Pop rock bar, Baroque pop

Okay, so before we get to baroque pop, I’d like to put my editor’s cap on and point out that the more familiar, even cliched, ‘ear to the ground’ works far better here than the gimmicky ‘nose to the ground’ though I’ll allow the songwriting part of my brain – or the direct access to the Muse, whichever you fancy – had a bloodhound trail on this thought and may have wanted to open with it and see whether it was picked up, with what was to follow

You Turn Me Upside Down

I keep my ear to the ground
I'm the square there when you're around
proof once aloof in love now profound
You turn me upside down, girl (turn me upside down)
[RPT]

My feet can't compete with the noise on the street
You take me apart like it's art yet make me complete
My shins shine where a grin should begin
My knees pressed where who knows needs to guess
The best moment not to be in
[chorus]

I liked being aright but you set me alight
  in standing and landing right
It was my head that said those I'd eyed could step instead
   into the light defining the night
[chorus]


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Invasion inversion

As I’m neither British nor have I been to the US, I feel spectacularly unqualified to invoke the British invasion. The other issue is that it is a bit of a catch-all in that not only was it ‘coals to Newcastle’ with the rhythm’n’blues and rock’n’roll but the bands who crossed the pond were caught up in(stigating) the change so is there anything not covered in our other sixties ruminations? Possibly not. The pressure’s off then

Billionaire’s Ballast

The name on the building
the sinkhole  filled in
or flying over your own isle
always go in what you call style

Your ship is surely equipped 
with the happier happening to be hip
Payment methods in mythic arraignment
the evanescent path to attainment
We're pleased you've thought us plutocrats
worthy of those stupid caps

The countries you court and the c#nts you control
 how you feel as you fill a hole
The steps the stops the stipulations
 leading to adulterated adulation
 search and destroy each situation

The inner circle jerk of innovation
rockets and sockets racked up salvation
it's another corner of the cornucopia
every magnate in their own utopia


Beat rude to me

Merseybeat deserves its own entry and we all know why even if the most prominent beat-titled band moved on. Beat groups sprung up and influenced the world with their own take on rock. It kept to the simple tale-telling rock’n’roll and R’n’B employed, along with their predilection for heart ache and chasing after the opposite sex.
The issue again is “Do we want to stick to this simple formula?” when this has been so well-covered here. The crux could be in what other influences are brought to beat music/British beat (not the band of that name, the genre). Wikipedia defines it thus

Beat music is a fusion of rock and roll (mainly Chuck Berry guitar style and the midtempo beat of Lubbock sound artists like Buddy Holly), doo-wop, skiffle and R&B.

You Turn Me Upside Down

I keep my nose to the ground
I'm the square there when you're around
proof once aloof in love now profound
You turn me upside down, girl (turn me upside down)
[RPT]

My feet can't compete with the noise on the street
You take me apart like it's art yet you make me complete
My shins shine where a grin should begin
My knees pressed where knows need to guess
The best moment not to be in
[chorus]
I liked being aright but you set me alight
  in standing and landing right
It was my head that said it could step instead
   into the light defining the night
[chorus]

Proto punked

It’s not garage, not really, despite referencing hitchhiking ‘earlier’ than CCR’s “Sweet Hitchhiker” and starting off simply (perhaps too simply as this just sounds like a rip on real garage bands) the next two verses are too dense and elliptical, despite the word count and the use of terms like ‘the hop’ simply rhymed with ‘shop’ and ‘stop’.

You can use all this and still have a song that doesn’t sound right. The term ‘proto-punk’ is useful here as the critic will look at whether There’s a Hitch imagining that it was written in the mid sixties, would have played more of an influence on other seventies genres than punk. If it was taken up at all.

I think it structurally fails for all of its tripping tropes both because it doesn’t meet the brief – whatever wonky wordplay some teenager of the time may have jotted down – nor stand up generally. When you start off with such a base mission statement it’s not wise to drift off in reverie, even if, on decoding the phrase or clause, the reader or listener discovers that you never really went off track. It’s the change in register that throws the song out.
I don’t know where it fits, quite honestly. Too twee for the braggart at the start of the song, too indecipherable for hotblooded teens in automobiles.

Much easier to write and not try to second guess your audience

Things are Back to Normal

I can vouch for the couch in which I slouch
Steady the course where's there's nary a stoush
Wear what I like or just despite
 wandering out and tripping the light

I can sneak a snack or openly spoon
the cornucopia the balanced boon
Read all day all I need to say
forget the regrets so far away

Stay indoors endeared to none
who find each other just for fun
where nations amass
at stations of the crass

A hint of the garage

The thing about garage rock is that it wasn’t named that until a decade later so adolescents wanting to get together and bash out songs could do so without worrying about genre. Some retrospective assessment has it that these teens cranked out simple ‘she done me wrong’ lyrics but I think we can adhere to the broader directive to keep the song simple and easy to sing.

Our roots rock merely had to be authentic so I told the story of my father leaving the farmhouse he’d lived in for twenty-five years. In the process, the blues is evident in both the mournful tone and, well you can’t get more blues than have to leave my happy home                                                                                                                                     The folk feel is evident in the plain speaking, in the unvarnished setting and the gathering of family.                                                                                                                   Country? It’s a rural setting and populated with machinery, with rust and dust.

Roots rock can still facilitate that line in the chorus which is both long and a bit of a tongue twister. It’s also confronting for the narrator to make declarations about their ‘frail familiar frame’ whether they have one or not. So it’s not as though it’s not challenging for a fellow with a semi-acoustic but does fit the classification. This is where, when we move over to the garage, we’d need to either break up the line or dispense with it altogether.

There’s a Hitch

I saw you on the side of the road
I said do you want a ride
You nodded and you climbed inside
You smiled as you climbed inside
CHORUS: Oh there's a hitch there's a hitch
          There's always a hitch
f
I was the driving force
arriving in due course
at the hop at the shop at the stop
keep this from the cops
(C)
I clutch this close to me
Brake for the sake of repartee
The gear to appear carefree

My reverse and my rearview 
I can't get enough of you 
How mad the mode a lad with his load
(C)



Roots, toots

Roots rock delves back whether to blues, folk, country, spanning out to hybrids of these forms. It’s not a lot different to what we’ve been looking at

Moving from the Farmhouse

It came as a hell of a shock
causing me to at last take stock
I was complete in complacency
so much I couldn't face you see
Lying in my quarters half my health is gone
soon though I'll be leaving where I belong 
CHORUS: Moving from the farmhouse
my family formed a circle round my frail familiar frame
Moving from the farmhouse
nothing no now nothing will ever be the same

I ran back over my escapades
all the times we had it made
 dreams now seem so resolute
trust the dust and rust to be destitute

I moved down here to start anew
did I manage as I planned it in your view 
with the reminders you'll find were kinder 
each machine evokes a scene
more distant than I mean 

Walking out and working out
what it was for
sent from where we went before
Stir and stare at what's in store
CHORUS: Moving from the farmhouse
my family forms a circle round my frail familiar frame
Moving from the farmhouse
sever forever now will never be the same

Gotcha psyched

As a rock swot, I was a little surprised at the newsthat psychedelia in UK and US had also triggered a “backlash” of roots rock. Well I’m happy to look at both, not knowing how different it will be to what we have already picked over.

I love psychedelic rock but at the same time I can see how in the wrong hands it could dissolve into a pile of pink dust. At the same time, roots rock is kissin’ cousins with Americana I would have thought. Maybe the emphasis is different.

Later Writers

We evolve as the plot develops
as the mood is rued and eve envelops
We're characterised by our character's eyes
if you're simulacra I do sympathise

Later writers with elongated scrawl
dipping dripping tripping
they can reach the far wall
 

We advance in a dance with chance
too real to feel so is circumstance
Reader feedback on our foibles to date 
a dunce with whom we could once relate 
[Chorus]
We're the scribble in the margin
  emerging in the script
Egg the stage when the ego is tripped
 [Chorus]
Assembled scribes with what resembles bribes
what was truth in our youth is now circumsubscribed

On the Rocks

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.

the turn of the Teens

It’s 2017 and I haven’t heard a pet name for this decade. We’ll be trouble next decade of course because the Roaring ’20s starts the chain of memorialised decades. But I don’t think with the onset of the First World War there was much to say about the second decade of the twentieth century and so it is for the twenty first

Suffice it say that strangely-monikered bands – I speak of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard – still crawl the land.

A catalogue of spent convictions

Follies fully followed til the fellows flew
into the face of tabbed taboos
difference to snuff to snooze
this is the stuff to use
Indiscretions in district court hissing with all the dissing bought
This is what they meant by don't get caught
Fellow felons who flew the coop
Now outstared out on the stoop
Rites incites but not for long
It says here I've done nothing wrong

Dalliance deleted or reported ripped repeated
pointed out or painted out
Leave alive as looks deceive
like stolen good to still receive
so who says you can't be something you're not 
the fear you get now you forget
empty of anger devoid of danger
The four you got now you forgot

Noughties song

The end forecast did not occur so perhaps fate doesn’t like neat division imposed by humankind. As for rock, that swept into the twenty first century without a by your leave. It may have had a few tumbles with hip hop and electronica and the like but, basically, this thing called rock continues to swagger.

If I Could Have Your Attention Please

The loud hailer and the lead hallooo
don't have the halo the hullabaloo
Shout shit til you're in shot
strip and rip and stop the rot
Bellow for cert it's a yellow alert
Hate those darts then hit the dirt 
There's seekers on the speaker what sort sought
reader in the rider with the other rubbish bought
Wobble over Web Bing lead the other way
We giggle over Google Yahoos lead astray

Where once we'd scramble at every scream
now we shift we drift downstream
Certain they're sorting it selecting the dream

Whether megaphone or meagre phone
microphone Mike's not home 
Social Medea she sells shills 
empires still til empty tills
tell us what we need to, no
spell out details in the blow

The loud hailer leads the hellooooos
haloes dropped hullabaloo stopped
Share shit while it's still in shop
Swoop and whoop and swipe and wipe
Announce an ounce increase 
pounce and then release