Let’s clumsily switch hats to reviewer or critic for a moment. When we talk about rock, there’s the rock writers as well. Who knows how much influence is wielded by Rolling Stone or Creem when they’re supposedly just covering the music scene.
I was voracious in fact, and was as likely to devour roneod magazines that had found their way from the underground to the cool kid shop. Rock’s half century is also a product of every garage band in the land; the luck or quirk directing some to greater heights and for longer or shorter periods. It is this fascination amongst the rowdy and unpolished that keeps the movement going as much as any superannuated or swapped rock star. Rock reaches mythic status and it sags under the weight of a dozen groups with no spark to make them special. It isn’t everything but it will pretty much have a go at everything.
With that in mind
You Could Have Told Me is more straightforward than More tally it’s true and this may come from the conscious attempt to ‘look more like a lyric’. More tally doesn’t have a hook and sixties songs, for all their experimentation, had hooks. It travels from the early Liverpool scene, even referencing “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” while ‘mirrored in the myre/pirrhouetting to the pyre’ is a nod to the Jims who round out the decade.
It’s all very well to tell you this but if you were to sit down and deliberately try for gimmickry or the aforementioned referencing that we swore would be naff, I fear the result would show all that and hurt the structure and the conceit. So am I saying that you should stumble on this, as if it can just happen? Yep, you need a fair dose of intuition.
What else is going on behind You Could Have Told Me you ask. The narrative decouples from classic boy meets girl as it presupposes that, in addition to casting some kind of spell on [the narrator] – standard fare for the time – this also means that she can foresee what will happen between them. There is no way otherwise that she could be expected to know how things would turn out.
Possessing those powers makes sense of that ‘mire/pyre’ line while conjuring off the cuff reference to the darker parts of history. There’s a sordid subtext of sacrifice on both sides with him declaring what he surrenders or no longer contemplates.
While it casts too much of a knowing wink to have come from the sixties, it captures some of the spirit that bands have been reviving from the seventies on.
Our seventies rock song is a perfect example of that aforementioned intuition. Having just noted how using a contemporary reference to write a song in a bygone style doesn’t work, here we go again. Only this time, the 60s and 70s fascination with 3D, though taking a different form, offers a perfect segue to looking at the 3D printing that is possible now. I will go out on a limb (a 3D printed one, natch) and declare this one a success.
So what else to say about Some Day My Prints Will Come: given my own penchant for puns, I found the only way to footnote that this one was plagiarised was to declare it upfront. That way we could get on with our seventies rock number.
By chance, the subject matter lends itself to copying so declaring the pun – and someone else’s pun what’s more – is acceptable in this rare instance.
It has a nice build on it too in the three verses, each doing its job well. This despite there being no chorus or other repeated element; the hook we mention above! I think that some sprawling epics that saw rise in that era can excuse the grandiose ‘referents you’ll just have to get’
The eighties rock number sounds like it could have actually made its appearance a decade later but since the nineties seemed like the first decade where all was a postmodern mishmash of existing styles, what does that say?
I think pheromones are a good thing to write about, especially when the subject’s just laying around waiting to be used. It’s quite long though so not suitable for all 80s rock.
Recursive could have been from the nineties but this doesn’t tell us much. Whereas Pheromones keeps to simple repetition of sound and pattern, Recursive is dense, as if, my having already covered the subject of repetition, doing another called Recursive requires a quite different approach. The song is about repetition but doesn’t display any itself.
As I get older, I’m winging it more as I just don’t listen to the same volume of stuff. There are situations and concepts that are perennial
and then there are the references to search engines that date If I Could Have Your Attention Please both on the millenium and during the next ten years. Do rock songs from 2001 or 2002 display this pattern of poetry (if I’m to be honest) where the subjects are reintroduced but in a changed scenario? It doesn’t matter because this whole situation of being able to stream anything we want does speak to this cry for attention that could be even necessary in a crowded marketplace and a distracted populace.
Why not write a song about it?
The fact that it requires a close reading to understand the force of the loudhailer when it’s reintroduced is a test of both the audience and the singer. It asks of the more than casual listener that they do indeed pay attention.
Which brings us to this decade we’re in. I don’t plan any of this, as the lyricist instruction component of this blog is at pains to point out. But one could rap this. A catalogue of spent convictions is not treading on thin ice or anyone with Ice in their name or who takes ice. The listener will bring in their own reading according to their circumstance, their expectations and their musical background but that is not usually our concern.
Follies fully followed til the fellows flew
Like the act of projecting that you’re stealing a stranger’s stuff in using the line ‘Some day my prints will come’ by stating such in the first verse but qualifying its useage; we’re now talking about something bigger.
Here we signal that the patois is of some toffee-nosed git whatever misdemeanours he may or may not have committed, just so you don’t read “could rap it” with the catalogue of spent convictions and think we’re going into dangerous territory. Again, this is the fortuitousness of doing nothing more than sticking to the subject and covering the angle while using arresting language.
There’s lines here that lightly touch on the gaolbird theme but not so you’d notice and it’s possible to see that this is just exactly what it says it is. It’s up to the audience or the band members to make out what nationality or cultural background the narrator is but I don’t think it matters. This could even be reportage with a voice different to that of the perp.
