Left Column...
Left Column...
I'm talking about songs that might or might not be sound, otherwise, but which contain at least one clunker, one dud, that mars an otherwise charming experience.
I always liked Billy Joel's "Piano Man", for example, but one line always grated on my nerves. "They sit at the bar and put bread in my jar and say, 'man, what are you doing here?'". What does he mean? He has just described the brief, pathetic lives of several bar patrons, all of whom seem to be deluding themselves. But even they know that that the narrator, Billy Joel himself, presumably, doesn't belong in this seedy little joint. It's an embarrassing line. I hope Joel deletes it when he releases the tenth edition of his greatest bestest collected gold hits, director's cut.
I also liked "He Thinks He'll Keep Her" by Mary Chapin Carpenter. It's about a woman who lives the traditional life, marrying, having kids, keeping house, until she is 37. Then she decides to leave her husband. The song doesn't tell you what the husband did wrong. It just keep repeating the chorus, "he thinks he'll keep her". That obviously comes from a phrase some men might use to describe a fish they did not throw back because it was too skinny or young or tasteless. It's a patronizing phrase of course. He deserves her contempt. But she's a strong, independent woman: she leaves him.
But wait a minute-- she doesn't leave him. I had always misunderstood the last line. She doesn't pack her suitcases and wait at the door. She packs his suitcases. In other words, he's worked for 17 years paying the mortgage and all the bills just so she can scam him out of the house, and probably the car, and probably some nice juicy support payments too. Then she joins the typing pool at minimum wage, proud, one supposes, of the fact that she is no longer a "kept" woman.
I find this little twist annoying. If she has decided that after only seventeen years of patronizing attitudes, she is going to get out from under his paternalistic domination and strike out on her own, she should be the one to pack the bags.
In "Things Have Changed", Bob Dylan tells you about a woman sitting on his lap who is drinking champagne. She is obviously part of the degraded landscape he find so appalling. She has white skin and "assassin's eyes".
My question is, then why is he letting her sit on his lap? Maybe he wants it both ways. Maybe he finds her sexually enticing, but still reserves to right to condemn her moral lassitude. Take a hike, Bob.
Paul Simon's "Feelin' Groovy" is one long bad lyric. It is quite possibly the worst lyric ever written by a self-respected singer-songwriter. But it also contains the single worst line ever written: "Life, I love you; all is groovy".
"all is groovy"
Well, I guess he couldn't fit "everything is groovy" into that phrase.
Bob Dylan could have. He would have created something interesting out of it too. "Everything is twisted cat slicked back silver sack groovy-- everything..."
You wouldn't want to say, "I am groovy", would you? And you've already said, "Life, I love you", which makes me picture a fat drooling golden-haired choir-boy running from tree to tree embracing everything and waving his sparkly wand. All is groovy. Not, "it" is groovy, or "life is groovy", but "all" is groovy.
And as if it isn't enough to have written and copyrighted the worst line of all time, Simon and Garfunkel give a saccharine little vocal twist to the words, the literary equivalent of dumping four heaps of sugar into your lukewarm tea.
Copyright © 2001 Bill Van Dyk All rights reserved.
