tymshft

Songs of the young, and songs not of the young

I recently attended a high school choral concert. Normally such concerts consist of classical and/or popular tunes that many of us have heard before. At this particular concert, however, one of the songs was an original composition, performed as a vocal/piano solo by the student who wrote it.

The song was beautiful, honest, and touching.

It was also very obviously written by a teenager. The sentiments expressed in the song included idealistic absolutes that one would usually expect a teenager to say. However, as I mentioned, the song was honest, and I certainly commend it.

Some songwriters try to write songs that express the feelings of younger people, and some of those efforts are less than successful.

My favorite example of this is a song by the electronic band Client entitled “Diary of an 18 Year Old Boy,” or, as I put it, “Diary of a 30 Year Old Woman Pretending to be an 18 Year Old Boy.” I happen to love the song, both in the electronic version on the Client album, and on a more acoustic version that I heard once. But the lyrics themselves are the funniest thing this side of the Pet Shop Boys.

I’ll confine myself to two hints that this song was not written by an 18 year old boy. The first one is right in the title – no 18 year old male, in Great Britain or anywhere else, would refer to himself as a “boy.” The second hint can be excerpted from the lyrics – I cannot think of any 18 year old man who, even in his secret diary, would write the words “Make me tremble.” Sounds like a 30 year old woman there.

Some songwriters, of course, are very capable of capturing the moods of the young. Perhaps you’ve heard of a singer named Justin Bieber. (If you use Klout to keep track of yourself, then you want to BE Justin Bieber.) One of his recent hits is a song called “As Long As You Love Me.” It appears that Bieber himself wrote the non-rap lyrics in the song, but whoever wrote the lyrics deftly captured the idealism and devotion that someone who was Bieber’s age would exhibit. Here’s an excerpt:

As long as you love me
We could be starving, we could be homeless, we could be broke
As long as you love me

These are the same types of absolute, idealistic emotions that were expressed in the original song that I heard at the choral concert.

And idealism, at times, can be a good thing.

The body of musical knowledge, from Gore to Drake

As the decades pass, bodies of knowledge are built up that later generations can reference. If I want to understand possible future changes in the United States, I can study the history of England, or of Rome, or of one of the Greek city states. If I want to understand science, or our lack of understanding of science, I can look at past scientific experiements and theories – some of which are still viable, and some of which are not. (I assume none of you have been treated with leeches lately.)

And if I want to understand a particular phrase in a song, I can look at songs that were sung a half century ago.

I had my car radio on, and was listening to a Drake song that I had probably heard a dozen times before. But this time, I was suddenly struck by a particular line that Drake sang:

It’s my birthday, I’ll get high if I want to

The line in and of itself is not that monumental of a line, but if you take a moment, and think about the rhythm of the words, and then think of a different melody that was sung a half century ago, you end of with the chorus of Lesley Gore’s biggest hit of a half century ago – her song “It’s My Party.” (Note: Lesley Gore is unrelated to Martin.) It’s a completely different story – in Gore’s song, the protagonist has lost her boyfriend to a girl named Judy. But the rhythm of the words nearly echoes that song that was a hit before Drake was born.

So did Drake intentionally mimic Gore? According to one commenter at rapgenius.com, he did not:

It would be clever if he was taking this line from back in the day and using it as an excuse to blaze. However, he’s actually interpolating Fabolous’s line in This is My Party from his Street Dreams album (2003)

And if you look at the Fabolous song, you’ll see that it was Fabolous that was recalling Gore.

But this is my party
Stroll by if you want to
Or ya’ll can stay home
But why would you want to?

Thematically, this is even more divorced from Gore’s original. In the 1960s version, the protagonist is the only one who is having a bad time at the party, but by the time Fabolous was singing, everybody was (if I may quote Wang Chung) having fun tonight.

So it’s quite possible that Drake was channeling Lesley Gore via an intermediary. Maybe Drake had never even heard the Lesley Gore song when he wrote “Take Care.”

The same thing happens in other fields, in which a politician may quote Thomas Jefferson, who may have been quoting a 17th century philosopher, who may have been quoting an ancient Greek.

The intriguing part is that what I consider modern popular music – in other words, anything after Bill Haley – has now been around for over 55 years. And that’s a lot of songs that new songwriters can reference.

How Maximum Rocknroll was produced in 1983

It all seems so long ago, perhaps because it was.

Back in the late 1970s and the 1980s, I was involved in several publications. I wrote a newspaper for my Reed College dorm called the Eastport Enquirer, back in the days in which its namesake the National Enquirer was decidedly unfashionable. (This was decades before the national paper broke real news in the John Edwards story.) A year later, I was working on the “real” college newspaper, the Reed College Quest. Several years after I left college, I wrote a local southern California zine called SHUFFLEBOARD!, a poor cousin to more highly-regarded zines such as From Ears and Mouth and The Bowl Sheet.

Before the monumental year of 1984, such publications were produced in ways that most people wouldn’t recognize today. Production of printed newspapers in those days often required the use of a typewriter, an Exacto knife, and lots of patience.

Back in those days, one of the leading zines was Maximum RockNRoll. It was clearly for the hardcore enthusiast; the one thing that I remember from those days was an impassioned letter that declared that the Beastie Boys (who had emerged from the hardcore movement before moving into rap) could not be regarded as true hardcore artists because of the rampant sexism in their lyrics. (For some, the so-called freedom of punk just meant that you had to adopt a new straitjacket.)

But that zine would crank itself out every couple of months. As part of a 30 year retrospective, John Marr (not the guitarist) describes how each issue was put together in those days.

The first thing to realize in looking back at these early issues of MRR is the unbelievable crude production methods we used. This was when the hot new Apple product was the IIe computer with dual 5¼” floppy drives and desktop publishing but a mad software engineer’s dream. We had no scanners, no computers, no laser printers. We did have an electric typewriter that could, in a jaw dropping display of 1983 technology, print out a justified column of copy.

After additional descriptions of the production methods, Marr states:

During the week, a steady stream of volunteers pounded in every letter, every scene report, every interview into that damn typewriter. (And you wonder why there are so many typos! Spell-check too was on the to-be-invented list.)

Nowadays Maximum Rocknroll is still, if you’ll pardon the term, old school. How? They still sell printed copies.

However, I don’t think they use Exacto knives any more.