more and more aware that I’m winding down my life, I’ve become even more disappointed in the lyrics of pop songs. I’ve tended to think that if I could find something enduring — something worth having lived for — I might find it in old movies, and, in particular, the great screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s. After all, all the people who were in these movies are long since dead. Before they died, did they look at or think of something in these movies, and conclude, “That was worth living for”?

In these old movies, songs are much more important than they are in today’s movies. Often the stars sang the songs. For some time now, I’ve been looking over the lyrics of songs from the old movies to see if I can find in them some transcendent message.

But the results are discouraging. One of the songs that’s sung most often in old movies is “The Old Oaken Bucket.” A hundred years ago, this piece of junk was probably the most popular song in the U.S. It was, in fact, adapted from an idiotic popular poem about the great sentimental value of — yes — an old oaken bucket that the poet had used to draw water up out of a well when he was a boy. The less said about it the better.

In “It Happened One Night,” which some consider the greatest screwball movie, the passengers on a bus sing, “The Man On The Flying Trapeze.” Come on.

“He flies through the air with the greatest of ease,

“The daring young man on the flying trapeze.”

Not much transcendence there.

It doesn’t help to look at the lyrics of the great songwriter of the screwball comedy: Irving Berlin. Most of the songs are about one of two motifs: I love Sue and she loves me and isn’t it wonderful? — or, I love Sue and she doesn’t love me boo hoo hoo.

Deep down, I’m not surprised by this. Those are the two motifs that have been the stuff of Western popular songs for as long as they’ve been around. (I don’t know how long they’ve been around, but they’ve been written down in notes for about 700 years.) Once in a while, there’ll be a songwriter such as John Dowland who can, like magic, make lyrics that transform those most banal of motifs into something beautiful and fulfilling and deeply insightful — perhaps something worth having lived for.

I may wind up deciding that there’s nothing better I can do with the time remaining than to listen to Dowland songs over and over.

By the way, just in case anyone was wondering, I don’t listen to popular songs. I hope you have more respect for me than to think I spend my time doing something like that. However, I won’t mind singing “I Saw Her Standing There” a few dozen more times — and doing everything within my vocal power to make it sound more stupid than it did the first time I heard it.

It’s amazing. Think about it. A man looks over and sees a woman. She’s standing. His heart goes boom.

If I hadn’t listened to the lyrics, I would never have known that hearts go boom.

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