There’s an old adage/cliché in art critique that only sad, dark, or otherwise bleak works can be considered ‘true art’. I’ve heard this many, many times, often in the context of someone defending bubblegum pop. This spin on the quote (which could be rendered as “Happy things are art too” or something a bit more prosaic like “Art can be found in the happiness of the day just as often as in the melancholy of the night” if you’re a snob) is the rallying call of poptimists everywhere, who maintain that the mass-produced product of artists like Britney Spears, Ke$ha, or Rihanna can be considered significant and worthy of analysis.
Let’s take a look at specific quote from that linked article,
“[Pop not being music is] an argument that seems to follow most pop music around these days. At the heart of it is the theory that all music needs to have been wrenched from the emotional core of a tortured soul, ideally recorded in a basement toilet and augmented only by the scratching of fingers on guitar strings and tears, ACTUAL TEARS. It forgets that music can be fun and instantaneous [….] It also hints at another old adage: that pop is for children who lap it up without giving it a second thought.”
This misses the point entirely. The kind of music Mr. Cragg is describing with such intense, English sarcasm would be considered art not because it’s sad, but because it’s authentic. That song (whatever it may sound like) would be worthy of analysis and critique because it’s the direct product of the musician himself, rather than the polled focus groups and crack production teams behind songs like “Toxic”.
This is to say nothing of the actual quality of the music. Personal preferences aside, I find it quite likely that “Toxic”, with its well-engineered and tightly controlled sound, would have an objectively higher level of songcraft than this hypothetical basement tape. Bubblegum pop isn’t dismissed because it’s cheerful, but because it’s completely empty of content.
I’ve discussed this many, many times before already, but allow me to give the nail one more good smack of the hammer: music needs to have a message. Bubblegum pop is deliberately written to give a key demographic people what they want: a beat, a video, and a hook. That’s it. Lyrics are a moot element in every bubblegum pop song I can think of. They’re worthless, and I won’t even bother linking to them.
The fact of the matter is that if you’re writing a song with the goal of wide demographic appeal, generalizable, surface-content only lyrics are an absolute must. Bubblegum pop has to either use extremely trite or extremely relatable lyrics to hook their listening audience, with the former sometimes veering into the self-parody that so appeals to the post-modern poptimist. For the record, I don’t care if LMFAO are acting as a self-parody on “Sexy And I Know It”, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s an awful, awful, awful fucking song that needs to disappear.
Anyway. Bubblegum pop is cheerful because happiness and joy are things people like to relate to, and it lends itself well to the up-tempo, high note, major scale style (think casino noise) that similarly makes people perk up and listen. Form follows function, after all. If you start talking about darker topics, it invites the kind of lyrical dissonance that clever musicians like to use to mock the genre. That kind of thing doesn’t sell, at least not these days (The Beatles used this every chance they got, sometimes in spite of complaints from within the band).
So it’s really no surprise that if you want to find good lyrics, you have to drift further and further away from pop music’s bright creamy center, into the darker regions of folk and country. Blues and rock can be good for lyric-seekers as well, but tend to be more concerned with raw emotion than clever words. Folk and country often do that too, especially the latter, but are equally concerned with the small details. Folsom Prison just wouldn’t be the same without those little details like “I bet there’s rich folks eating/in a fancy dining car”; it’s what lets you know there’s a real person singing the song. Musicians from these genres oftentimes seem to be suffering from acute hyperthymesia, so unflinching and exact are their eyes.
Country, folk, and rap music are the only genres, in my opinion, that are either able or willing to tell a story. They certainly tell the best ones, and that’s because of the focus on lyrics that all three genres share. Rock and punk songs will often give you character sketches (some of them very effective and even moving) but they don’t generally have the plots of good country songs, or the lyricism of the best folk and rap songs.
The Mountain Goats are the best of both worlds when it comes to emotion and story, at least in my opinion, and The Sunset Tree represents the apex of that ability, at least from an album standpoint. I’m qualifying that because Sunset Tree lacks their current, magnificent drummer and doesn’t include what is arguably one of their best songs. What this album does have is cohesion; there hasn’t been a slow burn of emotion this effective since Here, My Dear.
Josh Darnielle, the central member of the band and the lead-songwriter, based the album on his childhood spent with an abusive step-father. If that sounds a bit too intimate for comfortable listening you’d be right; this is not an album for a casual party. Darnielle’s music is unflinchingly autobiographical, and, rather than inviting listeners to sympathize with him, seems instead to be almost challenging them to keep the song going. I can think of no other reason for the album’s bizarre sequencing, where relatively poppy songs like “This Year” or “Dance Music” are followed by far starker songs like “Dilaudid” or “Dinu Lipatti’s Bones”. This choice of juxtaposition was clearly obvious; note the fact that the official music video for “This Year” linked above opens with the intro to “Dialudid”.
A glance at those titles can be intimidating; few songs reference painkillers originally developed as a heroin alternative or Romanian classical pianists. However, knowing what these songs reference isn’t terribly pertinent. The mood both titles and references are meant to evoke (desperation/addiction and Romantic melancholy) are obvious from the lyrics and music themselves. Whether that makes the references gratuitous or not is up to you; they honestly don’t bother me much at all.
I consider these more literary versions of the small details I mentioned before in the context of country songs. References to Romulus & Remulus, B&J wine coolers, or Crime & Punishment may not be terribly important to us, but I have little doubt that they mean something to Darnielle. And even if they don’t, they still help build a character.
Even if you don’t buy that, the songs on Sunset Tree are unflinching in their depiction of Darnielle’s desperation. I’d argue that that’s the real theme of the album; aimless desperation. The songs progress from the stifled depression of “Broom People” to the relatively blasé teenage rebellion of “This Year”, which leads into the toxic relationship depicted in “Dilaudid”, “Dance Music”, and “Dinu Lipatti’s Bones”. This, in turn, is followed by the barely checked aggression of “Up The Wolves” and the outright revenge fantasy of “Lion’s Teeth”. None of these efforts have an effect, which is driven home by the abuse scene of track 9.
What follows is something that would never fly in a traditional narrative: a non-ending. The last three songs (possibly four depending on how you interpret “Magpie”) are all calm reflections on death, starting with an ode to reggae artist Dennis Brown, followed by the more ambiguous “Love Love Love”. This is all capped by Darnielle being told that his step-father suffered a fatal heart-attack over the phone, “at last, at last”.
The mere fact that I can tease a narrative out of this album is an astonishing rarity in the music world. It’s not for nothing that I call Darnielle literary in his approach to writing lyrics. It’s not for nothing that I have spent the duration of this post occupied solely by his lyrics, and that listening to “Pale Green Things” after writing all that out forced me into almost total stillness. There is a very good reason why seeing Darnielle play solo last year was the most harrowing concert experience of my life, and one I nevertheless look back on with fond memories.
That, to my mind, is the most astonishing thing about this music. It’s difficult enough to write down your darkest thoughts and sing them to an audience of hundreds, but making them actually enjoy is simply remarkable. I’ve been to two Mountain Goats shows now and while the first was more reverential than anything else, the second, full band performance was one of the most gleeful I’ve ever seen. That challenge I imagine that Darnielle was offering has been graciously accepted in the form of mass sing-alongs to divorce anthems like “No Children”. I’ve been in one of those sing-alongs. Believe me, it feels good.
Isn’t stuff like that what art is at least partially for? An expression for the taboo thoughts we all have at some point in our life, a way to find true solidarity among a group of total strangers? I can’t imagine finding much joy from singing along to “Vogue”, even if it is a great little pop ditty. What’s the point in making a song about how happy you are, how great clubs are, or how your milkshake brings all the boys to the yard? What does that contribute to people’s lives other than yet another entirely Styrofoam pop song to dance along to?
Of course, the rejoinder to that is to echo the sentiments of musician Matthew Herbert, quoted from this Pitchfork article:
"I [...] feel that there is too much music in the world. I'm not convinced that we need to make any more music. I read this statistic that said 75% of music on iTunes has never been downloaded once. It's depressing, but it also makes you think that we should stop making music until we listen to it all, and then we should start again.
"We're in a bit of a muddle about the function of music, and why we're making it, and what we expect from our music. I mean, surely, everything has been said about love already by now. [...] It feels like people think they have a right to make music or express themselves in a certain way. I think you have a right to express yourself, but I don't necessarily think [...] that people should be expected to listen."
I’ll have a lot to say about this next week, but for now let me close with a good and hearty, ‘Fuck you.” Music is a fucking treasure, and the more of it there is the better.
Cheers.
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