0% found this document useful (0 votes)

1K views425 pages

The Poetry of Pop

The document is a copyright notice and introduction for Adam Bradley's book 'The Poetry of Pop', published by Yale University Press in 2017. It explores the emotional and artistic significance of pop song lyrics, emphasizing their poetic qualities and cultural relevance. The book seeks to bridge the gap between popular music and traditional literary forms, encouraging readers to appreciate the artistry in pop music lyrics.

Uploaded by

alexandermaxine111

We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.

Available Formats

Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

0% found this document useful (0 votes)

1K views425 pages

The Poetry of Pop

Uploaded by

alexandermaxine111

We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.

Available Formats

Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

You are on page 1/ 425

Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2017 by Adam Bradley.

All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in
part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond
that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of
the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for
the public press), without written permission from
the publishers.

Yale University Press books may be purchased in

quantity for educational, business, or promotional
use. For information, please e-mail sales.press
@yale.edu (U.S. office) or [email protected]
(U.K. office).

Designed by Mary Valencia.

Chapter titles designed by Justin Francis.
Illustrations by Leland Chapin.
Set in Century and Gotham type by Westchester
Publishing Services.
Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956986

ISBN: 978-0-300-16502-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

A catalogue record for this book is available from

the British Library.

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO

Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Bradley, Adam. The Poetry of Pop, Yale University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fdu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4815350.
Created from fdu-ebooks on 2025-02-09 22:08:59.
To Ava, who loves to dance.
To Amaya, who loves to sing.
To Anna, who loves them both.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

INTR O D UCTION 1

I
1LY R IC A ND SON G 11
2R E A D ING 25

3LISTE NING 43

II
4R H Y TH M 63

5R H Y M E 109

6F IGUR A TIV E LA NGUAGE 139

III
7V O ICE 177

8STY LE 229

9STOR Y 275

CO NCLUSION 311

Appendix317

Notes361
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Acknowledgments389

Credits391

Index395

Bradley, Adam. The Poetry of Pop, Yale University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fdu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4815350.
Created from fdu-ebooks on 2025-02-09 22:08:59.
M
ost of us live with a shifting soundtrack, songs that fill our ears
as we go about our days: a workout mix, a drive-time playlist,
the songs we hear in stores, the music we dance to at parties.
The songs themselves are secondary; they call us to experiences
rather than being experiences. We half listen, but our attention is elsewhere.
Some of us also listen in a different way. We obsess over a certain song,
even over individual words and sounds in the song. We play songs in remem-
brance or in celebration. We listen live at concerts, or learn to play favorite
songs for ourselves. Sometimes we choose these encounters; at other times
they surprise us, commanding thought and feeling. Such songs comprise
another soundtrack, a collection of memories accessible only through sound.
These are some of mine:
I’m three years old, listening to “Little April Shower” from the movie Bambi.
I haven’t seen the film because my mother says it’s too scary. But I have the
picture book and I have the LP. I clutch the album cover close to me as the
music plays. The song is confusing. It makes me sad, yet I want to hear it
over and over again. I’m captivated by the voices—of women, then of men, in
haunting harmony. I recognize only a few words: “Drip drip drop little April
shower.” These repeat more times than I can count. The melody summons a
strong and unfamiliar emotion in me. Now I’d call it wistfulness. All I knew
then was that this was the first song that ever made me cry and made me
long for it at the same time.
I’m twelve years old, playing air guitar to Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the
Jungle.” No one else is at home, so I choreograph a performance in front of
the living-room speakers. First I’m Slash because he’s biracial like I am, then
I’m Axl Rose because he’s a badass. I love the noise, the keening guitar, and
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Axl’s straining voice. I’m drawn to the contrast between the cacophony of the
chorus and the calm of the bridge, where Izzy Stradlin strums chords as Axl
sings, “And when you’re high you never / Ever wanna come down. / So. Down.
So. Down. So. Downnnnn. Yeah!” Axl’s “yeah” melts into Slash’s bended note
until they are a single sound. There’s wonder in this noise, then quiet, then
noise again. Like a lot of tweens and teens in the summer of 1987, I listen to
Guns N’ Roses because something about their music feels like me, or maybe
just the me I want to be.

I’m a twenty-three-year-old graduate student, about to take a three-hour

oral exam on the history of Western literature before professors whose names
appear on the spines of Norton anthologies. I spend the night before the exam
in the bathroom, vomiting from stress. In the morning I leave my dorm room
and walk to the test, my oversized headphones blasting the Wu-Tang Clan’s
“Triumph” on repeat. “I bomb atomically, Socrates’ philosophies and hypoth-
eses / Can’t define how I be droppin’ these mockeries / Lyrically perform
armed robbery.” Listening to these lines, I’m conscious of their poetry: the
figures and forms, the rhythm patterns and rhyme schemes that I’ve been
studying are here just as they are in Beowulf and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste
Land and Elizabeth Bishop’s “Roosters.” I’m mindful of how effortless the
poetic patterns sound in the song’s raw beats and hard rhymes. I take my
headphones off as I reach the exam room door. I pass the test.
I’m thirty-six years old, a first-time father, and my infant daughter won’t
stop crying. I sing her lullabies to no avail, then switch to pop songs. I try
the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry Baby,” Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song,” Joni
Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now,” and the entire Beatles songbook. Nothing works.
Desperate, I sing Hall & Oates’s “Private Eyes.” It does the trick. As soon as I
finish the song she starts to cry again. To soothe her I sing Billy Joel’s “Just
the Way You Are,” Kenny Loggins’s “Danny’s Song,” and Christopher Cross’s
“Arthur’s Theme (The Best That You Can Do).” She settles happily to sleep. I
reluctantly face the truth: my three-month-old daughter loves soft-rock hits of
the seventies and eighties. So at least once a day for nearly half a year I per-
form a cappella concerts for her. I’m no singer, but singing these songs helps me
to appreciate their careful construction, the way they work in spite of my voice.
As I hold her small body against me, dancing slow circles in near-darkness,
a simple fact dawns on me: Almost all songs have a spark of magic in them.
This is a book about the magic of pop songs and how a significant part of
that magic resides in the language of the lyrics, both on the page and in per-
formance. Few of us first encounter song lyrics on the page as poetry or as
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

sheet music; instead, we experience lyrics in sound, sometimes live but usu-
ally recorded. Lyrics, no matter how artfully conceived and constructed they
may be, rarely matter much alone; they exist in relation to the voice that
enchants them through rhythm, melody, and harmony; in relation to the in-
struments that intensify their language or obscure it entirely; and in rela-
tion to the experience of pop songs when heard alone or in a crowd.
The Poetry of Pop offers the license to look unabashedly at these lyrics. It
asks you to take pop songs seriously without being too serious about it.

There’s something irresistible about words set in song. In fact, songs are
among the most powerful forms that words take. If all art aspires to the con-
dition of music, as Walter Pater once observed, then it does so because
music achieves a register of feeling unmatched by any other mode of expres-
sion. Words in song can elicit emotions that plain speech cannot. Some songs
render words percussive and melodic, nearly divested of symbol and meaning.
Other songs enshrine words’ complex sense, building images and narratives
so durable that they live on for millennia.
Situating literary matters in the dynamic space of popular songs prom-
ises new attention to old concerns. It builds a bridge between the poetic acts,
both humble and sublime, taking place around us in pop music every day
and those that can seem distant and forbidding when encountered in novels
and plays and poems. The result is a mutually sustaining connection be-
tween disparate creations, united by a poetic practice that does not artifi-
cially discriminate between “low” and “high” culture, between the popular
and the canonical. The pop music I’m talking about isn’t a narrow genre,
but a broad descriptor that encompasses every thing from Broadway musi-
cals to country ballads, from obscure soul sides to Billboard Hot 100 hits.
It reaches back to the dawn of recorded music in the early decades of the
twentieth century and forward to the ever-evolving soundscape of our digi-
tal present.
I choose to use “pop” instead of “rock” or another term out of a considered
choice, though not an easy one. Pop comes closest to the descriptive range
that I seek. The term stands both for genre and for culture and commerce
writ large. Some endeavor to use “rock” in such a way. The Rock & Roll Hall
of Fame makes an implicit claim to universality, enshrining rap groups like
Public Enemy, Run-DMC, and N.W.A.; country acts like Carl Perkins and
Brenda Lee; blues artists like Muddy Waters and Etta James; and pop
groups like ABBA and the Bee Gees; not to mention rock and rollers like
Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry, who headlined the Hall’s inaugural class
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

back in 1986. The first rock and roll was rhythm and blues by another name.
It began as a term of convenience, a way of distinguishing the music white
artists were making from the music black artists were making, though
the sounds and styles were often nearly the same. Today, using the term
“rock” to describe the vast body of popular music since the 1950s unduly
whitewashes a vibrantly mixed catalog of sounds.
In contrast, pop is inclusive, multiracial, and global in its appeal. Certainly,
it carries its own baggage, including assumptions that all pop is bubblegum

music intended for preteens, that it is mass-produced and indifferently

crafted. However, the virtues of the term outweigh these detriments. Pop is
encompassing and capacious. It is popular music. It is the Billboard charts,
which reach across genres. Pop invites rather than excludes. At the same
time, pop allows insurgency and opposition and stubborn isolation.
Writing in his introduction to Listen Again, the 2007 collection of essays
from the EMP Pop Conference, Eric Weisbard offers the following defense
of pop as a cross-genre term: “If, as now seems increasingly clear, rallying
terms like folk, jazz, blues, rock and roll, soul, hip-hop, and so on are more
confining than illuminating, what should take their place? Perhaps an ex-
panded view of pop, which has numerous meanings, but, as the catch-all
music fan’s term for sticky sounds, inauthentic identity, and commercial
crazes of every sort, remains the best word for all that is heard, loved, and
yet rarely ennobled.” This book shares Weisbard’s impulse. Following the
novelist Nick Hornby, I use “pop” to “encompass just about anything that isn’t
classical music.”
Think of this book, then, as a strange sonic dinner party at which Taylor
Swift sits beside Richard Hell, who sits beside Aretha Franklin, who sits be-
side Jay Z, who sits beside Loretta Lynn, who sits beside Ozzy Osbourne, and
so on around the table. This strangeness is by design. The artists I quote and
the songs I analyze don’t reflect any one genre or sensibility; they don’t even
reflect my own taste. They all simply perform music in English, and this
music is pop in the broadest sense of that term: everything but classical.
Writing this book required conducting an enormous amount of research
and compiling a massive amount of data. I combed through close to three
hundred artist memoirs, gathering notes on matters of compositional prac-
tice and performance style. I transcribed hundreds of lyrics, scanning their
rhythms and marking their rhymes. I surveyed every Billboard Hot 100 hit
since the advent of the charts in 1958, cataloging songs by genre, song struc-
ture, and a dozen other matters of lyric form. I listened for hours, really for
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

years, to the detriment of my ears and the betterment of my being. Though

this book is rarely about me in any overt sense, it is the closest thing I’ve
ever written to a memoir in that it comprises my life in listening. My listen-
ing experience is, of course, far from comprehensive. The lyrics and record-
ings I cite throughout are not exhaustive, only exemplary. I hope engaged
readers will apply the principles in this book to the music of their minds.
The book is organized into three parts. Part I offers a primer on why and
how to analyze song lyrics as poetry. Part II addresses pop music’s poetic

forms. Part III engages pop music’s poetic functions. Finally, an appendix
gathers together annotated playlists that explore everything from a selection
of page-born poems that inspired pop songs to a collection of memorable whis-
pers, screams, and laughs in recorded pop. The chapters center on big con-
cepts (such as rhythm and story) that winnow themselves down to the
particulars of individual lyric lines. Of course, all of the subjects of the book’s
sections entwine with one another through performance. One rarely fixates
solely on rhyme when listening to a song. Having a chapter on voice doesn’t
mean that voice fails to come up in other chapters. In fact, we experience
pop’s poetry most directly when we lose sight of where one element ends and
another begins.
For pop music fans, The Poetry of Pop offers a glimpse into the aesthetic
labors of language and performance that create the recordings we cherish
or despise, and in doing so offers a new means of thinking and feeling about
popular music. For lovers of literature, The Poetry of Pop equips you with
the tools to unlock the particulars of language in song lyrics by fostering a
literacy that moves readily between the page and per formance, between
words as written and words as sung. Awareness of such acts of creation isn’t
compulsory, but it can prove transformative. It can change how we credit the
craft of popular entertainers, how we appreciate the marriage of language
and voice, and how we understand that our tastes are rooted not in mystery
alone but in concrete particulars that live side by side with that mystery and
enchant us all the more.
My goal is not to dignify or defend pop lyrics; they are their own best de-
fense. Rather, my goal is to open points of entry for those who wish to en-
gage deeply and analytically with forms of language and sound that we often
uncritically consume as entertainment. Applying the tools of poetics to song
lyrics is itself great entertainment. Part of it is the pleasure of the puzzle, of
understanding how disparate elements fit together to fashion an aesthetic
experience. Part, too, is the pleasure of situating art that is often consid-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

ered ephemeral in the firmament of tradition, of underscoring the continu-

ity in culture and practice that connects the seemingly disconnected. It is
invigorating to be able to trace the connection between the four-beat lines of
Beowulf and the four-beat lines of Biggie, not because it ennobles one or de-
bases the other, but because it reaffirms continuity across lyric creation.
This book relies on two things: readily acquired skills of literary analy-
sis, and common practices of close listening that are already part of how most
of us listen to music. It does not require extensive musical knowledge, nor

does it require preexisting experience with poetics. Instead, it takes a func-

tional approach, rooted in the belief that all songs have some mystery to share
with those willing to give patient attention, and that exploring this mystery—
often hiding in plain sight—will enrich listening pleasure. Singers’ and song-
writers’ conscious creations in language, music, and performance affect us
intellectually and emotionally. Their craft is the poetry of pop.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

I
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

L yric & Song

Bradley, Adam. The Poetry of Pop, Yale University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fdu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4815350.
Created from fdu-ebooks on 2025-02-09 22:08:59.
R
ihanna singing “Diamonds” is my idea of poetry. Of course, “Dia-
monds” is a pop song first, a 2012 global hit that gave Rihanna
her twelfth number-one single in just over six years—bested only
by the Beatles and the Supremes. It is a 3:45 pop ballad and a
music video, an object of culture and of commerce. Chances are neither
Rihanna nor the scores of writers, producers, engineers, label executives,
radio programmers, DJs, and consumers responsible for the song’s success
ever once stopped to think of it as a poem.
But “Diamonds” is a poem. Without the poet’s tools, the song could not
exist. The poetry lives in the lyrics that the Australian singer-songwriter
Sia is said to have composed in fourteen minutes while in a New York stu-
dio. It lives in how those lyrics nest themselves in the StarGate- and Benny
Blanco–produced instrumental. Most powerfully, it lives in the rhythms and
intonations of Rihanna’s voice as it lays its own art atop the art of others.
The poetry of pop demands both eye and ear. Part of the poetry is visible
in word alone. The first thing Rihanna sings on “Diamonds,” “Shine bright
like a diamond,” is a serviceable though not particularly inventive simile.
Sia’s lyrics soon reimagine it: “ We’re like diamonds in the sky.” Now the dia-
monds have become a metaphor for stars, which in turn becomes a simile
for two people in love. Later in the song diamonds are beauty and shooting
stars are a “vision of ecstasy,” both the drugged state of romance and the
drugged state of the drug itself.
The poetry is also in repetition, the signal quality of all poetic form. On
the page, this repetition soon surrenders to redundancy. In the ear, the re-
peated hooks and choruses become occasions for anticipation, of the famil-
iar and also of unexpected departures in rhythm and harmony. Rihanna
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

closely follows Sia’s vocal pattern from the demo recording, a fact of which
most of the listening public is likely unaware and, if made aware, probably
wouldn’t care. As Sia conceives it and as Rihanna executes it on the studio
recording, the song’s melodic character is enchanting, full of unusual vocal
ripples and eddies that always bend back to the flow.
Of course, we don’t need poetics to find pleasure in listening to “Dia-
monds,” or to any other pop song for that matter. The poetry of pop matters
inasmuch as our curiosity demands that we understand why and how the

song affects us—why we know the lyr ics without giving them conscious
thought, why the melody ends up running through our heads, why we tire
of the song, or even why it leaves us cold. Poetic analysis helps to identify
patterns in the language, figures and forms, rhythms and rhymes familiar
from the study of poetry meant first for reading. When directed at a recorded
song, poetic analysis reveals what happens when words leave the page and
go to live in the air, in the ear.
Saying that “Diamonds” is a poem is not meant to elevate it as high art.
It makes no value judgments. A poem need not be profound to bear the name;
the same holds for song lyrics. The lyrics to “Diamonds,” which New York
Times critic Jon Caramanica characterizes as “insipid,” are also purpose-
built: they are meant to carry a melody and evoke familiar feelings and com-
mon associations so as to reach the broadest possible audience. Pleasing
poems are often made of unsturdier stuff.
Thankfully, “Diamonds” need not rely on lyr ics alone. Pop’s poetry al-
ways lives in the space between word and music. It follows different rules
than those that govern most page-born poetry. Sometimes a song’s poetry
expresses itself best in the craft of a well-wrought lyric whose value is most
apparent on the page. Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is such a song, as is
Lauryn Hill’s “Final Hour,” both of which have an effortless sound that
belies the complexity of their construction. Often, though, a song’s poetry is
better heard than seen—or, rather, better seen and heard together. This
is the case, for instance, with Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and
Joanna Newsom’s “Book of Right- On,” both of which rely on the emotive
clarity of their performance to counterbalance the cryptic quality of their
lyrics. Once asked about being a poet, Newsom responded equivocally: “I don’t
exactly know how poetry is defined. I don’t write poetry that’s not meant
to be sung.”
“Diamonds” is a poem meant to be sung. The song’s performance makes
its poetic form palpable. Though its lyrics respond in small ways to poetic
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

analysis— a rhyme here, a simile there— the preponderance of its poetic

splendor is apparent only in performance. Hearing the lyric as part of a re-
corded song, one finds a balance of repetition and difference, and patterns
of diction that underscore the heightened state of love’s first flush. The bright
assonance of “i” sounds knits tight in the ear threads of words that are only
loosely tied in the mind. Shards of image that appear oddly mixed on the
page fit in clear composite on the recording. One finds, in other words, a po-
etic act that is also a musical one. One finds an art in equipoise.

Take “Diamonds” or Rihanna’s number-one hit from the previous year,

“We Found Love,” or the Beatles’ “Let It Be,” or Bob Marley’s “No Woman,
No Cry”—take all of the songs you’ll encounter in this book— and you’ll find
that their shapes derive in no small part from the craft of their poetry.
Rhythm, rhyme, figurative language, voice, style, story, abound here just as
they do in different measures across a Homeric epic, a Modernist lyric, and
an experimental poem written yesterday. The poetry of the page and the
poetry of performance equally animate the poetry of pop. Listen and read.
Read and listen. Though these are pop songs more than poems, they wouldn’t
be the songs they are without their poetry.
When written on the page, song lyr ics look a lot like poems. The lines
break, as the lines in poems often do. As with poems, the syntax of song lyr-
ics usually diverges from the patterns of casual speech; language is rendered
ritual. Rhythm bends lyrics into uncommon shapes, percussive breaks that
dance with the lines across the page. Figures and forms of speech and
thought abound in ways they rarely do in daily conversation. Then there is
rhyme, often at the ends of lines, just as one might expect of poetry from an
earlier time.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a poem as “a piece of writing or an
oral composition, often characterized by a metrical structure, in which the
expression of feelings, ideas, etc., is typically given intensity or flavour by
distinctive diction, rhythm, imagery, etc.; a composition in poetry or verse.”
Very little about this definition is prescriptive; poetry is “often characterized
by a metrical structure” and is “typically given intensity or flavour” by ele-
ments of its form. It may be written or recited; it may express “feelings, ideas,
etc.” Put simply, a poem is possibility.
To fulfill this possibility, poems generate feeling through direct emotive
appeal, through accretion of image, and, more subtly, through the play of
sound. Song lyrics outsource much of that emotive work to the music and to
how the singer’s vocal inflections color the words. Both music and singing
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

have more direct access to our emotions than does the written word. As a
consequence, the language of lyrics need not work as hard and, in fact, is
often better served by doing less than the language of page-born poetry. Song
lyrics still do work, though that work is often different from that done by
poetry meant for the eye: the sound-supporting effort of linguistic play, for
instance, and the winnowing of words to fit the melody.
Reading song lyrics as poetry invites cognitive dissonance. We know from
the listening experience that a song is emotively powerful, even if in read-

ing the words on the page little of that power comes through. A Great Big
World’s surprise 2013 Billboard number one, “Say Something,” is a deeply
affecting song. The contrast between Ian Axel’s vulnerable, uneasy lead vo-
cals and Christina Aguilera’s uncharacteristically restrained but strong
background vocals, combined with the delicate piano melody and vibrant
strings, fashions an emotive experience that is as close to operatic as a 3:49
song can muster. Precious little of that feeling, however, is apparent on the
page:

Say something, I’m giving up on you

I’ll be the one if you want me to
Anywhere, I would’ve followed you
Say something, I’m giving up on you

As lyric, these lines are limited. The first and fourth lines are identical,
as are three of the four end words; the fourth end word relates to the others
in a rather pallid rhyme (“you” and “to”). More limited still is the third line,
an awkward syntactical inversion that would make Yoda proud (“Anywhere,
I would’ve followed you”). For all that is redundant and plain about these
lines, however, their construction follows sound poetic practices. Writing
them down reveals the care with which they are crafted. Scanning the lines’
rhythm exposes an underlying order:

Say something,/I’m giving/up on you

I’ll be the/one if you/want me to
Anywhere,/I would’ve/followed you
Say something,/I’m giving/up on you

The entire verse is written in dactylic trimeter, a stressed syllable fol-

lowed by two unstressed syllables, repeated three times per line. The mea-
sured cadence imbedded in the line gives birth to the measured qualities of
the melody and performance, working in an uncredited supporting role to
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

the rhythm and feel of the song. For all its obvious deficiencies and incom-
pletions as a freestanding poem, its poetry nonetheless accounts for some of
the lyric’s success as a recording.
Pop songs take much of their form from such unseen acts of lyric craft, a
craft we readily ascribe to poetry and often fail to acknowledge in song lyr-
ics. We generally accept that poetry is a concise and precise art, the right
words in the right order. The dominant poetic mode of the moment certainly
leans that way: slender lines that abstain from rhyme and insist on their

interiority. Such art demands rumination that is voiced, when voiced at all,
in a cloistered concert of the mind. By contrast, song lyrics revel in rhyme of
all types and invite performance and communal engagement. Tap your toes.
Stomp your feet. Bob your head. Dance and sing, and you need not do it alone.
Pop lyrics are also carefully calibrated. A good pop song, like a good lyric
poem, demands the right words in the right order, even if those words are
“Oooowh! I feel good!” or “Oh, na na. What’s my name?” We can recognize
the poetics of pop songs even if we resist the urge to identify the lyrics as
poetry. Accepting the poetics of pop songs simply admits that lyrics are made
of much the same stuff and respond to the same kinds of attention generally
reserved for poems on the page. Reading songs, or, to borrow a phrase from
N*E*R*D, seeing sounds, reveals the patterning and organization at work,
as well as the breaks in form and flights of fancy that define the best art in
any genre.
The musicologist Lawrence M. Zbikowski observes that “despite their dif-
ferences, words and music work together in song. . . . Music can breathe the
breath of life into poetry or create a poem on a poem.” Creating a poem on a
poem, as “Diamonds” and “Say Something” do, is an apt way of describing
both the challenge and the possibility of songwriting: How do you conjoin
one aesthetic artifact with its own rhythm and logic and a second aesthetic
artifact with its own rhythm and logic to create a third aesthetic artifact
that somehow reconciles the two and improves on both? In some instances,
songs make lyrics legible; in others, the two achieve a delicate equipoise; in
others, they work in tension; in still others, the music is either so inconse-
quential or so artfully inconspicuous as to intensify the natural effects of
the lyrics as poetry. In still other instances, the lyrics are obscured or oc-
cluded by the sound, either in performance or in production. “In music, some
notes are accented relative to others, by virtue of their pitch, loudness, or
rhythm; these accents constrain the words that will fit well with the melody,
and help establish the musical mannequin on which the lyrical clothing will
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

be hung,” explains the sound engineer turned neuroscientist Daniel J.

Levitin. Language carries its own constraints; a line of lyric has its inborn
patterns of accent and pitch, rhythm and loudness. A song must resolve
these two into one; in moments of conflict the music usually prevails.
Imagine song lyrics existing on an expressive continuum, on which some
lyrics are almost entirely subservient to their music, while others approach
independence from it. At one extreme, the words to songs can work as pure
sound, another kind of music. At the other extreme, they can achieve an ex-

pressive singularity, with the recorded song providing an aural setting for
the music and meaning of the words. Think of the difference between jazz
singer Ella Fitzgerald’s rendition of “One Note Samba,” where her scat sing-
ing distills language to its phonemes and its expressive power largely shifts
from the semantic to the sonic realm, and Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,”
where the Bomb Squad’s “Wall of Noise” production attunes the listener’s
ear to the language of Chuck D’s lyrics as political act. As the Barbadian
poet Kamau Brathwaite reminds us, noise too is part of meaning. In the first
instance, the lyr ics shape an entrancing music; in the second, the music
serves the lyrics as rhetoric and poetry.
Most song lyrics lie somewhere in the middle of this continuum, neither
unmoored syllables nor clear and emphatic expression. The music gives the
lyrics a mandate, which often includes the following: (1) support the sound;
(2) do not detract from the song by becoming overcomplicated; and (3) cap-
ture the audience’s attention through a catchy hook or other lyric device. The
vast majority of pop lyrics abide by these rules most of the time. The result-
ing language is mostly composed of preexisting parts; like a prefabricated
home, pop lyrics are often economical, serviceable, and undistinguished. The
best that can be said about most of them— and this is no small thing—is
that they do their job.
But every lyric will steal a moment, small though it may be, where it in-
cites a revolution against the tyranny of music, where it commands atten-
tion to the recording primarily as language. This doesn’t compromise the
song’s identity as song; what it does, though, is complicate blanket pronounce-
ments about the servility of lyric. For this reason, a pop lyric almost always
provides close readers and listeners with something upon which to exercise
their skills in poetic analysis. It might be a surprising disruption in the
rhyme pattern or a particularly vivid image; it could be a playful moment of
alliteration or a hidden exercise of assonance. Poetics, with its emphasis on
the mechanics of language, patterning, and arrangement, is a useful body
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

of knowledge to put to work in song lyrics because the lyrics invariably re-
spond, sometimes in surprising and delightful ways.
Even still, people make good arguments for why song lyr ics should not
be considered poetry. Poems are meant for the page, while song lyr ics lose
their vitality when read in cold print. “I respect poetry and I try to write
subtly, but lyrics really aren’t poems. Printing them like poems can make
them seem silly,” Marvin Gaye told his biographer, David Ritz. Song lyr ics
need music, voice, and performance to give them life. “Lyr ics by definition

lack something,” writes Stephen Sondheim; poetry is complete unto itself.

Good songwriters leave room in their lyrics for the marriage with melody by
consciously constraining the effects of rhythm, rhyme, and image. The so-
ciomusicologist Simon Frith explains this succinctly: “Good song lyrics are
not good poems because they don’t need to be.”
Some differences between song lyrics and print-based poetry are obvious.
Songs are social; a community must generally come together to compose lyr-
ics and music and produce a recording for commercial release. Poetry, by
contrast, is usually the work of an individual writing words meant to be
read silently by another individual. “A completed poem is self-sufficient,”
notes the songwriter Sheila Davis. “A finished lyric, however, is an unfin-
ished product; it is half a potential song.” The poet Glyn Maxwell amplifies
Davis’s point: “The other half of everything for the songwriters is music.
For the poets it’s silence, the space, the whiteness.”
Though we might draw any number of reasonable distinctions between
poetry and song lyrics, strong evidence suggests that our brains do not.
“The auditory arts of music and poetry hold a privileged position in human
history, and we see this reflected in our own time in neurological case
studies,” observes Daniel J. Levitin. “Individuals suffering from Alzheimer’s
disease, victims of strokes, tumors, or other organic brain trauma, may lose
the ability to recognize faces, even of people they’ve known their entire lives.
They may lose the ability to recognize simple objects such as hairbrushes
or forks. But many of these same patients can still recite poetry by heart,
and sing songs that they knew as children. Verse—whether spoken or sung—
appears to be deeply encoded in the human brain.”
The neuroscientist Oliver Sacks observed that cursing, singing lyrics, and
reciting poetry might equally be understood as instances of automatic speech,
as distinguished from the propositional speech that constitutes most everyday
conversation. This lifeline to language and song extends even to those suffer-
ing from dementia. “ Music is no luxury to them, but a necessity,” writes Sacks,
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

“and can have a power beyond anything else to restore them to themselves, and
to others, at least for a while.”
I can attest to the power of poetic and musical memory. In my grand-
mother’s last years, when so much of who she once had been was slipping
away due to Alzheimer’s, I often sat by her bedside and read aloud from her
battered copy of Robert Frost’s Poems. Sometimes she closed her eyes, let-
ting the rhythms and rhymes engulf her. From time to time, drawing from
deep within her ravaged memory, she would speak a word or phrase or even

a complete line. In every case, her voice seemed driven by the shape of the
sounds rather than the denotation of the words alone. She seemed, in other
words, to be singing.
How do we classify the pop song, that aesthetic amalgam of music and
words? Our answer to that question has considerable implications for the kind
of cultural capital we confer on pop, for how—and even if—we study it, for
where we play it and whether we pass it down or just throw it away. Pop songs
are neither music nor poetry and yet both. I mean by this that pop songs often
fuse elements of music and of poetry—sometimes the one before the other,
sometimes both at the same time. It matters little what comes first because
the successful song is inevitably the product of an ongoing mediation of differ-
ence. “The simple truth,” according to the songwriter Jimmy Webb, “is that
anyone who has had ‘hands-on’ songwriting experience knows that the pro-
cess is fluid and that to be successful it must be mutable and words and music
mutually adaptable.” To say that a pop song is a poem makes just as much
sense as to say that a pop song is only music. Both claims are partial truths.
No, song lyrics are not the same as print-based poetry, but that does not
rob them of their claim to the name. We extend the name “poetry” to other
forms that reject easy categorization. Slam poetry bears the name “poetry,”
yet, like the song lyric, it relies on performance for its full meaning and im-
pact. Various forms of visual poems are considered poetry, though they rely
on nonlinguistic matters of arrangement and design. Sound poetry is poetry,
too, though it abjures conventional forms of poetic meaning, privileging the
phonetic and aural qualities of words over their semantics, as song lyrics
sometimes do. Poetry is a much wider field than arguments over the poetic
identity of song lyrics ever allow it to be.
The contested boundary of poetry and song lyric made headlines in Octo-
ber 2016 when the Swedish Academy awarded Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize
in Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great
American song tradition.” In an interview after the announcement, Profes-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

sor Sara Danius, the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, made
the case for Dylan’s award. “He is a great poet,” she said, calling attention
to his “brilliant way of rhyming,” his “putting together refrains,” and his
“pictorial thinking.” Looking back across millennia, Danius cites Homer
and Sappho as writing “poetic texts that were meant to be listened to . . .
often together with instruments.” Like those ancient counterparts, Dylan
too writes lyrics that, though meant to be performed, are at home in the
silence of the page. Take away his inimitable voice, his signature phrasings,

and what remains still merits praise and attention. “He can be read and
should be read,” Danius concludes, “and he is a great poet in the English
tradition.”
In recognizing Dylan, the Nobel committee might well have imagined
itself doing its best imitation of Led Zeppelin: trashing the hotel room and
throwing the television out the window in defiance of their own past prac-
tice and the rigid barriers separating the popular and the canonical. But
selecting Dylan was actually a fairly safe move. His literary bona fides are
unimpeachable. For over half a century now his lyrics have garnered exten-
sive scholarly attention even as other great singer-songwriters have been
overlooked. Witness the nearly fourteen-pound collection of lyrics edited by
literary critic Christopher Ricks in 2014, presenting Dylan’s words as if they
were torn from the pages of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads.
One could make the case that in the public eye Dylan is now just as much a
poet as he is a pop star.
The story of how we arrived at such a narrow vision of the poem is now
overfamiliar: Poetry retreated to the page in the age of sound recording and
began favoring a procrustean poetics that submerged songlike qualities to
achieve a more complex ideal. Taking a broad view of poetry’s history, the
literary poetry of today has fallen further out of phase with poetry through
the ages than has contemporary song lyric. Transplant an ancient Greek and
an Elizabethan to the present day and place before them John Ashbery’s
“. . . by an Earthquake” and a transcription of Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space”
and they’ll more readily recognize Swift’s lyrics as the poem. This doesn’t
mean that Swift is the superior poet, only that at the level of form pop-song
lyrics capture the poetic eye. Where Ashbery abjures end rhyme and an aes-
thetics of economy, Swift offers ample end rhyme and a measured lyric line.
The lyrics to pop songs and most poetry differ in this: Pop lyrics are asked
to dance to someone else’s music, while poetry dances to a music all its own.
A poetics of pop must account for this dual existence of lyric as word and
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

sound. In privileging the denotational meanings of song lyr ics over their
sonic function in a recording, we radically mismeasure pop’s poetry.
The rock critic Greil Marcus, certainly no fan of song-lyr ics-as-poetry,
comes close to admitting the possibility, with a necessary caveat. “Of all the
nonsense that has been written about the poetry of Neil Young, Paul Simon,
or even Bob Dylan,” Marcus writes in Mystery Train, “no one has ever said
anything about Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Little Wing.’ The poetry question, especially
when we are dealing with a song, has to do with how a writer uses language—

and his music will be part of his language—to make words do things they
ordinarily do not do, with how he tests the limits of language and alters and
extends the conventional impact of images, or rescues resources of language
that we have lost or destroyed.”
Marcus does not reject Young, Simon, and Dylan as artists; he rejects the
myopic critical assessment of them that imputes poetic value to their lyrics
in silence. Such a poetics of pop neglects an artist like Hendrix, whose poetic
appeal in a song like “Little Wing” relies on a full accounting of the language
of the lyric in recorded music. The way Hendrix sings the word anything,
from 1:33 to 1:36 of “ Little Wing,” for instance, is just as worthy of poetic
attention as an exalted Dylan line imbricated in rhyme.
A functional poetics of pop acknowledges how song lyrics “make words do
things they ordinarily do not do” when language is under the sway of song.
The reason that some people prize certain singer-songwriters as poets often
has less to do with the merits of craft than with the complacency of literary
critics who are unwilling or unable to develop a new poetics to account for
the double life of song lyrics as word and music. Resolving “the poetry ques-
tion” when it comes to pop music begins with cultivating a poetics that is
alive to the richness of lyric as contextualized in performance.
There’s a long history, dating back to the birth of rock and roll and reach-
ing into the 1970s, of books about the poetry of pop lyrics, falling broadly
into two categories: hagiographies of individual songwriters and polemical
efforts to equate— and in these critics’ minds, to elevate—pop songwriting
by comparing it to the craft of the Western poetic tradition. The best exam-
ple of the former approach is pretty much every book ever written about Bob
Dylan. The best example of the latter is David R. Pichaske’s Beowulf to Bea-
tles: Approaches to Poetry, an anthology first published in 1972 that inter-
sperses rock lyrics by songwriters such as Jim Morrison and Joni Mitchell
with poems by canonical poets like William Blake and Robert Frost. The
flaw in Pichaske’s book isn’t that it goes too far in putting forward song lyr-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

ics for close analysis. Rather, Pichaske doesn’t go far enough in asserting
his chosen lyrics’ aesthetic autonomy. By insisting on a scaffolding of canoni-
cal poems, the book underestimates the capacity for song lyrics to stand on
their own with and without their music, as a hybrid tradition worthy of study
and demanding a particular kind of analysis distinct from that commonly
directed at print-based poetry. Behind such earnest efforts as Pichaske’s is
a desire to ennoble pop music and to rationalize our obsessive attention to
it. The problem is that it often comes across as contrived, seeking sanction

from a high literary authority when rock never much cared for authority in
the first place.
The Poetry of Pop offers something different. The end of analysis isn’t en-
shrining pop lyrics in the Western poetic canon but, rather, figuring out
what makes them work structurally and sonically, what makes them beauti-
ful, and what makes them move us so. Such analytical labor is best accom-
plished by listening to the lyr ics in the context of their per formance as
music; however, a small but critical part of the work can be done only by look-
ing at the lyrics on the page.
Certain song lyrics stand up on the page better than others; they com-
port themselves well as poems. “I like ‘Across the Universe,’ ” John Lennon
told Rolling Stone in 1970. “It’s one of the best lyrics I’ve written. In fact, it
could be the best. It’s good poetry, or whatever you call it, without chewin’
it. See the ones I like are the ones that stand as words, without melody. They
don’t have to have any melody; like a poem, you can read them.” When the
interviewer asked Lennon if that was “his ultimate criterion” for great songs,
he replied, “No, that’s just the ones I happen to like.”
Finding out that a great song lyric also makes a great poem is akin to
finding out that your car can double as a boat—kind of cool, but hardly the
foremost thing on your mind during your morning commute. Nora Ephron
once asked Bob Dylan if he was a poet, by which she meant if he thought
his words “could stand without the music.” Dylan responded, “They would
stand but I don’t read them. I’d rather sing them.” Elsewhere, though, Dylan
insisted: “It ain’t the melodies that are important, man, it’s the words.” So
what matters most—the words, the music? The more compelling consider-
ation is whether a song lyric’s capacity to stand alone in print makes it some-
how better to sing. Could better poetry mean better recorded songs?
In the eyes of some, looking like a poem on the page renders a song lyric
poetry—or, more damning, “poetic,” that amorphous adjective one often
hears used to describe the overadorned, the inscrutable, and the meaning-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

less. Such has been the fate of the work of certain songwriters who write
lyr ics that are easily metabolized as poems— Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell,
Leonard Cohen, and Lou Reed all come to mind. People who describe these
songwriters as poets (sometimes, in fact, the songwriters describe them-
selves as such) are using the term “poet” as an honorific. Taken this way,
being a poet means being a member of the cultural aristocracy, an artist
rather than a craftsperson. Not everyone buys in. “I don’t think that rock &
roll songwriters should worry about art,” Keith Richards asserts. “I don’t

think it comes into it. A lot of it is just craft anyway, especially after doing
it for a long time. . . . Art is the last thing I’m worried about when I’m writ-
ing a song. I don’t think it really matters. If you want to call it art, yeah,
okay, you can call it what you like. As far as I’m concerned, ‘Art’ is just short
for ‘Arthur.’ ”
Keith is onto something. Some of the reasons that a song lyric works well
as a poem are the same reasons that it works well in a recorded song: lyric
concision, perhaps, but also occasional superfluity; imagistic beauty, but also
an artful ugliness. At the same time, some of what makes for a good poem
can get in the way of a good lyric— assonance, for instance, which can cre-
ate a small, beautiful music on the page, might clash with the music in per-
formance as song; or a rich accretion of image, which might choke out the
space necessary for the music to breathe. One only discovers this, however,
by applying the principles of close reading and close listening to a song, as
both lyric and recording. One only discovers this after learning to read and
to listen again.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Reading
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Bradley, Adam. The Poetry of Pop, Yale University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fdu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4815350.
Created from fdu-ebooks on 2025-02-09 22:08:59.
R
eading song lyrics is not the same as reading into song lyrics. The
former is a neglected practice, the craft of being an active observer
capable of negotiating words and phrases, tone and meaning.
The latter is a favorite pastime of teenagers, weedheads, and
rock critics— and certainly of teenage weedhead rock critics.
The lyrics to pop songs are routinely the subject of close scrutiny, often of
the wrong kind. “Louie Louie” merited its own FBI file, investigating the
purportedly salacious content hidden in the near-indecipherable mix. The
Eagles’ “ Hotel California” has been read as an allegory of good and evil and
as a metaphorical account of experiences in drug rehab. Don McLean’s
“American Pie” is about Buddy Holly, or the Vietnam War, or who knows
what. Many people assumed that Peter, Paul & Mary’s “Puff the Magic
Dragon” couldn’t really be about a magical creature that frolics in the
autumn mist in a land called Honalee, as the singers and the songwriter
themselves averred, but is a drug allegory suitable for a sing-along. These
instances, and countless others in the pop canon, attest to the fact that one
can think hard about pop music without thinking smart. They prove that
there’s a difference between looking closely at the way a lyric is constructed,
considering what accounts for its emotional appeal, and using song lyrics as
an occasion to prove how clever one is, or to see some secret symbol.
The approach to reading espoused here differs fundamentally from
hagiographic attention to the “hidden meanings” in songs; the act of “decod-
ing” toward a pure text; the smart-aleck certitude maintained by many who
parse lyrics. Rather, it is invested in cultivating a less conjectural reading
practice, one that is descriptive rather than prescriptive, that responds to
what songwriters and singers, and the host of others responsible for turn-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

ing a song into a recording, have actually done rather than to what they
may have been thinking or feeling while doing it. This analytical practice
looks to the evidence of the reader’s own eyes and ears rather than relying
on supposition.
The act of analysis often requires temporarily isolating interrelated ele-
ments from one another to understand better the workings of the aesthetic
whole. Is looking at the lyrics to Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” the same
as hearing the song? Of course not. Is it as full an aesthetic experience? Not

by half. But do we stand to gain a clearer understanding of her art, art

in general, and our own aesthetic and emotional responses by looking at the
lyrics alone? I argue that we do.
Analysis also requires moving from that temporary isolation to synthe-
sis. Pop songs are always created and experienced in relation; they extend
and complicate multiple traditions, quote scraps of lyric and sound from other
songs and other places, and engage the culture in the broadest possible sense.
“Like the novel, rock & roll operates by means of heteroglossia, the free and
democratic mixing of a wide variety of voices, and that openness to other
traditions, genres, sounds, worlds, is both what’s best and what’s most chal-
lenging about the rock & roll that matters,” the literary critic Kevin Dettmar
observes. Pop music— call it rock and roll, or hip hop, or any old thing you
choose— demands critical attention that can toggle between the particular
and the relational.
When it comes to reading song lyrics, the first question to ask is why you
are reading lyrics in the first place. What do you hope to find? I suggest the
following: Read for patterns and breaks in patterns of language, for a tax-
onomy of form. Read for the struggle between poetry and song, the verbal
and the musical in antagonistic cooperation. Read for the transformative ex-
ercise of performance on that which is composed as it expresses itself in the
voice and in the emotion of a given recording. Read for the stories that songs
often tell.
The next question concerns how to read lyrics. One may, for instance, read
a song lyric as one reads a page-based poem these days—in complete silence
with a sense of duty and mild foreboding. Few song lyrics stand up to that
particular brand of attention. Instead, try reading song lyrics aloud. What
kind of music do the words themselves make, irrespective of the music? The
experience will be different, of course, if you know the song than if you don’t.
If you know the song, your mind will undoubtedly fill in the melody and per-
formance in spite of your best efforts to tamp them down. So try reading a
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

lyric to a song you’ve never heard. Do you read it quickly or slowly? What
words make you stumble? What sections flow? Does the repetition seem over-
much? (It usually will.) What about the rhymes? Are they perfect or slant or
absent entirely? Are they patterned in a sequence of couplets, or are they
organized more idiosyncratically across the page? What mood does the
lyric conjure on its own? What needs does the lyric satisfy, and what does it
leave you wanting? Reading a lyric like this, aloud but apart from its per-
formance, creates a template against which to understand the essential

function of the music in completing the lyric and making the song whole.
Music often serves a clarifying purpose for lyric, on the levels of meaning
and of emotion, just as the lyric often does for the song.
Reading song lyr ics aloud is almost never the same as reading poems
aloud. A poem, as acknowledged above, brings its own music, while a song
lyric knows that much of its music comes from somewhere else. The lyricist
Noël Coward explains it this way: “ Unless the reader happens to know the
tune to which the lyric has been set, his eye is liable to be bewildered by
what appears to be a complete departure from the written rhythm to which
his ear has subconsciously become accustomed. . . . In many instances, the
words and rhythms he reads, divorced from the melody line that holds them
together, may appear to be suddenly erratic, inept or even nonsensical.”
Coward overlooks the fact that it is precisely in such departures that a lyric
announces its craft. A great lyric will hint at its music; we should have a
feel for the music’s presence even though we can’t hear it. So when reading
a lyric aloud, note the moments when the lyrics seem to miss the melody for
guidance, where they seem most lacking, or where they build their own en-
ergy. Returning to the song in performance, you’ll find occasions for surprise,
particularly if you were previously unfamiliar with the song.
Another way of reading lyrics is to try performing them. I’m no singer,
but while I’ve been writing this book I’m sure that passersby have heard my
voice coming from behind my office door as I struggled to reach that high
note at the beginning of Al Green’s “Love and Happiness.” You need not be
a great singer to practice this method; it’s all in the name of analysis. As
with reading silently, there’s a substantial difference in practicing this kind
of reading with a tune you know and with one that you don’t. When you know
the song, you are already acquainted with what the singer must do to trans-
late the words to performance. When you don’t, you are left to intuit as best
you can, given the scant clues imbedded in the language, what the song
might sound like. Can words themselves suggest their proper melody? Per-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

haps not. But they can certainly conjure music, if only through their rhythm
and the collision of sounds.
Finally, the most powerful method of all, and the one to which these other
methods naturally lead, is reading a lyric while listening to the recorded
song. Doing so stages an encounter between two common ways of taking in
art—through the eye and through the ear—that results in generative mo-
ments of tension and resolution. Things fall into place, and things that seem
familiar and natural in one context suddenly become revealing and strange.

One could conceive of other analytic practices, such as listening to a song

without the transcribed lyric but with a conscious focus on language, or
reading a lyric after having recently heard the recording. A method that I
found surprisingly helpful during the composition of this book was ana-
lyzing a performance entirely from recollection. Recapitulating a remem-
bered performance of a song from silence opens up a new way of perceiving the
interrelations of words and sounds. I’d often wake up with a song running
through my head, conjured by my subconscious, which my conscious mind
then had to puzzle over to discover why the song had come to me.
Each method has its inherent virtues and limitations. Toggling among
perceptual positions helps one to appreciate that the song extends from the
sheet music to the lyrics to the recordings. Amoebic in its shape, the pop song
can easily shift from poem to performance, from lyric to music, to the terri-
tory in between. All this variety begs the question: Where does the song ac-
tually exist?
I borrow this question from the poet Stephen Dobyns’s query of poetry.
Does the song exist “in the air” as sound and performance, on the page as
text (as sheet music, musical notation, or lyric), or in the mind, “nonexistent
until it is perceived”? What is the primary aesthetic object under consider-
ation when it comes to a song? The lyrics? The sheet music? A specific re-
cording? Or is a song reinvented with each successive performance? Answers
to these questions condition how to approach the process of analysis.
In this book, I take as the primary aesthetic object the particular record-
ing to which I refer, understanding that the conclusions one can draw about
a song will differ depending on the iteration of the song, lyric, or recording.
At times, however, my attention turns to the song itself—to the process of
composition and to the lyric artifact, what might be termed the “script” for
the song’s arrangement, performance, and recording. In other words, atten-
tion shifts between the product of particular performers (the recorded track)
and the aesthetic object of songwriters (the song itself, as lyric and music).
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Pop music is often the product of creative people with little or no formal
musical training. Traditionally, songs are written before the recording pro-
cess begins, but this is not always the case. Sometimes in pop music the stu-
dio becomes the site of creation. When the post-punk band Joy Division was
first taking shape in the mid-1970s they were driven largely by intuition.
“Back then we didn’t know rules or theory. We had our ear, [lead singer] Ian
[Curtis], who listened and picked out the melodies,” recalls the band’s bass-
ist, Peter Hook. “He always had his scraps of paper that he’d written things

down on and he’d go through his plastic bag. ‘Oh, I’ve got something that
might suit that.’ And the next thing you knew he’d be standing there with a
piece of paper in one hand, wrapped around the microphone stand, with his
head down, making the melodies work. We’d never hear what he was sing-
ing about in rehearsal because the equipment was so shit. In his case it didn’t
matter because he delivered the vocal with such a huge amount of passion
and aggression, like he really fucking meant it. It was great. Who cared what
he was saying as long as he said it like that.” “Saying it like that” is the way
a pop recording can sometimes save a pop song, the way a band’s feeling, con-
viction, and creative impulses can overcome almost anything, even the song
itself.
The language that most band members speak to one another when it
comes to making a recording is not primarily one of technical musicianship,
but mostly of emotion and feel. “As a singer and a writer—or cowriter— I
find that it’s often my responsibility to say, ‘Look, this song is very aggres-
sive.’ Or, ‘This is a touching sequence that becomes aggressive,’ or whatever.
They don’t want to know what the words are but they want to know what
the mood is,” Mick Jagger says in explaining the importance of feeling over
lyrics during recording sessions with the Rolling Stones. Or, as Elvis Costello
quipped: “You don’t really need musical notation for rock and roll. I always
said it was all hand signals and threats.”
Songs never settle into fixed forms; they remain in a state of perpetual
evolution and reinterpretation with far greater range than most any other
art. Analyzing the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses,” originally from 1971’s
Sticky Fingers, one might hear different qualities in the song if one were
working from their live version on 1995’s Stripped, or one of the numerous
concert versions available on YouTube, or Alicia Keys and Adam Levine’s
2005 live cover version. Yes, songs come to states of rest with definitive re-
cordings that fix particular performances in the imagination. But even these
signature renditions always leave open the possibility of their reinscription
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

in another voice for another time.

Song lyrics’ most enduring place might not be in performance at all, but
in composition. “Song lyrics exist independently of their performance in the
practice of songwriters,” observe the songwriter Peter Astor and the musi-
cologist Keith Negus in a joint essay. “Songs can no more be reduced to their
performance than to their lyrics, a recording or sheet music. Song lyrics live
and endure between and beyond all these interpretations, transcriptions and
renditions.” Song lyrics are mutable things, coalescing into fixed forms only

to shift shape and reappear as something different, though somehow also

the same. This asks much of us as readers; it promises much in return.
In isolating a lyric, one temporarily relinquishes the experience of a re-
corded song in full so as better to comprehend and appreciate the many ways
that language dances with music. “A record is, above all, a richly textured
surface, which we apprehend only as a sensory, temporal, and complete expe-
rience,” the musicologist Albin Zak writes. “All of its parts must be present in
order to grasp it. As soon as we section off some part of it— the lyr ics, the
chord changes—we are no longer dealing with the record.” For the times
throughout the book when we shall not be dealing with the record, it will
always be in the spirit of returning to that record with a keener ear and a
finer attunement to the richness of the recording in full.
I should take a moment here to clarify some terminology. When I refer to
“song” I mean the musical composition in full as rendered in sheet music or
a lead sheet, inclusive of lyric and music; when I refer to “lyric,” I mean the
words alone. When I refer to “recording,” I mean a specific version of a given
song as produced and distributed for commercial consumption. When I refer
to “performance” I mean a live concert that I attended; “live” performances
released as recordings are recordings, subject to many of the same processes
that produce studio recordings. As the musicologist Theodore Gracyk re-
minds us, names matter because they help us be sure that we are talking
about the same things.
I take as my primary text the song lyric, the studio recording, and
perhaps other recordings of the song as well. Most of the book’s listening
attention will be directed at studio recordings of songs rather than live re-
cordings or songs that I personally heard live in concert. The reasons for
this are many, most significantly because the studio recording is usually—
though certainly not always— the most authoritative version, and because
it is the one most readily available to any reader. The focus on the studio
recording should not, however, dissuade one from applying the principles
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

of pop poetics to the vast range of recordings and live per formances you
might experience.
I direct secondary attention to the melody (inasmuch as it gives shape
to and sometimes finds itself in tension with the lyric) and the sheet music
(inasmuch as looking at how the song is rendered on the page in words and
musical notation reveals something about the language of the lyric). In study-
ing a song lyric like “Killing Me Softly with His Song,” one might consider
the Grammy-winning Roberta Flack recording from 1973, Lauryn Hill and

the Fugees’ cover from 1996, and Lori Lieberman’s 1972 original, as a means
of illuminating the form, feeling, and meaning of the song.
A web search for “Killing Me Softly lyric” yields over 25,000 entries.
Among those are dozens of different presentations of everything from the
song’s words to the way the lyrics are broken into lines. Even published ver-
sions of lyrics in liner notes, sheet music, and books provide no consensus.
Deciding which version to use becomes imperative once we begin applying
the tools of poetic analysis to our chosen song lyric. Literary poetry is a
graphic medium in which lineation, typesetting, and even typeface have tra-
ditionally played important roles in the design of the aesthetic object. They
provide explicit and implicit instructions for reading. The same holds for an-
alyzing a song lyric.
What makes song lyric transcription so difficult, of course, is song’s dual
identity as language and as sound. Words in song are bound both by the con-
ventions of language, which make them easy to transcribe, and by the conven-
tions of sound, which make them nearly impossible to transcribe with elegance
and specificity. “Writing about things heard is particularly difficult because
so much of the inner life of sound dwells below conscious thought,” writes
Seth Horowitz, a neuroscientist who studies human hearing. “At first
thought, it seems easy—many of the sounds we pay attention to in daily life
are words. You can transcribe conversations or lyrics into written form in a
straightforward fashion because words are bound by the conventions of lan-
guage. But go a bit below the basics of the written and spoken word and you
find that the rules of written language only give you a piece of the richness
found even in plain speech of a nontonal language such as English.”
The dual identity of song lyrics not only renders the practice of transcrip-
tion fraught with challenge, it also leaves even the most assiduous text a
mere approximation of the lyric as it lives in sound. This limitation is most
exposed in moments when the music and the singing voice move language
beyond conventional expression. Transcribing Stevie Wonder’s “ Don’t You
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Worry ’Bout a Thing,” you might reasonably write out the first and second
chorus in the same way. After all, they use the same words. Lost in such a
transcription, though, is that on his second time through Wonder stretches
the word “out” into a seven-second melodic run (from 1:39 to 1:46), a beauti-
ful embellishment that defies all attempts to set it down on the page.
Though the perfect lyric transcription is unattainable, this does not mean
that transcriptions aren’t worth doing, and doing well. Even the best tran-
scriptions are functional documents, meant to be used to explore the song

from new angles, not as an end in themselves. Before one can attend to the
practice of close reading and listening, it is essential to have a reliable tran-
scription on which to work. This will allow us to make observations about
the poetic functions of the lines (the relation of rhymes, for instance, or the
balance of syllables and stress) as well as the musical functions (the struc-
ture of the musical sections as they map on to the lyrics).
The goal is to respect the integrity of the poetic line while underscoring
its identity as language imbedded in musical performance. Doing so means
discerning the relation of the lyric line to the musical measure. “Lyrics are
written according to the phrasings of music; they are not written in stan-
zas, but (usually) in eight-bar units,” observes the songwriter Gene Lees in
his indispensable Modern Rhyming Dictionary. “Within a given eight-bar
unit,” he continues, “the melody may call for four, five, six, or more lines
of lyric.” In singing, the melody dictates the proportion of lyric lines to musical
bars. The number of notes in the melody will dictate the number of lines in the
lyric; these will often be marked by a pattern of end rhyme. In most Tin Pan
Alley compositions, for instance, an eight-bar musical section will take four
lines of lyric. Hoagy Carmichael’s 1927 classic, “Stardust,” illustrates this:

Sometimes I wonder why I spend

The lonely nights dreaming of a song
The melody haunts my reverie
And I am once again with you

Much contemporary lyric adheres to this pattern of four lyric lines per
eight musical bars, though one also finds five lyric lines and more. Rap tradi-
tionally calls for eight full lines of lyric to correspond to eight musical bars,
with sixteen-bar / sixteen-lyric-line sections as the standard unit of measure.
This longer line is necessary because rap more closely approximates speaking
than singing.
A transcribed song lyric, of course, presents certain obvious differences
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

from a page-born poem. The first is the authority of the written text. Can
we trust that the words we see are the ones the writer intended, presented
in the right order on the page? Poets usually oversee the way their words
appear in print. By contrast, songwriters rarely vet published lyrics, be they
the transcriptions that commonly appear in the inner sleeve of LPs and CDs
or the countless lyr ics now available online. Transcriptions of song lyrics
vary wildly in the texts they present; readers cannot presume that the lyr-
ics approximate the way the songwriters would want their words seen.

There is no stable state for printed lyrics; either they portray a written
record of their compositional process, as in the case of Dylan’s handwritten
draft of “Like a Rolling Stone,” which sold at auction for over $2 million back
in 2014; or they capture a listener’s—or, in the case of online lyrics, a crowd-
sourced community’s—transcriptions of utterance. Only rarely will song-
writers prepare lyrics for publication as text alone, and even in those rare
instances when they do—as part of a poetry collection, for instance, or inter-
spersed throughout a memoir— one finds a shocking lack of care and consis-
tency. In the era of the LP, many artists, including the Beatles, incorporated
printed lyrics to their songs on the album liner. More recent decades have
witnessed the proliferation of books that collect song lyrics as poems, often
with the artist’s putative involvement. Surprisingly, neither liner-note lyr-
ics nor lyrics-as-poetry books follow consistent practices when it comes to
matters like line breaks or section structure. Most read as if they were pre-
pared by underpaid interns at the record label or the book publisher, which
in fact might often be the case.
Music fans write out lyrics in various idiosyncratic ways. For those of us
who wish to explore a lyric’s construction with greater care, however, an-
other kind of transcription is required, one that stands up to the rigors of
close reading and close listening combined. For a lyric to be usefully ana-
lyzed on the page, a few conditions must be met.
First, make sure the transcription underscores rather than obscures the
structural organization of the song. It should clearly demarcate the moving
parts of verses, choruses, bridges, and any other features that songwriters
construct when composing a song. Without structural clarity, the pattern-
ing and repetition that comprise the defining qualities of a lyric’s formal
shape are hidden. Most websites, for instance, will transcribe the chorus only
the first time through, thereafter simply writing “Chorus,” even in instances
of small but significant differences of language. In his illuminating account
of the songwriter’s craft, Tunesmith, the prolific songwriter Jimmy Webb de-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

scribes how he and many other songwriters he knows will actually use trac-
ing paper to ensure that the formal structure of rhyme, line length, and
rhythm pattern are consistent across the verses in a song. This kind of at-
tention is quietly at work in many songs, without listeners’ knowledge.
There’s a value in attending to it, both to extol the songwriting craft and to
come to terms with the formal puzzle each lyric presents.
Second, ensure that the transcription expresses a clear and consistent re-
lation between the rhythmic structure of the music and the rhythmic struc-

ture of the lyric as rendered in the lyric line. For a lyric transcription to have
integrity it must clarify and codify the relationship between the length of a
lyric line and the span of a musical bar. A reader must be able to look at a lyric
and know that each line represents the same period of musical time. This will
allow a reader to experience the songwriter’s lyric play and dilation of time
when one line is significantly longer or shorter than others, or the constancy
that results when the lines are essentially the same length.
A brief example may be helpful here. Consider the children’s nursery
rhyme “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” which is based on Mozart’s musical
scoring of the French nursery rhyme “Ah! Vous Dirai- Je, Maman,” first pub-
lished in 1761. Two other well-known lyrics in English have been set to this
tune, “The Alphabet Song” and “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.” In the transcrip-
tions below, I’ve followed the same practice with all of the lyrics, where the
four lines represent eight musical measures. I’ve written the number of syl-
lables per line along the side to demonstrate how each lyric dilates its lan-
guage to fit the same musical space:

Ah! Vous dirai-je maman 7

Ce qui cause mon tourment? 7
Papa veut que je raisonne 8
Comme une grande personne 8

Twinkle, twinkle, little star 7

How I wonder what you are 7
Up above the world so high 7
Like a diamond in the sky 7

A, B, C, D, E, F, G 7
H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P 9
Q, R, S, T, U, V 6
W, X, Y and Z 7
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Baa, Baa, black sheep, have you any wool? 9

Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Three bags full 7
One for my master and one for my dame 10
And one for the little boy who lives down the lane12

Moving from “Ah! Vous Dirai- Je, Maman” to “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,”
we notice a striking expansion of syllable count. Seven seems to be the ideal
number of syllables each line will naturally take (both in French and in

English). “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” fits that form exactly, both in the
section I’ve transcribed and in most of the lines of verse that follow. The mel-
ody remains; however, each lyric demands a different number of syllables in
the same space of musical time. The shortest line, “Q, R, S, T, U, V,” fills the
same space as the longest, “And one for the little boy who lives down the lane,”
because the former includes a medial caesura (an internal pause at the
middle of the line that looks like this: “Q, R, S // T, U, V”) and the latter ac-
celerates the pace of the singing to fit in the added syllables before the end
of the measure. This is only a simple illustration of something that is going
on in every song we hear.
Most songwriters carefully calibrate their rhythmic durations per line,
down to the syllable; a reader should be aware of this patterning in the same
way that a listener is implicitly aware of the push and pull of the lyric as
performed in relation to the beat. Additionally, the concordance of line length
and musical time will reveal important details about rhyme patterning. A
poor transcription will obscure the play of internal rhyme, particularly if a
transcriber assumes that the line must always break whenever a rhyme
crops up.
Third, endeavor to make the transcription as faithful as possible to the
particular language of the lyric as performed. This is an obvious point that
often proves challenging, due to either the inattentiveness of the transcriber
or the unintelligibility of the recording. Pop recordings run the gamut from
careful articulation of language to conscious obscuring of the voice. Some-
times, too, the absence of clear enunciation is a key element of the perform-
er’s style. Elton John, for instance, cultivates a stylized slur on much of his
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road LP. “Saturday Night” and “Bennie and the Jets”
both draw much of their appeal from the messiness and the implicit emo-
tional urgency of expression that such slurring communicates. The lack of
certainty about particular words does nothing to diminish the impact of
these songs. On the contrary, it builds mystery and empowers the listener to
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

fill in the gaps of comprehension that remain. Of course, one should work
to get every word right in a transcription, but the first two conditions for
transcription are more impor tant when it comes to the work of analyzing
and appreciating the lyric craft.
Finally, no matter how successful the transcription is at achieving the
above aims, it should always be understood as a provisional document. Lyr-
ics by themselves are rarely the aesthetic end of a song. Even in the case of

Beck’s Song Reader, a set of sheet music he released in 2012 as an invita-

tion to other artists to record their own versions of his songs, Beck conceived
of the written document as a means to a future end. Transcriptions of song
lyr ics are purpose-driven documents; certainly, they may bring aesthetic
pleasure on their own, and they may even communicate ideas and feelings
in ways different from the song as performed, but they achieve their true
value in providing engaged listeners with another point of entry into the re-
corded song. A faithful transcription is a celebration of the songwriting
craft, as well as a working document that a listener, now a reader, may use
to gain a greater understanding of the poetic and musical structures at work
in a recording.
Analyzing the poetics of a song on the page naturally privileges a certain
kind of lyric and a certain kind of listening. It showcases keenly crafted lines
of patterned rhythms, rhymes, or the two combined. It engages the eye for
analysis while forestalling temporarily the ear for emotion. This is why read-
ing lyrics is never an end in itself, but always part of a process of defamil-
iarization and refamilarization with the song in full. Appreciation for all
songs will benefit from the process of looking at their lyr ics on the page,
though some songs will benefit more than others. The Beatles’ “Revolution”
and “Revolution #9” are both fascinating, but there’s simply more to say
about the poetics of the former than those of the latter.
Yes, poetic analysis favors certain kinds of lyrics over others. So does lis-
tening to music in a state of distraction, or of rapt attention, or inebriation
or celebration or jubilation or perambulation or any combination of these
states. Whether we know it or not, all of us already subject the songs we hear
to all kinds of filters: analysis and emotion and attention and so on. This
battery of de facto experiments in musical cognition is every bit as denatur-
ing as looking at lyrics on the page, with and without the benefit of the music.
Through it all, the song survives. Songs are made of sturdy stuff.
So, when reading the poetry of pop, the beauty of certain songs will inten-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

sify, while the beauty of other songs will diminish in the gaze of the reading
eye. The important thing is to know this and to account for both transforma-
tions as best one can in the analysis. This means realizing the limits of each
critical practice and allowing space for the mystery of things beyond our
grasp. Every analytical approach has blind spots, and certain songs will
prove inscrutable to the methods described here. For instance, poetic analy-
sis might not account for what is most appealing about a rap freestyle, in

which extemporization undercuts the kinds of formal patterning that poetic

analysis rewards. The same might be true for songs, and there are many of
them, where the beauty of the sound exceeds sense and structure.
Accepting these limitations, the poetic analysis of song lyrics is a marvel-
ously adaptable method, capable of capturing and communicating to others
some of what is so moving and remarkable about the songs that stay with
us, and those that pass us by. Poetic analysis reveals the inner workings of
a lyric as simple as “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and one as textured as “A
Day in the Life.” Poetics is sensitive to sound and to sense, as well as to the
many places in between.
A great deal of the fun in reading the poetry of pop is in the way that it
can reveal brilliance and conscious craft in places where they might not be
apparent in the listening alone. Pop tends to wear its poetics lightly, with
raffish disregard that belies the careful tailoring that goes into its construc-
tion. Many pop songs are better poems than they need to be to satisfy their
listeners and to do the job that their music demands. So much of the plea-
sure of analysis, then, comes in the surprise of finding just how much is going
on—not beneath the surface of the lyric, but on the surface itself.
The surfaces of songs take shifting shapes. Just look at the t-shirts you
may have seen people wearing over the years, bearing lists of common song
structures. As these t-shirts attest, pop songs are modular, composed of for-
mal units that can be assembled and reassembled to fashion innumerable
patterns of repetition and difference. The terminology and notation used to
name the parts have shifted over time, though the constitutive elements of
a pop song have remained essentially the same for a century: the sing-along
familiarity of the chorus, the narrative drive of the verse, and the digressive
energy of the bridge.
Choruses are usually fixed, repeated with little or no change twice or more
during the song. They tend to be short, six or eight bars in duration. They
often contain the song’s primary hook, the most memorable or “sticky” sec-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

tion of melody and lyric. Verses, by contrast, are the domain of difference.
They are longer than choruses, often stretching to twelve, sixteen, or many
more bars in duration. They are the primary space for narrative in pop songs,
where singers and songwriters mark development from the chorus’s point of
relative stasis. Finally, bridges furnish the unexpected; usually played only
once, the bridge marks a sonic, lyric, and emotive shift from the song’s es-
tablished pattern. “From Stevie Wonder to Steely Dan,” Pharrell Williams
told students at NYU, “bridges are everything.”

“We all wrote to the same formula in the beginning,” recalls the singer
Paul Anka of his late 1950s– early 1960s apprenticeship in the Brill Build-
ing, hallowed shorthand moniker for the hundreds of music publishers and
songwriters who occupied space in and around the Brill Building’s 1619
Broadway and 49th Street address in Manhattan. “The structure of the
music was also simpler, it was just the classic AABA format,” continues
Anka. “A” stood for the verse, and “B” stood for the bridge, which was in-
tended as a compelling sonic and lyric departure from the pattern the verses
established. One might also find a refrain, or repeated tagline, imbedded in
the verse, which would satisfy the sing-along function now common to the
chorus. The Shirelles’ 1960 hit “ Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” written
by Brill Building luminaries Carole King and Jerry Goffin, is an elegant ex-
ample of the simple beauty of the AABA form. The two verses that open the
song establish a pattern of expectation in the listener that the bridge subtly
subverts, only to close with a final verse that reestablishes the pattern and
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

offers resolution.
Most pop songs, however, follow patterns with more moving parts than
the AABA form. The most common of these is probably the ABABCB form,
where “A” is the verse, “B” is the chorus, and “C” is the bridge. The overall
principle is the same as it is with the AABA pattern: establish expectation
(with a verse alone in the shorter form, or the verse followed by a chorus in
the longer), disrupt that expectation (in both cases, with a bridge), and ar-
rive at resolution (either with a concluding verse or with a chorus).

A fine example of this form is “Nothing Compares 2 U,” a Prince song

that Sinéad O’Connor took to the top of the global charts in 1990. Prince
employs the ABABCB structure to capture the emotional stages of heart-
ache, putting the constitutive formal parts to their optimal uses. The two
verses narrate the singer’s mournful state. Verse one commences in striking
fashion: “It’s been seven hours and thirteen days / Since you took your love
away.” The inversion of temporal order combined with its exacting specific-
ity speaks to the lived experience of love lost. The remainder of the verse
celebrates the freedoms of being unencumbered by a relationship, rejecting
each of them in favor of the blues-drenched sadness of loss.
The second verse extends the narrative of the first, rejecting the consola-
tion of some other romance and even a doctor’s prescription to go have some
fun. Following each verse is a simple, powerful chorus that gradually unfurls
the words of the title. The halting repetition of the title phrase is in tension
with the soaring melodic line, just as the singer’s emotional state is caught
between heartache and passion. The bridge, which begins “All the flowers
that you planted,” is a departure both sonically and substantively from
all that comes before it. The singer, now addressing her beloved, admits even
in the face of having been left behind that she’s willing to try it all again.
When the chorus returns, it is charged and changed by this small possibility
of reconciliation. O’Connor sings the lines with a heightened passion that
sounds both hurt and hopeful. Take any element of the ABABCB form away
from “Nothing Compares 2 U” and the song is not the same; the musical
and emotional heights it reaches are unattainable.
In recent years, popular music has seen a shift in the song’s center of grav-
ity away from the verse and toward the chorus. Many pop songs today do not
include a bridge at all, ceding the space in the song to a hook-driven chorus.
But the story of the pop song’s formal transformation isn’t just one of simpli-
fication. Quite the contrary— one is more likely now than ever before to find
an array of song structures that depart from established norms. At least
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

part of this is attributable to the modes of pop production. Contemporary pop

songs are more often than not the work of producers rather than songwrit-
ers alone, so fixed lyric forms are often supplanted by ornate patterns that
reflect the exigencies of sound recording rather than the dictates of written
composition. A producer moves a few bars here, then copies them and moves
them there as well, and now the song has a pre-chorus. An artist needs a big
radio hit, so the producer ensures that the chorus repeats a half dozen times
instead of only three.

Even songs that seem formulaic often reveal unexpected complexity hid-
ing on the surface of the sound. Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)”
appears straightforward enough; it follows the same ABABCB form as “Noth-
ing Compares 2 U” and thousands of other pop songs. The verses are still
narrative (“Up in the club, just broke up,” the first verse begins), the chorus is
certainly catchy (“ ’Cause if you like it then you should have put a ring on it”
became a cultural catchphrase), and the bridge offers a striking key change
and a lyric assertion of self in the face of her lover’s lack of attentiveness.
“Once I got the bridge, I thought the song could become iconic,” the song’s
lead writer and producer, The-Dream, told Genius.com. “Without the bridge,
it would just be this melodic hip-hop record. I believe that’s why it got Song
of the Year.”
“Single Ladies” is, in many ways, the perfect pop song. Transcribing the
lyrics, one finds a downright Byzantine architecture comprised of small re-
peated units and surprising departures from established pattern. The song
is fitted with parts that must be given names other than “verse,” “chorus,”
or “bridge.” There’s the “All the single ladies” phrase that repeats numerous
times at the beginning of the song that I suppose you could call an “Intro,”
as Genius.com does, except for the fact that it repeats again near the song’s
end. Then there’s the “Wuh uh oh uh uh oh oh uh oh uh uh oh” section that
comes after the first chorus, a prominent part of the recording that the Ge-
nius transcription excludes. Call it a post-chorus, or a pre-chorus to the
chorus that follows it? “Single Ladies” is the work of two preeminent pop
producers, The-Dream and Tricky Stewart, which might help account for the
fact that the form reflects the shifting sonic textures of production more than
it does a logic of lyric.
Though traditionalists might wish to write the story of pop music as one
of decline—the only variance being the high-water mark to which the critic
clings, be it Tin Pan Alley or Brill Building or 1960s and 1970s rock trouba-
dours or something else—the nature of song structure tells a different story.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

One finds today, in fact, a profusion of forms with more elements of lyric and
sound, more variations, more ways of fitting parts to a whole. This doesn’t
mean better songs than in the past. What it does mean, though, is that pop
music constantly challenges us to hear it and to read it in new ways.

Listening
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Bradley, Adam. The Poetry of Pop, Yale University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fdu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4815350.
Created from fdu-ebooks on 2025-02-09 22:08:59.
L
isten to this: Guns N’ Roses’ “Paradise City” begins with a chorus,
clear and anthemic. “Take me down to the Paradise City / Where the
grass is green and the girls are pretty.” Axl Rose’s vocal cadence,
layered with harmonies, follows the natu ral rhythmic contours of
the lyric language. We hear each word and we know how it relates in the
sentence to the words around it.
By contrast, the first verse opens something like this: “Suta urcha nana
nun on the street, um ahh.” It is a sonic and rhythmic event, not a clearly
discernible semantic one. Rose’s singing erodes the boundaries between in-
dividual words, loosing syllables from one another and inviting them to forge
new unities in sound. The lyrics actually read “Just an urchin living under
the street, I’m a . . .” Listening back to the recorded song with Rose’s real
words in mind, the opening line snaps into focus. We now know where one
word ends and the next begins.
But are we any better for the knowledge? Not necessarily. The same edge
and urgency come across in Rose’s singing and in the music whether we can
decipher the language of the lyr ics or not. Why, then, study lyr ics at all?
Because many songs call attention to specific meanings in ways that “Para-
dise City” does not. And because many of the tools of poetics work just as
well on “Suta urcha” as they do on “Just an urchin.”
The poetry of pop concerns both language and performance, both the se-
mantic and the sensory. Part of the pleasure stems from listening closely to
the recorded song and applying analytical tools to that experience in sound.
This act of analysis considers language as it lives in the air, evading efforts to
capture it in print. Part of the pleasure, as well, derives from attending to
the lyrics on the page—as a script for performance, and as relations visible
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

only in the provisional space of print. Though the latter kind of critical at-
tention is more commonly associated with poetics, the former is equally the
domain of poetic analysis.
Listening to pop songs with a critical ear begins by attending to language,
sound, and style as they imprint themselves on feeling. Deep listening is only
possible once we invite emotions into our analysis. When listening, imagine
your whole body as a seismograph of sorts, except instead of registering the
earth’s vibrations, you’re capturing your own sympathetic engagements with

sound. What does the song make you feel, and precisely when does it make
you feel it? Can you account for specific qualities of the recording that in-
spire those feelings?
“ Music has the power to stop time,” observes Ahmir “Questlove” Thomp-
son, the drummer and musical director of the Roots. “When I listen to songs,
I’m transported back to the moment of their birth, which is sometimes even
before the moment of my birth. Old songs, rock or soul or blues, still connect
with me because the human emotions in them, whether jealousy or rage or
hope, are recognizably similar to the emotions that I’m feeling now. But I’m
feeling all of them, all the time, and so the songs act like a chemical process
that isolates certain feelings at certain times: maybe one song helps illumi-
nate the jubilation and one helps illuminate the sorrow and one helps illu-
minate the resignation.”
This kind of close listening is a process of emotional reciprocity, of recog-
nizing shared impulses and feelings of others through the language of song.
Most all of us listen to music, at least at times, in the way that Questlove
describes, temporarily ceding our emotional compass to the inexorable pull
of someone else’s sound. The only difference between this kind of listening
and the deep listening I propose is that the pleasure or pain the song in-
spires in you is the beginning rather than the end of analysis. Close listen-
ing almost always moves from an apprehension of feeling to an apprehension
of form.
Most of us are far more comfortable listening to a song than reading a
novel or a poem; we’re better practiced at it, and our critical guard is down
because most of us understand listening to songs as play rather than work.
In addition, the cultural barriers put in place over the years to bar entry to, or
at least to exact a toll of attention from, those engaged in literary conversa-
tions have never been successfully replicated in discussions of popular music.
To paraphrase the folk historian Bruce Jackson, pop-music audiences are
no different from literary audiences; they’re just less pretentious about what
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

they do. Though Jackson was writing about folk poetry, his distinction holds
for pop music as well. Unlike literary audiences, folk audiences and pop-
music audiences “do not pretend their decisions are based on high and im-
mutable aesthetic values; they do not pretend they have no gut reactions to
things; they do not pretend to like things which make no sense to them. In
a way they are the harshest of audiences, for they are intolerant of what
bores them and tend to discard boring things quickly and to reject boring
performers immediately.”

Like folk poetry, the poetry of pop exhibits an aesthetics of immediacy.

More often than not, pop songs do not require their audience to pull back
the integuments of meaning, like unfurling the buds of an artichoke to reach
its heart, in the way that page-based poetry often demands. Instead, pop re-
cordings luxuriate in surface effects that include everything from rhythm
to rhyme to rhetorical figures and forms. In other words, they call upon tools
used by students of literature, augmented by an intuitive or trained ear for
music.
Though pop songs sometimes carry complex meanings, those meanings
are rarely hidden insights into the human condition. A great deal of the lan-
guage is prefabricated; a great measure of the emotion is canned. Lyrics
come to aesthetic life in action: in performance, and in the way the music
animates listeners’ lives. The meanings of pop lyrics are contextual and ac-
tive; they live on the surface of the language, in the minds of the people who
listen, and in the spaces in between. “I have often found careful listening to
be repaid with delight even when the song and the per formances are not
to my taste,” remarks the musicologist Albin Zak. “I also find that the harder
I listen, the more I am aware of how much there is to hear and how much
the record artfully withholds from me.” This artful withholding is a call to
deeper listening—not for hidden meanings, but for those qualities that re-
side, evanescent, ephemeral, on the surface of the sound.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “ephemeral” as “in existence,
power, favour, popularity, etc. for a short time only; short-lived; transitory.”
Pop music is ephemeral, not primarily in the sense that it is something that
soon passes out of notice, but in the sense that it is meant to entertain us
right now. All but the most ponderous pop songs appeal in some way on first
listen. Though returning to them can clarify and intensify their meaning,
pop songs generally expose their splendors from the start. Of course, the
entertainment pop music provides also supports a multibillion-dollar indus-
try. The fact that pop songs are engines of commerce, however, does not
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

negate the fact that their primary function must always be to entertain; if
they fail at that, then nothing else follows. To understand the source of pop
songs’ entertainment, it’s best to look to the surface. What one is likely to
find there is not just ease of articulation but also a certain obstruction. Both
define the poetry of pop.
Poets often seek a way to provide just enough obstruction and just enough
direction to guide readers through their work. The pleasure to be found in a
great many poems is, after all, in the labor of them, more so than in their

outward effects of sound or the dance of their lines on the page. So much
about poetry can be explained by this simple insight: Poems are the product
of the poet’s necessary labor, which in turn creates necessary labor for the
reader. We see it in the derangement of syntax, in the fashioning of image,
in the disruptions and misdirections brought on by line and enjambment, in
the artifice of poetic diction. All of these qualities and more stand between
the reader and pure—if there can be such a thing—meaning. What distin-
guishes most poetry from everyday speech is the ritual that the former de-
mands of its reader. Be it through incantatory rhythm, patterns of repetition
(from alliteration to assonance to rhyme), shifts in voice, games with struc-
ture, or any number of other techniques, poets endeavor to control the pace
of cognition so as to create pockets of epiphany.
Songwriters referred to as poets achieve this distinction in large part
because their lyrics satisfy common preconceptions of the poetic, the most
important of which is this idea of obstruction. We need to puzzle over Jim
Morrison’s lyrics to the Doors’ twelve-minute opus “The End,” so therefore
it must be poetry. The central image in Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue”
is so charged, the temporality so strange, that it must be poetry. However,
this approach creates inherent bias against certain genres of music—namely,
dance- and rhythm-driven music, which is to say the vast majority of African
American and Latin American music—that often achieve their complexity
through the alchemy of sound and language. Accepting a broader definition of
“poetry” or “poetic” means including aesthetics that privilege qualities other
than semantic difficulty. Such inclusion broadens and deepens pop’s poetic
heritage and directs attention to the qualities that predominate in genres
beyond the folk/rock singer-songwriter of the 1960s and 1970s. What is the
poetics of an artist like Johnny Cash? Or a group like the Ramones? What
is the poetic aesthetic of Michael Jackson or Madonna? Of Nicki Minaj or
the Weeknd? Answering these questions leads to a rich and varied appre-
ciation of what words can do in the minds and in the mouths of pop singers.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Popular songs don’t always offer much cognitive obstruction on the level
of the lyric, although they often generate other kinds of obstructions on the
musical and performance levels that end up impacting the lyric. When the
Beatles sing “I want to hold your hand,” the words themselves demand no
deep thinking. That said, it would be a mistake to dismiss them without re-
flection. In performance, that simple statement conveys longing. For scores
of young fans, it permitted a safe and attainable desire. The counterpoint of
harmony underscores the union promised by the speech act.

Much of the mismeasure of pop music is a consequence of misplaced in-

terpretive frameworks. A listener critiquing a Rick Ross club banger for its
absence of lyric nuance is missing both the point of the song and the point
of serious criticism. Of course, one is certainly within his or her rights to
find such a song unappealing or objectionable. However, it’s left to those lis-
teners with knowledge of the song’s genres and conventions to speak with
nuance about the value and quality of the performance. This isn’t to estab-
lish an aesthetic hierarchy; music, and popular music in particular, is defi-
antly democratic, even against oligarchical business interests that seek to
control it. It is, rather, to assert the power and agency of an informed and
active listener, one willing to judge a song against the terms it announces
for itself.
A song announces itself most palpably in emotional terms. Poems gener-
ate emotion through direct emotive appeal, through accretion of image, and,
more subtly, through the play of sound. Song lyrics often outsource much of
this emotive work to the music and to how the singer’s vocal inflection col-
ors the words. Both music and singing have far more direct access to emo-
tions than do words alone. Song lyrics still do a great deal of work, though
the work is different from that done by the words of print-based poetry.
Understanding how language functions differently in song lyrics than it
does in print-based poetry means grappling with the matter of emotional
inflection. In song lyrics, words can be emotionally shaded in many ways:
through the tone or timbre of the vocalist; through the tone or timbre of the
accompanying music; through the melody, harmony and rhythm of the sing-
ing, rapping, or speaking; through the melody, harmony, and rhythm of the
accompanying music; and through the qualities of sound engineering and
production that result in the finished recording. These sonic effects on lan-
guage are interrelated and often experienced simultaneously. As with speech,
song lyrics rely on the fact that most people have the equipment to process
multiple stimuli, deriving meaning and feeling from them all at once. As
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

with instrumental music, music with words also depends on a more primal
impulse to draw meaning directly from the experience of sounds.
Performances of a song charge words with meanings they might not carry
in reading. Singers often endow the songs they sing with their own aesthetic
perspective within the interpretive space that the song allows. Singers make
meaning in a song through phrasing, holding and clipping words, or paus-
ing and accelerating the lines; emphasizing words that neither the poetics
nor the music suggests for emphasis; changing or cutting words outright; tak-

ing liberties with the melody; introducing vocal harmonies; and creating
dramatic contrasts. “The best pop songs . . . are those that can be heard as
a struggle between verbal and musical rhetoric, between the singer and the
song,” Simon Frith observes. Struggle can potentially express itself on sev-
eral different levels as well: the struggle, for instance, of performance with
poetics, or between the individual artist’s sense of time and the sense of time
embodied in lyric and song.
On Pearl Jam’s “Even Flow” one hears the push and pull of singer with
song. Eddie Vedder extenuates and accelerates syllables as he sings. Single
words stretch across entire measures, and a dozen or more syllables jostle
against one another in the space of a single line. This can’t be rendered ap-
parent on the page without deranging the words, like writing “Freezin’ / Rests
his head on a pillow made of concrete” as “Freeeeeezin’ / Rests his head onap-
illowmadeofconcrete.” Vedder’s performance stages a small drama, conjuring
a dynamic emotional mood. Of course, this can only be experienced fully in
the listening.
Lyr ics express their meaning and exert their feeling in several ways:
through sound (rhythm, rhyme, and other patterns of repetition and dif-
ference), through story (the narrative voice and action that command
heightened attention to detail), through the ways that individual words
and phrases alight on our consciousness (opening lines, choruses, hooks,
or other memorable parts of the whole), and through the ways that the sum
of the words comprise ideas and elicit emotional responses through the song
in full. The poet Adrian Matejka once told me that he believes the emotions
in pop music are almost always predicated on language first. “Song lyrics can
take a vague feeling brought on by the melody or an instrumental solo and
make that vague feeling tangible for the listener,” he said. “ Music has a vis-
ceral power, but lyrics pinpoint feeling.” Though instrumental music is a po-
tent tool for eliciting emotion, the lyric usually carries the specificity of that
emotion. Lyrics are the emotional compass pointing the listener in a direction
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

of feeling.
Consider two songs that take on love, pop’s greatest theme: Hank
Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and Stevie Wonder’s “I Was Made
to Love Her.” Though their respective music situates the listener in an
emotive field of melancholy and joy, respectively, the lyr ics direct us more
precisely to a sense of desperation in the former and of new romance in
the latter. This is accomplished both through the songs’ narratives and, more
subtly, through their registers of diction— the patterns of words that the

songwriters have selected to help foster a feeling. Williams, for instance,

underscores the lyric’s sadness with words like “blue,” “low,” “night,” “crawl-
ing,” “moon,” “die,” and “falling.” Wonder captures the excitement of first love
with words and phrases like “sweetheart,” “hand in hand,” “inspiration,”
“appreciation,” “sweet,” “blossomed,” “worship,” and “adore.” Of course, these
constellations of meanings account for only part of the life of the language.
The rest lives in the tone and timbre of the words rendered through the
singing voices.
One song can express divergent emotional meanings through different
performances, though the words remain the same. When performed by Willie
Nelson (the songwriter) and by Patsy Cline (the singer of its most defini-
tive rendition), the lyrics to “Crazy” summon distinct emotional responses.
Nelson’s phrasing extenuates then attenuates the lyric line, establishing
small patterns of anticipation and release. “My phrasing is peculiar to me,”
Nelson writes, recalling his recording of “Crazy.” “I’ll lay back on the beat
or jump ahead. I’m always doing something funny with time because, to me,
time is a flexible thing.” By contrast, Cline phrases more securely in the
pocket of the beat, emphasizing words that the poetics and the music also
stress. Cline’s rendition is measured and melancholy; Nelson’s, rueful and
even a bit wry. Whichever version you prefer, critical attention to language
in relation to music and performance provides a vocabulary for supporting
your taste and explaining it to others.
Besides being vessels for a song’s emotion, lyrics also function in the act
of storytelling. Music by itself carries narrative only by analogy; a song can
build to a climax, can devolve, can explore alternate paths and return to its
main thematic thoroughfare, but we only understand this as narrative in
the associative act of metaphor. Many pop songs structure themselves as
stories, with characters and climaxes and tensions familiar from narrative
art forms like short stories, novels, plays, and certain kinds of poetry. Lyrics
often expand to fit their stories, as in rap where the lyric line is long enough
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

to contain complex narratives. When song lyrics function as narrative, it re-

quires no analogic leap or critical translation to apply the tools of narrative
analysis as practiced in other literary genres. Of course, these tools must
be tailored and sometimes reinvented to account for the particularities of
the story’s expression in song, but they nonetheless retain their basic struc-
tures and critical practices.
Lyr ics announce their importance to pop songs in the antagonistic co-
operation between words and song, in the emotions they carry and help to

clarify, and in the stories they tell. But we’ve yet to consider one final factor
in how the poetics of pop songs function: you. How do you listen? How does
the language of lyrics enter into that listening?
Some songs ask to be experienced in isolated moments, musical phrases
and inflections, scraps of lyric, particular riffs and sounds. Others demand
attention to the whole, a sonic flow washing over you without clear differen-
tiation of words from other sounds. All songs invite attention both to their
particulars and to their wholes, and each song usually suggests an inclina-
tion for its own analysis. It’s the difference between listening to James
Brown’s “Funky Drummer” with its solos, breaks, and howls, and listening
to Ike and Tina Turner’s Phil Spector–produced “River Deep, Mountain
High,” with its Wall of Sound production rendering instruments and voices
at times indistinguishable. Some pop lyrics achieve a state of transparency
where they can be metabolized so cleanly as sound and feeling that one for-
gets their materiality as language. Other lyrics bear an expressive density
where the substance and structure of the language and meaning demand
active attention.
The song lyric and the lyric poem share a capacity to be appreciated when
only partly understood, or to be understood at multiple levels by different
individuals, or even to be understood by the same individual in dif ferent
ways at different times. Pop songs and poems also share an implicit appeal
to audience, a call to empathy and to recognition. The literary critic M. H.
Abrams calls this process the “imaginative transformation of the self.” In
poetry, it manifests itself most plainly when we read a poem aloud and
become, if only for the duration of the recitation, the “I” of the speaker. We
inhabit the haunting condition of Emily Dickinson’s speaker when we read
these lines: “ Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for
me; / The carriage held but just ourselves / And Immortality.” In pop music,
empathetic identification makes itself most apparent when we sing along to
a song. Singing the lyr ics to Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Water” means accepting an intimate relationship with an unnamed person

in need of comfort: “When you’re weary, feeling small / When tears are in
your eyes / I will dry them all.”
To understand what listeners expect from the language of pop songs, it is
useful to begin by exploring exactly what happens to those words once they
enter our consciousness. Scientists have recently posited that song lyrics are
processed in the right hemisphere of the brain, in the “primitive” limbic
system. The limbic system, and specifically the amygdala, records the emotive

connotations of words rather than their precise denotations. When research

subjects listen to song lyrics while connected to a neuroimaging scanner, the
amygdala lights up. This suggests that song lyrics are experienced in the
brain’s domain of automatic speech and nonpropositional thinking, which
houses other speech acts like counting, cursing, and conventional greetings.
By contrast, propositional thinking— creating original expression by string-
ing together words in syntactical structures—happens in the left hemisphere
of the brain.
The human brain is hardwired to attend to the language of song lyrics in
a markedly different way than the way it attends to the language of every-
day conversation or even to the language of literature. It is not a lesser form
of attention, nor is the distinction absolute. In general terms, though, it is
fair to say that when we listen to song lyrics, we are likely to comprehend
the emotion and conviction (in other words, the connotations) behind the
words more readily than we do the denotative meaning of the words them-
selves. That is why it is possible to love a song and to be able to play it back
in your head, but not be able to recite all of the lyrics or even to recognize a
given lyric line when it is presented out of context. Though song lyrics some-
times demand repeated attention akin to the close reading required of liter-
ary texts, they almost always reward our first listening as well.
Words in song are never just words, of course, in large part because of
the dictates of the melody and the inflection given them by the singing voice.
Sound has syntax. Song lyrics are memorable because of their distance and
their difference from conversation. It is the difference between the statement
“The ballerina danced on the beach” and Elton John singing “Ballerina, you
must have seen her / Dancing in the sand.” It is the difference between read-
ing the words “Somewhere over the rainbow / Way up high” and hearing them
sung to a melody that demands that the singer jump up an entire octave from
the first to the second syllable in the space of that opening word: Some-
WHERE. Words in song have the capacity to become unforgettable when
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

the singer finds a way of extracting something from the constituent sounds
of words that might otherwise remain locked up. Sometimes this happens
by accentuating sounds in unexpected ways; sometimes it happens by jux-
taposing certain sounds with others through rhyme or alliteration or asso-
nance; sometimes it happens by deranging the sound entirely, rendering a
familiar word strange. The very sounds of words, even when divorced from
sense, communicate meaning through emotion.

Take this example. In the mid-1980s the British duo Wham! was one of
the biggest groups in the world. They had a string of number-one hits before
splitting up. The lead singer, George Michael, would go on to a solo career
with an even longer string of number-one hits. Wham! epitomized a certain
strain of 1980s pop by combining elements of soul singing with New Wave
instrumentation on songs almost always about love. Perhaps the best exam-
ple of this style is their 1984 million-selling, chart-topping hit “Everything
She Wants.” Written, produced, and sung by George Michael, it embodies
his singular vision of how a pop song should sound.
“Everything She Wants” is clearly legible as a song of longing and lament
even when the lyrics glide past awareness. A good deal of this has to do with
the melodrama of the music and the clarity with which the music and the
voice, including the lyrics, communicate a particular emotional state. It also
has to do with Michael’s plaintive tone, starting with the ad-libbed moan that
begins the record before the lyrics come in, unleashing a flood of connota-
tive meanings. It also has to do with the lyric moments that the song high-
lights, the words that seep into conscious awareness, the ones we might sing
along to or that might crop up unbidden in our head. These could be the
words of the song’s title, for instance, or the chorus, or the interjection near
the song’s end when Michael blurts out, “My God! I don’t even think that I
love you.” Together, these discrete moments build an impression of the song’s
meaning, its various states of being.
Pop songs encourage such gestalt listening, where the “essence or shape of
an entity’s complete form” is clearly understood, though the particulars may
not be. This way of knowing a pop song is different from the way we generally
come to know a lyric poem, where the act of reading stipulates a basic attention
to individual words on the page. It’s the difference between looking and seeing,
hearing and listening. “This is the power of the song lyric,” writes Daniel J.
Levitin. “The mutually supporting forces that bind rhythm, melody, harmony,
timbre, lyrics, and meaning in a song allow some of the elements to fill in for
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

others when there is ambiguity, contradiction, or outright opacity.” Any uncer-

tainty in the particulars is made tolerable by our relation to the whole.
Gestalt listening may be the predominant way that listeners’ relate to pop
music, but it is certainly not the only way. At the other end of the attentional
spectrum is what I call acute listening: those sparkling, singular moments of
linguistic concentration that result in heightened awareness of individual
words or phrases in a lyric. These specific lyric moments, be they single

words, entire lines, or even larger passages, are not matters of objective fact;
each listener’s relation to a song is unique, and even distinct with each listen-
ing. However, if enough people’s ears are drawn to the same scrap of lyric, it
can start to show up in the culture as a whole. One can then begin to build a
case for given instances of acute detail that are more generalizable than the
predilections and particular tastes of an individual.
Listen to Pharrell Williams’s Oscar-nominated pop confection “Happy”
and, beyond the joyous feel of the song (the gestalt), what stands out in the
minds of many listeners are these lines from the chorus (the acute): “Clap
along if you feel / Like a room without a roof.” These are the lines that may
even last beyond the pop life of the song itself. People think they are profound
or silly or clever or playful, but they think about them. One listener tweeted
Williams to ask him what the lines meant. “Heya @Pharrell,” she wrote,
“why is a room without a roof happy? #lyricalriddle.” Williams responded:
“Hi Kate. It is metaphorical for one’s space w/out limit.” He might have added
that the power of the line resides both in figurative language and in what
that poetic figure demands of the mind: connecting an abstract concept, hap-
piness, with a concrete if unfamiliar image, a room without a roof. For
Williams, that connection embodies the idea of limitlessness, but the inter-
pretive range of the simile is broad enough to allow other readings as well,
such as the act of opening up something that is traditionally closed, or letting
fresh air into a previously confined space, or the freedom one feels in letting
the sun or the rain touch the skin.
Pharrell’s “room without a roof ” simile’s effectiveness and its wide appeal
rest in the fact that the meaning is not singular. Though its cognitive
complexity might not rise to the level of a riddle, it nonetheless causes one to
puzzle, if fleetingly, for a way of connecting the parts. In a song that is not
primarily grounded in its lyrics, this object of acute listening attention gener-
ates a small moment of startling imagistic beauty. The song concentrates its
themes of defining and owning happiness in this single simile. It isn’t that
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

one doesn’t hear or even know the other lyrics; they just somehow recede into
the gestalt. We’re left both with an overarching feeling and with a couple of
acute images from the song to attach to that feeling.
Lines like these from “Happy” are the lyric equivalent of what scientists
call involuntary musical images and most of us just call earworms. Whereas
an earworm is generally understood as a catchy tune that runs continually
through the mind, with the emphasis on the infectious melody, the moments
I describe here are primarily based in language, with the melody as the

vehicle for delivery. Undoubtedly, there will be instances where the two types
meet somewhere near the middle, where the melody and language both cap-
ture attention. It is also worth isolating those lyric moments in which the
emphasis bends toward language rather than melody for acute recognition.
Pop’s most memorable words may derive their staying power from their
meaning, from their performance, or from other factors both internal and
external to the song. There is, for instance, the category of indelible opening
lines. Take this example: “Just a small town girl. . . .” For listeners of a cer-
tain generation, a particular taste, or both, this will automatically set off a
near-eidetic recreation of Journey’s “ Don’t Stop Believing,” sung in the mind’s
evocation of Steve Perry’s plangent voice. The words themselves are unre-
markable, except inasmuch as they commence the narrative. The timbre and
emotive quality of Perry’s delivery—impassioned, even theatrical—make
this line memorable. Perry wrings poignancy from prosaic words, the emo-
tion propelled by a melody and piano figure that create a mood of nostalgia
and longing. Even if you haven’t heard the song in years, your mind will
likely set the song to playing with that single line.
Another category that calls attention to specific lyrics is the play of poetic
figures and forms. In its simplest manifestation, this may take the shape of
sound play; in more rarified forms, it becomes simile, metaphor, or other figu-
rative constructs. Play with sound abounds across genres, in the form of ad
libs or in lyric substitutions where sounds take the place of semantics. A sur-
prising number of these substitutions arise in songs about love, partly because
most pop songs are about love, and also because the experience of being in love
often defies expression. Whether it is 1960s soul grooves like the Delfonics’
“(La-La) Means I Love You” or contemporary pop tunes like Lady Gaga’s “Bad
Romance,” love often drives singers and songwriters to abstraction.
Minnie Riperton’s “Loving You” raises this kind of lyric substitution to
an art form; the most evocative lines in the song are the ones that transcend
words and edge into the upper registers of the human voice, toward squeals
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

and ecstatic sighs. Here’s how one online lyric site attempts to transcribe
the song’s closing lines:

Lovin-ughhhhh. la-la-la-la-la-la-la.
And doot-doot.dootin.doot-do.
b.doom.doom.doom.
mya.mya.mya.mya.mya.mya.mya.
la.la.la.b.doom.b.doomb.doom

Good luck giving voice to that. This song, and this section of the song spe-
cifically, has endured because it resides somewhere beyond words, express-
ing the ecstatic confusion of being in love.
This kind of play with sounds is only the most obvious example of the ways
that pop songwriters and performers use poetic strategies to activate the au-
dience’s acute listening. Among the varieties of figurative language in pop
music, the simile predominates. It may be most obvious in rap, which makes
it a staple of its poetics, though it thrives across the pop-music spectrum.
Entire songs sometimes function as experiments in figurative language, as
in the song “Black Swan” from Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke’s solo album,
The Eraser (2006). From metaphor (“I’m your black swan, black swan”) to
simile (“ People get crushed like biscuit crumbs”), lyric derives its force and
energy from the transitive quality of juxtaposition and identity. Yorke’s sim-
ile comes across with a swagger more naturally associated with hip-hop, an
attitude underscored by the spare drum accompaniment and Yorke’s vocal
syncopation. This lyric invites close inspection even as it allows listening to
the song in the gestalt as groove and as mood.
Sometimes songs dissuade acute lyric attention by making the words diffi-
cult to discern. Even nearly incoherent lyrics, though, like those on My Bloody
Valentine’s “Only Shallow” or almost every song on Radiohead’s Kid A, tend to
clear up a bit in the chorus. On Pearl Jam’s “Yellow Ledbetter,” for instance,
Eddie Vedder’s famous warble goes from incomprehensible in the verses to
barely interpretable in the chorus. Pearl Jam’s most commercially successful
tracks, like “Alive” and “Even Flow,” are clearer still, offering listeners a
strong chorus where they can sing along and attach words to abstract feelings.
Many pop songs invite such sing-along, some mainly in the chorus, others
throughout. At a Jimmy Buffett concert, you’re more likely to spend the night
hearing an old white guy in a Hawaiian shirt singing in the crowd next to you
than hearing an old white guy in a Hawaiian shirt singing to you from the
stage. By contrast, most of Vedder’s songs play like invitations to shut up and
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

listen, with occasional concessions in the chorus to the audience’s unmet

desire to join in the song. The gestalt and the acute are both part of the plea-
sure of the song, both necessary to the practice of close listening.
The best place in song to explore the confluence of the acute and gestalt, the
semantic and the sensory, is the hook. “Hook” is a mutable term in popular
music, commonly used and variously applied. In its narrowest definition, a
hook is a repeated portion of lyric often imbedded in the chorus and frequently
containing the song’s title. “The hook brings you back / On that you can rely,”

John Popper sings on Blues Traveler’s 1994 single “Hook,” a song that lam-
poons pop music’s formulaic structure even as it exploits that structure to
climb up the Billboard charts (the song peaked at number 23 on the Hot 100
chart). The opening lines of the first verse set the tone: “It doesn’t matter
what I say / So long as I sing with inflection.” As it turns out, the phrase “the
hook brings you back” is in fact the song’s hook, repeated six times, twice in
each of the three turns of the chorus. The line is catchy, both melodically
compelling and ironically self-knowing. The song was a hit because it cap-
tured two distinct audiences: those upon whom the hook worked its practical
magic, and those amused by the lyrics’ ironic critique of pop’s formulas.
A functional understanding of the term “hook” allows for its various ap-
plications in the parlance of songwriters, producers, and performers of popu-
lar music today. In this broad definition, a hook is one or more catchy passages
in a song, be they lyric, melodic, or harmonic. “The hook can be the track it-
self,” says Ryan Tedder, the songwriter, producer, and frontman for the pop
group OneRepublic. He points to Coldplay’s “Clocks,” where the opening pi-
ano figure functions as the sonically sticky element of the song, the part that
excites listener anticipation. The hook might be a portion of the chorus or the
title of the song; it might equally be a guitar riff, a seductive sample, a stutter,
or a scream. Rather than restricting the hook to a prescribed portion of the
song, it is best to understand it as a quality defined retrospectively. A hook
is that which asserts itself on the listener’s consciousness, inviting antici-
pation and providing pleasure with each return.
Hooks in this expansive sense of the word dominate contemporary popu-
lar music. This isn’t to say, however, that today’s singers and songwriters
invented the hook-heavy single. Writing of the Eurythmics’ 1983 Billboard
number one “Sweet Dreams,” Dave Stewart, the instrumental half of the duo
beside the vocalist Annie Lennox, remarked that they consciously composed
the song to blur the lines between verse and chorus. “ There is not one note
that is not a hook,” Stewart boasts. In his 2015 exploration of the business
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

of pop-song craft, The Song Machine, the journalist John Seabrook identi-
fies what he calls the “track-and-hook” method of pop-song production. “In a
track-and-hook song,” he writes, “the hook comes as soon as possible. Then
the song ‘vamps’—progresses in three- or four-chord patterns with little or
no variation. Because it is repetitive, the vamp requires more hooks: intro,
verse, pre-chorus, chorus, and outro hooks. ‘It’s not enough to have one hook
anymore,’ [the producer] Jay Brown explains. ‘ You’ve got to have a hook in
the intro, a hook in the pre, a hook in the chorus, and a hook in the bridge,

too.’ ” Citing Brown, Seabrook argues that successful pop music must pro-
vide a hook at least every seven seconds to account for the fickle nature of
listener attention. What does a song with a hook every seven seconds sound
like? It sounds like Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off.”
“Shake It Off ” was the lead single off of Swift’s fifth album, 2014’s 1989.
It debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, only the twenty-
second single to do so, joining such pop megahits as Michael Jackson’s “You
Are Not Alone,” Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” and Lady Gaga’s “Born
This Way” in that distinction. “Shake It Off ” was nominated for Record of
the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Pop Solo Performance at the fifty-seventh
Grammy Awards. Like other songs on the album, “Shake It Off ” was born
of the creative collaboration between Swift and two Swedes, the superpro-
ducer Max Martin and Martin’s protégé, Shellback.
“Shake It Off ” delivers its first hook before Swift even utters a word, in
the syncopated drum pattern that begins the song. Rather than following
the predictable hook-heavy ploy of commencing with the chorus, as Martin
does on *NSYNC’s “Tearin’ Up My Heart” and as Swift and Martin do on
one of 1989’s other hits, “Bad Blood,” “Shake It Off ” begins more convention-
ally with a verse, which is generally the section of a song lightest on hooks.
For the most part, the verse vamps in the manner that Seabrook predicts in
his “track-and-hook” formula, though even in the verse hooks abound. Sev-
eral distinctive supporting elements stand out as strange and compelling,
working together to call attention to one another. The first of these is the
synthesized horn that lays down a sonic bed for Swift’s vocals; the second is
Swift’s “ad-libbed” (though they must certainly have been composed) endings
to phrases: “That’s what people say, um hum,” she sings, then repeats the
line. The horns drop out for each of the four “um-hums” in the first verse
and subsequently during the four utterances in the second verse, setting
them apart from the rest of the verse’s lines. It’s a small sonic move that calls
attention to the casual phrase and helps define Swift’s attitude of joyful in-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

difference to her detractors. All of this transpires in twenty-three seconds,

before the verse gives way to the hook’s native domain: the chorus.
In a song of hooks, the chorus delivers the biggest hooks of all:

Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play

And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate
Baby, I’m just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
I shake it off, I shake it off

The descending repetition of the end words becomes the song’s signature;
it’s the portion that makes you want to sing along. All that repetition leads
to the crowning repetition of the chorus in a final hook, the line of the title.
Both musically and rhetorically, Swift has constructed this hook to deliver
repetition with a difference. As the pianist and part-time pop-music theo-
rist Chilly Gonzales observes, the phrase ends musically with an instance
of rhythmic displacement. The musical phrase repeats but achieves resolu-
tion by displacing the rhythmic emphasis from the beginning to the end of
the phrase. A parallel process transpires in the language of the lyrics, where
Swift’s voice registers a small but significant shift in stress from the first
part of the phrase to the second. In music and lyric, these shifts bring the
chorus to a pleasing resolution even as they underscore through repetition
the dominant meaning and motif.
“Shake It Off ” repeats the chorus three times, augmenting it with three
pre-chorus sections and a post-chorus section, each with their respective
hooks. Perhaps the most hookish section of the song outside the chorus,
though, comes in the spoken interlude between 2:18 and 2:28. This brief sec-
tion incited a great deal of commentary on social media, most of it centered
on Swift’s concluding phrase, “this sick beat.” That phrase functions as a
hook all its own. Recognizing as much, Swift’s team actually applied for a
trademark on it. Vocally, Swift slyly moves from speaking to chanting in the
bridge, then back to singing through a melodic outburst that lands back in
the familiar chorus, the hook of all hooks.
The singer-songwriter Ryan Adams’s audacious cover of Swift’s entire
album is instructive in many ways, not least of which in its handling of
“Shake It Off.” Swift’s ballads, like “Blank Space” and “Wildest Dreams,”
are more readily assimilated by Adams’s acoustic sensibility, more respon-
sive to Adams’s implicit theory that if you strip away Swift’s pop veneer you’ll
be left with solid songs. “Shake It Off ” presents something of a problem for
this approach. So much of what makes “Shake It Off ” appealing is its artifice,
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

the play of its surface rather than the deep structures of the song. Stripped
down by Adams, “Shake It Off ” simmers but never boils. The “haters gonna
hate” section with its joyful repetitions is foreshortened. The line hangs in
silence, leaving the ghost appendage of Swift’s repetition echoing in our mem-
ories. Other hooks are eliminated entirely. In fact, the only hook that remains
from Swift’s original is the repetition of the song’s title in the chorus, which
Adams performs with Springsteen-level world weariness. More than any
other song on the album, “Shake It Off ” resists Adams’s efforts and doggedly

demands its original recorded form, with its profusion of pop hooks, its sur-
face delights, its sense of fun and play, and even its disposability.
The poetry of pop is finally this: a poetry that relies on form—patterns of
rhythm and rhyme, and figurative language—as a means to transcend form.
Analyzing pop songs means moving from pleasurable but often unreflective
listening, to directed and attentive listening, then back to pleasurable lis-
tening enhanced by the new pleasure of understanding. It means reading
with your ears and listening with your eyes. It is a poetry whose success
lies in getting you to forget that it is poetry at all.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

II
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Rhythm
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Bradley, Adam. The Poetry of Pop, Yale University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fdu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4815350.
Created from fdu-ebooks on 2025-02-09 22:08:59.
R
hythm matters. I’m picking up my two daughters, both under the
age of five, from preschool. I buckle them in, kiss their foreheads,
and supply them with snacks for the five-minute drive to the house.
But when I turn the key in the ignition, the music I forgot to shut
off—Drake’s “Hotline Bling”—blares from the speakers. It could have been
worse. The song before had been Future’s “Fuck Up Some Commas”; the song
before that, Pusha T’s “Crutches, Crosses, Caskets.” The problem is that the
girls, particularly my four-year-old, love the few seconds of the song that
they hear. After I shut off the stereo, my older daughter begins belting out the
only lyrics she understood, the first line of the chorus—“You used to call me
on my cellphone!”—and doesn’t stop singing it until we pull up to the house.
Now “Hotline Bling,” aka “The Cellphone Song,” is on their request list,
right beside “Let It Go” and “The Wheels on the Bus.” Out of desperation I
discover Kidz Bop, the successful series of cover-song compilation albums
with kids singing sanitized versions of pop music’s latest hits. I play them
Kidz Bop’s “Hotline Bling” and both girls seem satisfied. My ear, though,
can’t help fixating on the small emendations made in childproofing the
lyr ics. “You used to call me on my cellphone / Late night when you need my
love” becomes “You used to call me on my cellphone / Anytime you need to
talk.” It’s a serviceable substitution, erasing all implications of after-midnight
assignations. Like the original, the new line is seven syllables long. None-
theless, something’s wrong with the rhythm. In Drake’s per formance, the
line rests on a series of stressed syllables—“need my love”—that emphasizes
a sense of longing. That same stress on “need to talk” seems out of place.
Even more disruptive is Kidz Bop’s substitution of the multisyllabic word
“anytime” for Drake’s balanced phrase “late night when.” Both are three
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

syllables long, but pronouncing “anytime” requires crowding the syllables

together, whereas Drake’s three separate words luxuriate in their collective
sound.
It’s a subtle disruption, and a small price to pay for getting my girls the
song they want in a manner that my wife and I can allow. It’s also an impor-
tant reminder that no single analytical tool can account for the many rhythms
at work in a pop song. Merely counting syllables and stresses, Drake’s line
and Kidz Bop’s line are interchangeable. Close listening to the actual record-

ings, however, underscores their differences. A full accounting of the complex

rhythms in the poetry of pop demands attention not simply to the stressed
and unstressed syllables, but to the microrhythms that define the texture of
the sound.
Rhythm is the sequence of sounds over time. Before song lyrics are any-
thing like poetry, they exist as sequenced sounds. “If you don’t have the sound
right,” Paul Simon observes, “it doesn’t matter if you have the words right,
because the ear isn’t available to hear them.” The sounds of lyrics express
themselves most apparently as rhythmic pulse— a binary code of stressed
and unstressed syllables set to music that itself is a binary code of stressed
and unstressed sounds. Stripped to its essence, pop music is the dance of
the rhythmic pulse of the lyric over and against the rhythmic pulse of the
music. Jimi Hendrix put it more succinctly: Music is “nothing but rhythm
and motion.”
Three distinct rhythms and motions govern pop songs: the rhythm of the
music, the rhythm of the lyric language, and the rhythm of the singer’s per-
formance of that language to the music. Rhythm, therefore, is the lingua
franca of music, poetry, and performance in song. These three elements, dis-
tinct but interrelated, come together in dynamic tension to achieve a single
emotive effect in the listener. One can study each element in isolation, but
the full meaning of a recording’s rhythm lies in the space that they inhabit
together.
Most of us are comfortable with the concept of rhythm in music, even if
we lack the formal training to explain how it works. What is a song’s time
signature? What kinds of rhythmic and polyrhythmic textures are developed
in the instrumental performance? Not everyone can answer these questions,
but just about everyone can tap their toe or bob their head to a beat. “ Music
is a foreign language which everyone knows but only musicians can speak,”
explains Stephen Sondheim. “The effect is describable in everyday language;
how to achieve it is not.” The rhythm of a song expresses itself in the
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

quantifiable—the meter of the composition— and in the ineffable— each in-

strumental performer’s distinctive interpretation of the music’s meter and
the interplay of rhythmic impulses and instrumental voices across a given
track. “The control and perception of form in any music involves recognition
of two basic musical activities— repetition (or similarity) and change (or
contrast)—plus an activity that combines these two. This latter activity is
referred to as ‘development’ and provides contrast within similarity,” ob-
serves Jack Perricone, professor of songwriting at Berklee School of Music.

As repetition with a difference, the rhythm of a musical composition defines

the territory in which lyrics traverse the space of sound.
The second measure of rhythm, the rhythm of the lyrics, is governed by
the laws of poetic meter. How many stressed syllables appear in the lyric
line? Do the stressed and unstressed syllables coalesce into any discernible
metrical patterns? For all its chaos and cacophony, Nirvana’s “Smells Like
Teen Spirit” settles comfortably into iambic tetrameter in the language of
the lyrics: “Our lit/tle group / has al/ways been // And al/ways will / until / the
end.” Kurt Cobain singing these lines deranges this strict formal structure,
but the rhythmic regularity of the syllables still counterbalances the defi-
ant indeterminacy of the lines’ meaning. Lewis Turco observes in his Book
of Forms that the terminology used when scanning accentual syllabic lines
of poetry in English borrows from ancient Greek, whose poetry was, by
contrast, quantitative—“(that is, like musical notes, syllables were assigned
‘lengths’— full note, half note, quarter note, etc.)” rather than differing
in volume or stress, as in English prosody. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” offers a
wonderful confluence in the language of the lyric imbedded in song between
accentual syllabic stress and quantitative duration of emphasis.
Song lyrics are words under pressure, compressed in a space that the music
defines. “They are reinforced, accented, blurred, belied, inspired to new mean-
ing, in a continual interplay,” writes the literary critic Mark W. Booth. The
rhythm of the music situates the rhythm of the lyric. It defines optimal expres-
sion: Words will fit best here, at this tempo, in this rhythmic pattern, even to
this specific melody. Melody, after all, is just pitch set to rhythm. The rhythm
of the music and the rhythm of the lyrics often line up. In rap, for instance, we
generally find lyric lines of four stressed syllables for every 4/4 musical bar.
However, words are never completely governable. Though they fall under
the sway of the song, they push and pull and sometimes break free. When that
happens the rhythms of music and of language clash, through carelessness
or conscious design.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

The final measure of rhythm in pop music is the rhythm of the perform-
ing voice, which relates to both the rhythms of the music and those of the
lyrics. In fact, it is often the bridge between the two, reconciling the rhythms
of music and lyric in a single performance. This performative rhythm, though
bound by the rhythmic possibilities that the music and the lyrics allow, is
otherwise free to express itself in accordance with the distinctive rhythmic
sensibility of the singer. The performative rhythm might cleave closely to the
imbedded rhythms in the lyrics by obeying the laws of poetic meter; it might

abide by the prescribed rhythms of the music by staying in the pocket of the
beat. More often than not, though, the performative rhythm expresses a dis-
tinct sense of time that reflects the style and sensibilities of the performer.
For all their differences, Frank Sinatra, Willie Nelson, Ray Charles, and
Aretha Franklin all tend to dilate and contract the lyric phrase when they
sing. The way they syncopate and swing, playing on and off the beat, charges
every song they sing with reckless brilliance. One always fears that they will
take it too far, breaking rather than merely bending the rhythmic integrity
of the song. It is a testament to their craft that they rarely do so.
The interplay and tension of these three rhythms account for a great deal
of what makes pop music appealing to hear and compelling to analyze. On
a November 2015 episode of Switched On Pop, the podcast in which the craft
of songwriting meets the science of musicology, one of the hosts, Charlie
Harding, led a guest, the comedian Chris Duffy, through a game called Name
That Song, Name What’s Wrong. Harding read a few lines of lyr ics and
played a few seconds from the recorded song, then asked Duffy to identify
the song and to point out what was strange about the snippet. Harding
started with the beginning of Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood,” the Grammy-
nominated fourth single from her 2014 album, 1989:

Did you have to do this?

I was thinkin that you could be trusted
Did you have to ruin
What was shiny? Now it’s all rusted

Duffy correctly guessed that it was Swift singing, but whiffed on the
song’s title. He also could not discern what Harding thought was wrong, even
after Harding read the lyrics to him again in a robotic voice. “The em-pha-
sis is on the wrong syl-lab-ble,” Harding quipped. “The rhythm is completely
wrong!” Swift’s diction in “Bad Blood” is undeniably strange— stylized and
clipped. Something unusual is going on in the song’s prosody, the way that
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

the words imbed themselves in the music. It strikes the ear as artificial, if
not exactly robotic.
Surely this isn’t the product of poor song craft, though—not from an art-
ist as polished as Swift. Why, then, would Swift and her production team
seek out such strangeness? Answering this is a job for the poetics of pop.
Beginning with a simple syllable count, the song’s two verses establish
an alternating pattern of a short line of six syllables followed by a long line
of nine or ten syllables. The same pattern holds for the number of stressed

syllables per line, which alternates between two stresses in the short lines
and three in the long:

Did you have to do this? 6/2

I was thinkin’ that you could be trusted10/3
Did you have to ruin 6/2
What was shiny? Now it’s all rusted 9/3

Even before listening to the recording, one can already glean from the lyr-
ics that the performance will have a herky-jerky rhythm to it. The lyric
language all but guarantees it. With more empty sonic space—more “air”—
around the words in the shorter lines, we experience the longer lines as a
kind of release, a flood of language that gets dammed up by the short line
that soon follows, only to be released again when the long line returns.
This pattern of short line then long line becomes the dominant order of
the verses, supplanting natural syntactic order. In lines three and four, for
instance, retaining the short-long pattern means sharply enjambing the
third line, cutting Swift’s question (Did you have to ruin what was shiny?)
in half and rendering it less clear. Rhythmic logic has replaced semantic
logic here. An even more dramatic instance of the obscuring influence of the
song’s rhythmic imperative comes in the next two lines: “Did you have to hit
me / Where I’m weak? Baby, I couldn’t breathe and. . . .” Here the line break,
which Swift registers in her performance through an extended pause, momen-
tarily leads the listener to believe that the syntactical unit has closed, that
Swift is asking a troubling question about physical abuse (Did you have to hit
me?) rather than employing a metaphor of violence to underscore an emo-
tional violation (Did you have to hit me where I’m weak?). The patterned
rhythm of the lines and the rhythm of Swift’s performance conspire here to
leave both questions resonating in listeners’ minds. If Swift had sung her
lyric question in a continuous, flowing phrase it would have registered as
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

a pallid cliché rather than as the unsettling query it is by virtue of its stud-
iedly stilted delivery.
Scanning the lyr ics again while the song plays, it becomes clear that
Swift’s performance further exaggerates the syllabic and stress differences
imbedded in the language itself. Here is my scan of the lyrics, followed by a
scan of how I hear the stresses falling in Swift’s performance:

Did you have to do this? 6/2

I was thinkin that you could be trusted 10/3

Did you have to ruin 6/2

What was shiny? Now it’s all rusted 9/3

Did you have to do this? 6/3

I was thinkin that you could be trusted10/4
Did you have to ruin 6/3
What was shiny? Now it’s all rusted 9/4

The striking difference between the rhythm of the lines as poetry and the
rhythm of the lines as Swift sings them rests in the way that she stresses
naturally unstressed syllables. Each line has one more stressed syllable when
Swift sings it than it does when read on the page. Not only does she augment
the stress in the lines, she also relocates it. She begins the first line, for
instance, by according almost equal stress to the first two words (“did” and
“you”), whereas neither word gets heavy stress in the language of the lyrics.
In line two, Swift displaces the natu ral stresses and instead emphasizes
the pronouns (“I” and “you”), a fitting move in a song about betrayal and
recrimination.
The liberty Swift takes with the inherent syllabic emphasis of the lyrics
gains authority through her singing’s rhythmic relation to the music. Her
vocal performance, particularly in the short lines, plays on and off the rhythm
of the track. On the first and the third lines, she places emphatic stress on
the opening word, falling on the downbeat, then she locates the remaining
stresses in rhythmic counterpoint on unexpected beats in the measure.
Swift’s combination of stressing syllables that the natu ral flow of syntax
leaves unstressed and placing those same stresses in counterpoint to the
rhythm of the track accounts for what some listeners hear as her robotic tone.
It also accounts for the unsettling energy that helped make the song a hit.
Reading rhythm in popular music is never just one thing. When multiple
musicians assert their rhythmic sensibilities, whether inside or outside the
confines of the song’s demands, anything is possible. At their best, rhythm
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

and motion cohere with purpose and direction. “Just like the rising and fall-
ing of a poem, the music also travels, and you have to feel it,” Gregg Allman
writes of playing in a group. “It’s like traveling on a train, rolling through
the hills. It’s a journey with your partners, and they’re all going with you,
and some of them make the same turns, and a couple may go a different
route, but they all meet you on the other side. I know that’s a strange way of
describing how the arrangement to a composition works, but it’s like a mu-
sical journey.”

Rhythm is fundamental to pop music, both in obvious ways like the prom-
inence of percussion and in subtle ways like the cadence of the lyric line as
expressed in the singer’s delivery. Each pop song constitutes its own rhyth-
mic network, a series of relationships in constant flux. Given that the focus
of this book is on song lyrics, of particular interest is how the small rhythms
of language relate to the big rhythms of the music and of the singing. How
much of the rhythmic information native to the words and their specific
order finds expression in the song as performed? Does the performance of the
song follow the natural rhythmic inclinations imbedded in the written lyric,
or does the performance transform them, push against them, subvert them?

RHYTHM DEFINED

Pop is synonymous with rhythm, which is to say it is synonymous with rep-

etition. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “rhythm” as “relating to a
regular repeated pattern of sound or movement.” Rhythm, therefore, is or-
ganized, predictable, and replicable. In pop, this can mean anything from
a hip-hop break beat to a rock and roll backbeat. Rhythm expresses itself
in sound and in movement, although the term “movement” alone might be
enough to describe it given that sound itself is the product of movement (the
vibration of vocal cords or strings) and sensed through movement (the dis-
placement of air and the vibration of cochlea in the ear).
Rhythm is also a primary quality of language. The OED further codifies
rhythm as “the measured flow of words or phrases in prose, speech, etc.” A
specific form of this is prosody in verse, the metrical divisions of stressed
and unstressed syllables that comprise syllabic feet. Rhythm has a parallel
meaning in music, as the OED defines it: “the systematic grouping of musi-
cal sounds, principally according to duration and periodical stress; beat; an
instance of this, a particular grouping or arrangement of musical sounds.”
Rhythm is found in nature and even in human physiology; as the dictionary
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

observes, rhythm can refer to “the recurrence at (normally) regular inter-

vals of the heartbeat, breathing, or other physiological process; periodicity.”
In poetry and music, rhythm takes the form of art. “The word has re-
tained throughout its history an aesthetic aspect, suggesting a movement
or spatial arrangement that exhibits some degree of regularity without be-
ing mechanical,” explains the literary scholar Derek Attridge in The Prince-
ton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. He goes on to describe rhythm’s
defining features, which include regularity (that is, delivered at expected in-

tervals), repetition (of the same stimuli), variation (which enhances rhythm’s
enjoyment by staving off monotony), hierarchy (the privileging of some beats
over others in gradations of emphasis), and grouping (or the organization of
those hierarchal sequences into relational units). Writing in The Harvard
Dictionary of Music, the musicologist Harold S. Powers amplifies many of
these literary qualities in defining rhythm for music. Put simply, rhythm is
“the pattern of movement in time.” Most Western music, like most Western
poetry, follows an accentual rather than a durational rhythm. In 4/4 time, the
heaviest emphasis is on the first beat, with secondary emphasis on the third.
Similarly, in English prosody a dactyl places the heaviest emphasis on the
first syllable of a three-syllable sequence. Instead of counting rhythmic units
like a Japanese haiku (a poem of seventeen syllables, grouped 5-7-5) or an
Indian raga (a melody comprising a fixed number of notes, usually five to
nine), pop songs express themselves— both in lyric and in music—as an
arrangement of varying weights of rhythmic emphasis.
Rhythm’s form is one thing. It must also have a function. The neuroscien-
tist Daniel J. Levitin posits that the rhythm of group song served a practi-
cal purpose of social cohesion and protection among our early human
ancestors. “Rhythm in music provides the input to the human perceptual
system that allows for the prediction and synchronization of different indi-
viduals’ behaviors,” Levitin writes. “Sound has advantages over vision—it
transmits in the dark, travels around corners, can reach people who are
visually obscured by trees or caves. Music, as a highly structured form of
sound communication, enabled the synchronization of movement even when
group members couldn’t see each other.” In 1964 the R&B singer Major Lance
scored a minor hit with an ebullient song called “Rhythm” whose lyrics il-
lustrate Levitin’s ideal:

What’s that sound? (That rhythm)

Everybody around (Likes rhythm)
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

There can be no beat (Without rhythm)

Makes me wanna move my feet (That rhythm)

Rhythm abounds in these lines and in this recording: in the call-and-

response between Lance and his backup singers; in the repetition of the
word “rhythm” at the end of each line; in the laid-back, layered groove. All
these rhythms underscore the elemental force and the communal connection
rhythm conjures, and they all emphasize structured repetition, a pattern of
rising and falling. Rhythm is sonic, social, ordered, and bodily.

In pop music, repetition asserts itself most apparently in the rhythmic

backdrop of the music known as the groove, established through some com-
bination of drums, bass, keyboards, rhythm guitar, and background vocals.
“The rhythm section sets the groove, the steady repetitive accompaniment
against which the singer(s) and any soloists may have much more varied
rhythms,” writes the musicologist Walter Everett. “The drummer pretty much
controls the pocket, the repetitive pattern basic to the groove.”
Alex James, the bassist for the English rock band Blur, recalls one par-
ticular groove from their first album. On “I Know,” James looped a two-bar
bass line and repeated it throughout the entire recording, creating a pro-
pulsive groove that defines the sonic feel of the track. “The fundamental unit
of groove is the riff,” he writes. “If the riff is good, the groove is good. A
groove is usually the same riff played again and again with subtle varia-
tions. With a looped groove, you’re actually hearing exactly the same thing
over and over. The bass player jams along with the drums and a small sec-
tion of the performance, usually eight beats long, is cut and pasted together
to make the bassline for the whole track.” James’s bass groove dominates “I
Know,” demanding a near-reflexive physical response from a listener. It’s a
minute in before you hear a human voice— and that’s just fine.
The regularity of the groove liberates solo instruments and voices to
explore a greater range of rhythmic textures. These two rhythmic impulses,
the (relatively) fixed and the (relatively) free, are mutually sustaining. “ There
is something very earcatching about the same thing repeating, a hypnotic
perfection. Eight beats is quite a small amount of time, but it is actually long
enough to change the course of popular history, if you get it exactly right,”
James continues. “Making good loops is no easier than playing well through
the whole song. In fact, it puts even more emphasis on the ‘feel.’ ‘Feel’ is the
subtle quality that separates the great players from the ordinary ones. It’s
largely innate, like a person’s way of walking or talking. A hundred differ-
ent guitarists will all play the same riff in exactly one hundred slightly dif-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

ferent ways. The subtle pushing and pulling at the rhythm, the exact length
of the notes and how hard the strings are hit and bent, mean that no riff is
ever quite the same in different hands. Things played with clinical accuracy
often sound quite lifeless and mechanical. If it feels good, it is good.” At its
most transcendent, the groove fashions a syncopated space of dance and rev-
erie. Or, as Prince once slyly observed, “ There’s joy in repetition.”
Propulsive rhythms are a soundtrack for active listening, accompanying
everything from dancing to driving to exercising to having sex. Whether in

hip-hop or in electronic music, rhythm carries associations of a Dionysian

departure from the conventions of polite culture. “In song and in dance man
expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how
to walk and speak and is on the way toward flying into the air, dancing,”
writes Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. “His very gestures
express enchantment.” Whether at an early-morning revel in Ibiza or a sub-
urban spin class, rhythm can conjure a trancelike state among listeners.
Rhythm has the capacity beyond any other quality of music to hold listeners
under its sway.
Rhythm can also alienate. Rhythm’s perceived overabundance in pop is
the very thing that makes the music objectionable to some tastes. To the ears
of pop music’s detractors what has always been missing, no matter the era
or the style, is proper attention to music in full, beyond the beat alone. A
thumbnail history of the last century of popular music must sound some-
thing like this to the ears of those who reject a primacy of rhythm— a pri-
macy, in particular, of rhythmic syncopation, whose displacement of rhythmic
expectation has fomented sonic revolutions. First there was jazz, with its li-
centious, primal cadences. Then there was rhythm and blues and rock and
roll, which held melody in thrall to the driving rhythms of drum, bass, pi-
ano, and rhythm guitar. After that came disco, whose 4/4 beat turned all who
heard it into dancing, drug-addled automatons. Then came hip-hop, a music
so rhythm-obsessed that some wondered if it qualified as music at all. To
bring the story up to the present, electronic dance music (EDM), which draws
liberally from a panoply of pop sources, especially disco and hip-hop, may
have fi nally apotheosized the beat. Where critics once feared the rhythm-
crazed flappers of the Jazz Age or the dancing queens and kings of disco,
they now denounce another generation for bobbing their heads and waiting
for the beat to drop.
Of course, this is only part of the story. Each of these musical styles has
always been more textured and varied than critics would admit. However,
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

this caricature underscores a fundamental sonic truth. Pop music has trea-
sured rhythm as a defining element of its form. The reasons for this are
many, though certain themes endure.
Rhythm begins in our bodies. Humans are among the few creatures on
the planet born with rhythm. As I’ve been writing this book, I’ve been playing
a lot of music for my two young daughters. I’ve seen my two-year-old spin
herself dizzy to Fred Astaire’s jaunty 1952 rendition of Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’
On the Ritz.” My four-year-old has stared transfixed at a video of Beyoncé’s

choreographed dance moves to her 2008 hit “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)”
before getting down on the floor to try them herself. “The rhythmic properties
of language and music may well be unique to humans: informal observations
suggest that no other primate can easily be trained to move to an auditory
beat, as in marching, dancing, tapping the feet, or clapping the hands,”
writes the experimental psychologist Steven Pinker. This process, called un-
conscious entrainment, helps to set the brain’s metronome. “Rhythm turns
listeners into participants, makes listening active and motoric, and syn-
chronizes the brains and minds (and, since emotion is always intertwined
with music, the ‘hearts’) of all who participate,” writes the neurologist Oliver
Sacks. With all due respect to these esteemed researchers, my daughters are
the only proof I need that the physical urge to respond to musical rhythms is
born in us.
Pop music inspires what the sociomusicologist Charles Keil terms “kines-
thetic listening.” In other words, pop music, or almost any form of music, acti-
vates a physical response; audiences feel “the melody in their muscles.” When
we listen, we are inspired to embody the performance as if we were in fact
making the sounds. “Across repeated listenings,” explains the literary critic
Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, “the particular sonic and temporal trajectory
of the piece grips and regrips motor circuitry, solidifying a kind of motor rou-
tine that makes the music increasingly feel like a familiar way of moving,
rather than merely a familiar series of sounds. The more this happens, the
more the music seems to dissolve boundaries, occupy your subjectivity, and
connect your inner sensibilities with the outer world: important parts of the
pleasure of repeated listening.” Repeated sounds, such as beats, over repeated
listenings begin to manifest themselves in our ner vous system, inciting
responses that we only partly control. “The reason why rhythm is particularly
significant for popular music,” writes Simon Frith, “is that a steady tempo
and an interesting patterned beat offer the easiest ways into a musical event;
they enable listeners without instrumental expertise to respond ‘actively,’ to
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

experience music as a bodily as well as a mental matter.”

Beyond the biological connection, rhythm carries culturally coded mean-
ings specific to communities of the music’s origin. In the United States,
rhythm-dominated genres—from jazz and R&B to salsa and hip-hop—have
been most closely associated with black and Latino performers and, at least
at first, with black and Latino audiences. A surfeit of rhythm caused suspi-
cion among listeners who assumed the song must have something to hide. A

glance at the rhetoric of music censorship in the United States reveals a sur-
prising antipathy toward rhythm- and dance-oriented music. Critics associ-
ated such music with corruption and even madness. “Jazz was originally the
accompaniment of the voodoo dance, stimulating half-crazed barbarians to
the vilest of deeds,” asserted Ann Shaw Faulkner, president of the General
Federation of Women’s Clubs, which launched its attack against the moral
ravages of jazz in 1921. The steady beat of the tom-tom in 1920s jazz music
would become the backbeat of early rock and roll, the 120 beats per minute
of disco, and finally the boom-bap of rap and blips and pulses of EDM. The
beat meant sex and drugs and excess. It meant the loss of control and, per-
haps, a kind of revolution. Of rap, William Bennett of Empower America of-
fered the following fatalistic claim: “I think that nothing less is at stake
than preservation of civilization. This stuff by itself won’t bring down civi-
lization but it doesn’t help.”
In the antebellum South, the drum was indeed an instrument of insur-
rection, if not one of physical liberation then at least a liberation of the mind.
Recognizing this, the South Carolina Slave Code of 1740 banned “using and
keeping of drums, horns, or other loud instruments, which may call together
or give sign or notice to one another of their wicked designs and purposes.”
The talking drums offered a way for enslaved Africans to communicate
across distance in coded cadence. That code would fit itself to language
through work songs and spirituals that drew on Old Testament stories of
the Israelites’ deliverance from bondage to map salvific potential onto soul-
crushing everyday realities. Fast forward to the middle of the twentieth
century, and the sly calypso rhythms of Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat
Song (Day-O)” made dancers move even as it helped make a movement as
an anthem for civil rights activists. Even today, pop music, particularly the
rhythm-rich music that inspires dance, elicits wariness and skepticism from
some, often for nothing more than an unspecified sense of threat communi-
cated through the beats. For others, though, rhythm is life.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Unpacking the complex interrelatedness of rhythms in pop songs means

coming to terms with the dynamics among the three rhythmic forces at
play in most recordings: musical rhythm (the rhythmic identities of the
instrumentation), poetic rhythm (the patterns of stress in the language of
the lyr ics as identified through the process of scansion), and performative
rhythm (the idiosyncratic way that a singer interprets a lyric in a given
performance).

MUSICAL RHYTHM

When musicians talk about rhythm, it sometimes sounds as if they’re talk-

ing about poetry. “Rhythmic content means how you accent, where your
accents are, and how they fit in with dif ferent types of rhythm,” the jazz
trumpet great Dizzy Gillespie explained to the Paris Review in 1965. “You
can’t notate it for them; they have to be able to hear it. You can come close,
but you can’t really write jazz.” Though speaking of jazz, Gillespie illumi-
nates an essential distinction of category for both music and poetry: the
difference between rhythm and meter.
Meter is what you can notate. Meter is the syntax of musical rhythm anal-
ogous to the syntax of language. Indeed, music, language, and dance are all
connected in the brain as common modes of communication. Meter is the
stuff of sheet music, of quarter notes and sixteenth notes. It is the metro-
nome and the time signature. It is, in other words, the ideal. Rhythm, by
contrast, is the real. It is human breath, its flaws and frailty beside its in-
spiration and invention. Gillespie understood this as “rhythmic content,” the
conscious assertion of an individual rhythmic sense atop a given metrical
pattern. The result for the studied ear is a palimpsest, where the stylized
rhythm of the performer, who chooses what and when to accent, shares space
with the prescribed meter of the composition.
The most danceable songs find a balance between the reassuring and the
surprising. A great example of this is Pharrell Williams’s “Happy.” “The song
is layered with predictable beats and complex, syncopated ones,” argues the
neuroscientist Maria Witek, principal author of a 2014 study on what makes
a song danceable. “The drums, the piano, the clapping and even Pharrell’s
voice create inviting gaps.” Out of the interplay of predictability and nov-
elty, of structures and gaps, is born syncopation— stress where one would
expect rest, and rest where one would expect stress. A talented singer, like
a talented percussionist, knows when to rush forward and when to lay back.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

“Knowing when not to play is in some ways more important than actually
playing,” the percussionist Sheila E. observes. The same could be said for
singing. Out of this manipulation of time style is born. But none of that ex-
ists without the foundation of meter.
“One can’t have rhythm without meter,” explains Walter Everett. “Meter
is the imaginary background grid of regularly recurring pulses against
which performed rhythmic patterns are heard and interpreted. Meter pro-

vides a constant flow of inaudible beats, some of which (or some parts of
which) are manifested in the actual rhythms of a song, and some of which
pass silently by. In many songs, the drums simply beat out the meter, mark-
ing every beat uniformly on the snare for a hard-driving effect; this is true
in the Rolling Stones’ ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.’ ” With Charlie Watts
banging out beat for beat, Bill Wyman’s bass line dancing around Watts’s
pattern, and Jack Nitzsche creating rhythmic counterpoint on the tambou-
rine, the song fashions a fertile field for Mick Jagger’s alternately smooth
and jerky vocal delivery. Whether the performers outline or elide meter, its
presence is defining. “Rhythms often align with meter, or they can synco-
pate against it by emphasizing normally weak beats (or their parts), thus
creating the great off-balance, propulsive tension typical of rock music,” con-
tinues Everett. This rhythmic arrangement was unusual for the Stones;
Watts usually followed Keith Richards’s guitar, and Wyman typically hit his
notes slightly behind the drumbeat. Richards would also often use acoustic
guitar as an additional percussive instrument, but in “Satisfaction,” that
acoustic rhythm is mixed so low that it becomes nearly indecipherable from
the cymbals and tambourine.
In poetry, meter serves an analogous function. Skilled poets syncopate
over and against the rhythmic patterns they invoke. Meter is the ideal
against which metrical poets assert their rhythmic sensibilities. William
Shakespeare wrote his sonnets predominantly in iambic pentameter, which
is to say that most of his sonnets follow the rhythmic pattern of iambic pen-
tameter except when the language itself resists it, or when he artfully devi-
ates from the form to achieve a desired effect of sound or feeling. Sometimes
he subverts his readers’ rhythmic expectations from the start, as he does in
the opening lines of Sonnet 130:

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun

Coral is far more red than her lips’ red
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

When scanned, the lines maintain the expected iambic impulse, the up-
swing of the voice, albeit with some striking departures. Most notably, the
second line disrupts the meter by beginning with a trochaic substitution (a
falling rather than a rising inflection): “Coral / is far / more red.” This small
metrical inversion alters the music of the sonnet, drawing the eye to the

idea at the center of the lyric: that these conventional comparisons of beauty
are a poor fit to describe the object of the speaker’s affections, just as the
poetic line itself bridles against the beauty of iambic conformity. Rhythm
here is an engine of both sound and meaning. This is the same sensibility—
the art of rhythm rather than the science of meter—that Gillespie under-
stood. In both music and poetry, the distance between rhythm and meter
often holds the mystery of emotion and meaning.
Not surprisingly, both pop songs and poetry have evolved systems of
analysis intended to domesticate rhythm, through notation and critical ter-
minology that help creators and critics to systematize an unruly and myste-
rious force. Musicians notate time from left to right on a staff, with pitch
delineated by a note’s vertical position along the staff and bar lines dividing
the notes on the horizontal plane. The time signature designates tempo.
Poets and literary critics have developed their own notation through scan-
sion, marking stressed and unstressed syllables in lines of poetry that in
metrical verse fall into familiar patterns. Asserting that a given line is
written in dactylic trimeter is nothing more than an approximation, a func-
tional fiction. The true identity of these lines in rhythm, their subtle gra-
dations of stress, their orchestration of breath and articulation, exceed our
capacity to contain them in neat categories. Linguists have developed more
accurate measures that account for finer grains of emphasis (setting out four
or eight or more gradations of stress), but these systems fail to suit the poet
and the critic because their complexity renders them unwieldy for composi-
tion and close reading.
“Of course,” writes the inimitable English wit Stephen Fry in his custom-
ary tone of assuredness, “it is fundamentally daffy to scan lyrics . . . since it
is the musical beat that determines emphasis, not the metrical stress. You
could never guess the very particular emphasis on ‘get no’ just by reading
the lyrics of ‘Satisfaction’ unless you knew the tune and rhythm it was writ-
ten to fit.” Fry is partly correct. Though it is decidedly daffy to imagine that
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

one could resuscitate the idiosyncratic and rich rhythmic textures of the
Stones’ recording from the lyrics alone, it is not daft in the least to identify
rhythmic dynamism in the language by comparing transcription and per-
formance, and by locating instances where the natural impulse of the scanned
poetic line is in tension with the dominant rhythmic impulse of the music.
Below I’ve first scanned the lyric as I would a poem meant for the page,
and next as I hear Mick Jagger singing the lyric on the studio recording of
the song:

I can’t/get no/satis/faction
I can’t/get no/satis/faction
Cause I try/and I try/and I try/and I try
I can’t/get no,/I can’t/get no

I can’t get no-oh satisfaction

I can’t get no-oh satisfaction
Cause I try and I try and I try and I try
I can’t get no, I can’t get no

Scanned as page-based poetry, two lines of trochaic tetrameter (a sequence

of four stressed/unstressed syllabic pairs) precede one line of anapestic te-
trameter (four instances of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed
syllable) and another line of trochaic tetrameter, albeit one that lends a feel
of irresolution through its failure to close the sentence in the same way that
it does in the first two lines. Scanning Jagger’s performance, the most strik-
ing departure is in the way he spaces the first three words from one another,
which lends them almost equal stress. He makes a two-syllable word out of
“no,” which endows it with a rising impulse. The multisyllabic “satisfaction”
remains largely unchanged from its natural state in the language, save for
a small flourish at the end of the word. In his singing of the third line, Jag-
ger gives himself up entirely to the rhythmic impulse of the anapests. The
final line is instructive for the way Jagger charges the same words with a
subtly but significantly different rhythmic pulse, pushing the emphasis to
the middle of the phrase the first time (I can’t get no) and to the front the
next (I can’t get no). Depending on which “get no” Fry means, he may be
right: You can’t imagine the rhythmic energy Jagger gives this last line with-
out hearing the performance. Part of the urgency of Jagger’s tone, in fact,
comes out of his choice to push against the natural metrical inclination of
the language. Equally instructive are the moments in the lyric where Jag-
ger’s performance cleaves to the dictates of poetic meter, emphasizing the
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

ease and elegance of the rhythm.

Comparing the lyrics as scanned apart from their music and the lyr ics
as recorded results in a kind of prosodic syncopation, an imposition of
verbal stress governed by the rhythms of the musical per formance rather
than by the conventions of natural speech. This is the site upon which
close comparative analysis of language on the page and language in perfor-
mance is most richly rewarded. As a reader of song lyr ics, then, we should
make what use we can of these domesticating efforts of meter in poetry

and music while understanding that rhythm really roams wild beyond
their bounds.

POETIC RHYTHM

If we can gauge the meter of the music and the meter of the lyrics, then com-
posing a song would seem to boil down to making sure those meters are in
sync with one another, or at least don’t awkwardly clash. Imagine a musical
composer, a lyricist, and a singer as three separate individuals, each exert-
ing as much control on the song as their positions allow them while collabo-
rating with one another in the act of creation. Now imagine that the composer
has written the musical instrumentation and the melody, which the lyricist
then supplies with lyrics to create the song that the singer performs. Who
exercises the greatest control of the rhythm? “When you put words to a mel-
ody,” notes the songwriter Sheila Davis, “the meter is all laid out with its
strong and weak accents, its pauses, its peaks and valleys of emotion. A
gifted writer simply fills in the blanks. Well, almost.” So the composer makes
the lion’s share of the rhythmic decisions, the lyricist exercises some small
measure of influence in the placement of syllables along the line, and the
singer exerts an even further attenuated rhythmic influence through choices
in phrasing within the limited frame provided by the melody. At least that’s
one way a song becomes a recording.
“Lyrics are ‘married’ to music,” explains Pat Pattison. “ Whether the lyric
is written before the music, at the same time as the music, or after the music,
its syllables are intended to fit with notes. Music is, by its nature, rhythmic.
So you must arrange syllables into rhythmic patterns, either to prepare them
for music or to match music that has already been written.” For some song-
writers, the process is more organic. “It seems that the words and the melody
come at the same time with me,” Johnny Cash said. “I always have it in my
head before I can ever find a pencil and a piece of paper. It’s always running
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

through my mind. . . . I don’t know, I think it’s God. They come from Him
through me.” Songwriting is rarely as neat a process as someone compos-
ing the music, then another person writing a lyric, and another interpreting
that lyric in performance. Songwriting can get downright messy.
The greatest claim for music’s primacy over lyr ics might be scrambled
eggs. “He didn’t have the words yet. He was calling it ‘Scrambled Eggs,’ and
singing ‘Scrambled eggs . . . Everybody calls me scrambled eggs,’ ” recalls
Eric Clapton. So goes the myth of Paul McCartney composing “Yesterday,”

the Beatles’ classic 1965 ballad that would go on to become one of the most
covered songs in music history. Clapton is close. McCartney’s actual dummy
lyrics were “Scrambled eggs / Oh, you’ve got such lovely legs” or “Oh, my baby
how I love your legs,” depending on whom you trust. McCartney even devel-
oped the theme to complete the lyric—“Scrambled eggs / Good for breakfast,
dinner-time or brunch / Don’t buy six or twelve, buy a bunch”—which might
explain why the song languished for a time before McCartney thought to re-
turn to it. In his biography of McCartney, Peter Carlin picks up the story of
the song’s lyric evolution: “Riding in a car to the southern coast of Portugal,
with his girlfriend snoozing at his side, a restless Paul thought back to the
‘scrambled eggs’ song and began kicking around words to fit the three-beat
opening riff. Then, somewhere in the hot, barren fields, the opening word
arrived: yesterday. And that was it. Something about the word encapsulated
the melody perfectly: reflective, melancholy. The rest came in a rush, the
words of a man reflecting on his emotional isolation.”
The final lyrics McCartney wrote clarify the emotion already present in
the melody. McCartney would later second-guess the song, troubling over its
indefinite meaning. “ They’re good,” McCartney told Playboy of the lyr ics,
“but if you read the whole song, it doesn’t say anything; you don’t know what
happened.” Misgivings aside, that indeterminacy is in keeping with the emo-
tional state the music implies. This is a song that rejects easy answers and
clever consolation. Carlin puts it succinctly: “Yesterday” is “a plainspoken
description of heartbreak.” It’s fitting that McCartney would record the song
alone with his guitar, backed only by a string quartet, with the rest of the
band sitting the session out.
The story of McCartney’s “Scrambled Eggs” is now a standby when lyri-
cists want to explain the creative process of composing through dummy lyr-
ics. It ennobles the humble and messy craft of songwriting and sustains hope
that even the silliest lyrics might one day become sublime. “I use nonsense
words until I get the right ones—the way Paul McCartney used ‘Scrambled
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Eggs’ before he came up with ‘Yesterday,’ ” writes Paul Anka. “You scat, you
go da da da, just keeping the basic idea in mind. The words are generally
tweaked later. Like a house, you need that foundation to build on. You need
the music. The words are only as good as the notes under it. That’s where the
magic comes in, when you have that real strong melody.”
It isn’t that words in pop songs don’t matter, it’s that they often matter in
different ways than words in conversation and in writing usually do. Because
listeners almost always experience the language of pop in performance, the

sonic quality of a given word, or of a cluster of words, is usually of greater

importance than the semantic meaning alone. Derangement of language can
occur at any number of points during the process of a song’s creation— during
composition when a songwriter might favor a logic of sound over sense, dur-
ing vocal recording when a singer might choose stylized pronunciations or
melodic choices that render spoken idioms strange, and during recording and
production when producers and sound engineers sometimes consciously bury
the language of the lyrics in the mix.
Pop songwriting and per formance most always celebrate language, en-
shrining certain words and their constitutive sounds. Creedence Clearwa-
ter Revival’s blistering “Born on the Bayou” vividly illustrates the ways that
words matter both as meaning and as sonic texture and mood. The band’s
singer and songwriter, John Fogerty, recalls in detail how the language of
the song started in feeling and only later coalesced into meaning:

I’m screaming nonsense vowels and consonants—“AEEEE

ewwaaaaAAAaaaaaAAA.” Random words and sounds lead me into
something, and every once in a while it sounds like an actual word. I
always tried to pick words that were really cool-sounding to sing.
That’s a lot different from the way many songwriters write, but it’s
because I’m the singer too. I’m a rock and roll guy. There are words
that are really just cool-sounding to sing, and I’d find that word.
“Puppy,” “doggy,” or . . . “hound dog”? “Shazam”—now there’s a cool
word. This was an impor tant ingredient, along with pronunciation of
the word itself, which was almost like a musical instrument to me.

Fogerty’s compositional practice privileges rhythm and sound as the

source of his song’s language, while also understanding that some words
carry rich associations. Finding words that are “just cool-sounding to sing”
is no less a conscious poetic act than choosing words for their profundity or
allusive reach. At the same time, Fogerty articulates the singer’s preroga-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

tive to reshape those words in performance, using his voice as an instrument

to bend and distort just as reliably as an electric guitar’s whammy bar.
For all the concern that songwriters direct at their language, the vesti-
gial remains of dummy lyrics often find themselves in songs that make it on
the radio, even songs that become big hits. In most instances, listeners don’t
perceive these lyrics as scaffolding that hasn’t been stripped away from the
final structure. On the contrary, these dummy lyrics— often nonsense words

and phrases— can end up becoming the most memorable parts of the song,
even the reason the song becomes a hit. Hal David, the lyric-writing half of
a songwriting duo with Burt Bacharach, reveals that “Raindrops Keep Fall-
ing on My Head” was a dummy lyric that Bacharach had put in as a syllabic
placeholder to guide David’s composition. When David couldn’t come up with
something that could fit Bacharach’s intricate melody as well or better than
the dummy lyrics, he capitulated to the absurdity of the line and worked to
make semantic sense to go along with its sonic sense.
In other instances, the songwriter makes little or no effort to resolve the
absurdity of the lyric holdover. When Phil Collins was working on his post-
Genesis solo album, he had an idea for a melody without the requisite words
to phrase it. In their place he simply said “a kind of nonsense thing that just
sounds nice.”

There’s a girl that’s been on my mind

All the time. Su-su-sussudio. Oh-oh-oh . . .
Now, she don’t even know my name
But I think she likes me just the same
Su-su-sussudio. Whoa-oh-oh . . .

“I kinda knew I had to find something else for that word,” Collins recalls,
“then I went back and tried to find another word that scanned as well as ‘sus-
sudio,’ and I couldn’t find one.” I remember being ten years old in 1985, watch-
ing the “Sussudio” video on MTV and giving surprisingly little thought to
what the word actually meant. I just knew it seemed cool. It had to be. It was
on MTV, and I was ten years old. In pop music, that’s more than enough.
Throwaway lyrics and detritus of the compositional process can become a
source of wonder and mystery, or they can simply be absorbed without resis-
tance. So much relies on their delivery, the way the words sit in the song.
Steven Tyler of Aerosmith describes the process of scatting or using dummy
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

lyrics this way:

I would listen back, along with the rough of the song, and I would
hear lyrics. Every time. Tapped right into my own subcontinent. It
would jump right out at me from the scat. I could play you scats and
if you listened close enough, you would hear the lyrics that I wrote.
Not unlike psychoacoustics. If two people are playing, you hear things
in the middle. If two notes are played or people are singing . . . there

is a tone on the in-between. Harm- onics-slash-psychoacoustics-

slash-vibe. The scat kink became Pink. The scat to the Beatles’ clas-
sic “Yesterday” was scrambled eggs. Fucking magic.

A song, Tyler asserts, begins with emotion, and emotion communicates in

sound more than meaning. It requires entering a nonliteral state of mind.
Marvin Gaye’s biographer, David Ritz, describes Gaye’s methods of composi-
tion as “subconscious.” “Watching him record,” Ritz continues, “I noticed that
usually no lyrics were written before he started singing. . . . ‘I mumble things
into the microphone,’ Marvin told me. ‘I don’t even know what I’m saying,
and I don’t even try to figure it out. If I try, it doesn’t work. If I relax, those
mumbles will finally turn into words. It’s a slow, evolving process, something
like the way a flower grows.’ ” This method of lyric composition is largely done
behind the scenes, with the exception of rap freestyles where the process of
sonic association and stream of consciousness is the aesthetic end of the art.
Grandmaster Caz, one of the architects of the art of MC-ing, describes
the process as moving “from lines to sentences to paragraphs to verses to
rhymes.” Songwriting follows a similar progression; the difference is that
rap sometimes makes the method its meaning.
“A good MC has to ride the beat. And a really strong beat will eat a
wack MC alive,” the poet Kyle Dargan, a child of the hip-hop generation,
tells me. We’re listening to Timbaland’s pulsing “Jigga What, Jigga Who”
beat, which Jay Z flows atop with casual virtuosity. When given a beat like
that, an MC’s goal is to figure out how not to get run over by it. An MC
must have something to say and must fit it in the rhythmic space the beat
allows. Where does Jay Z stay with and where does he stray from the rhythm
of the track? Sometimes he goes double time. Sometimes he finds his way
securely in the pocket. Sometimes he lags a little behind or jumps a little
ahead. His capacity to find the beat’s elasticity without stretching it to
attenuation is one of the hallmarks of his rhyming skill. This virtuosity
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

expresses itself almost entirely through rhythm. We marvel at the rhythmic

ingenuity; that’s the first thing that catches our attention. “An MC can get
away with saying just about any old thing if the rhythm is right,” Dargan
concludes.
Long before hip-hop, James Brown was doing some freestyling of his own.
Over the course of his career, he would follow essentially the same recording
practice in the studio: establish his band’s groove, then start extemporizing
jive on top of it. “So much of his stuff comes out of a process of recording in

the studio, which is live jamming, with a tremendous amount of spontane-

ity, proto-rapping, verbal riffs like ‘mo’ peas,’ ‘get on the good foot,’ ‘popcorn,’
just like horn riffs,” notes the anthropologist Steven Feld. “. . . And because
he’s going from the sound to the sense—‘mother popcorn,’ ‘mama come here
quick, bring me that lickin’ stick’—it’s the pops and the clicks, the /p/s, the
/k/s, the sounds of the words, not that they mean anything particular to
James, either when he utters them, or later. It’s the sound of those words
together.” Just as sound often leads sense in rap, it does the same in other
pop genres as well.
Lyric improvisation is a practice that cuts across genres. In her acclaimed
memoir Just Kids, Patti Smith relates an exchange she had with Sam Wag-
staff, an art curator and Smith’s benefactor:

“Say anything,” he said. “You can’t make a mistake when you im-
provise.”
“What if I mess it up? What if I screw up the rhythm?”
“You can’t,” he said. “It’s like drumming. If you miss a beat, you
create another.”

Smith touts this moment as initiating her into the “secret of improvisa-
tion,” which she would draw upon throughout her career. One hears it on
“Gloria” in the slurring conversational tone of the lines “I’m movin’ in this
here atmosphere where anything’s allowed / And I go to this here party and
I just get bored,” which leads to the more melodically structured lines that
follow, “ Until I look out the window, see a sweet young thing / Humpin’ on
the parking meter, leanin’ on the parking meter.” These lines might equally
be the product of studied labor or in-the-moment invention. What matters
here is the effect—the contrast and play between chaos and order.
One of the most amazing live performances I ever witnessed came in the
early 2000s at Black Lily, the New York– based musical happening, often
hosted by the Roots. A young R&B singer named Jaguar Wright took the
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

stage to perform extemporized lyrics with all the feeling of a vintage soul stir-
rer and all the look-ma-no-hands swagger of a battle rapper. To watch her
keep the beat and craft a melody atop the Roots’ rhythms and chord progres-
sions, all while furnishing rhymes and fashioning a narrative, was nothing
short of miraculous. Only in retrospect, though, did I become conscious of
the feats of her lyric technique. In the moment of per formance, I was too
captivated by what her voice was doing to give much thought to what her
brain was pulling off.

When a composer furnishes a lyricist with music in need of words, as was

almost always the case in Tin Pan Alley days and remains a common prac-
tice of popular music today, some of the lyricist’s decisions are already made.
The song’s time signature dictates the points on each lyric line that will re-
ceive a strong beat and therefore command the most emphasis. The melody
will even dictate rhyme: “It is a mark of skill in a lyricist when he uses a lot
of open rhymes on long notes at the ends of musical phrases,” writes Gene
Lees in his songwriter’s bible, The Modern Rhyming Dictionary. The mel-
ody will also draw the ear to particular moments in a song by elevating pitch
or otherwise generating sonic drama, even before language renders those mo-
ments concrete. In this regard, the composer asserts a greater share of con-
trol over a song than either the lyricist or the performer. Stephen Sondheim
explains this dynamic:

Performers can color a lyric with phrasing and rubato (rhythmic flu-
idity), but it’s the melody which dictates the lyric’s rhythms and
pauses and inflections, the accompaniment which sets the pace and
tone. These specific choices control our emotional response, just as
a movie director’s camera controls it by restricting our point of view,
focusing us to look at the details he wants us to notice. For the song-
writer, it’s a matter of what phrase, what word, he wants us to focus
on; for the director, what face, what gesture. An actor singing ‘Oh,
what a beautiful mornin’’ might want to emphasize ‘beautiful,’ but
Rogers forces him to emphasize ‘mornin’’ by setting the word on the
strongest beat in the measure and the highest note in the melody.

Consider the aforementioned chorus from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s

Oklahoma! The rhythm of the accompaniment and the shape of the melody
set the following words in sonic spotlight:

Oh, what a beautiful morning

Oh, what a beautiful day

I’ve got a wonderful feeling
Everything’s going my way

Poetic scansion reveals that the lines are charged with a dactylic pulse (a
pattern of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables) that
lends a rhythmic feel akin to a waltz. The first two metrical feet in each line
are dactyls; the third is truncated into trochees (one stressed followed by one

unstressed syllable). This imbalance in the poetics, however, is resolved in

the melody, which extenuates the syllables of the last word in each line. No-
tice that the syllables emphasized by the arrangement of language echo the
emphasis accorded by the melody:

Oh, what a/beautiful/morning

Oh, what a/beautiful/day
I’ve got a/wonderful/feeling
Everything’s/going my/way

A great deal of the success of this elegant song is a consequence of the

coordination of rhythm and emphasis in the music and lyric. “Melody should
mirror the natural rhythm of the language as much as possible,” according
to Jimmy Webb, a pop songwriter with experience writing for Broadway. As
one can see above, the natural accents of the language and the accents con-
jured by the music overlap in a mutually supportive way. The result is a song
in which the melody gains resonance and inspires memory through the
words, and the words gain emotive depth through the music.
Musicians use the term “prosody” to capture the way that a lyric sits in a
musical context. An ideal space exists in which a prosodically matched lyric
fits “correctly” into the rhythms of the music. The relation of musical bars to
metrical feet is rarely one for one; for instance, if a line of lyric scans as iam-
bic tetrameter, it is likely to require more than just four musical beats, a
single bar, to fit it. Effective lyricists write with a sense of the line as per-
formed; in other words, they anticipate that a single syllable might sustain
itself over an entire musical measure or more, that lyric lines will expand
and contract as the melody requires or as the performer dictates. “In song-
writing, uniformity in the length of lines creates monotony and works at
cross-purposes to the fluidity and diversity that interesting music requires
and that the composer will want to achieve,” writes Webb. “From a song-
writing standpoint ‘nursery rhyme’ predictability is not only annoying but
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

debilitating. The best lyrics have an element of asymmetry in the length

and positioning of the different lines.”
Lyrics can flood the line or leave it wanting. Often lyrics written before the
music are simply too wordy, which is why poems intended for the page rarely
work well as lyrics. Given a blank page, a poet or a song lyricist will be hard
pressed not to fill it. “Composers, on the other hand,” writes Sheila Davis,
“instinctively think of held tones, and they tend to carve out melodies with

some open spaces between the notes.” The necessary economy of song lyr ics
is perhaps more readily born of writing to a melody and rhythm that defines
spaces for language. “It would appear that composers have the rhythmic
edge,” Davis continues. “To state the obvious: they use notes for the musi-
cal framework of a song, whereas lyricists must struggle to make musical
structures with mere words.” The words of song lyrics have their intrinsic
rhythms that don’t always match up precisely with the rhythms in the music.
One can see and hear the sway that music has over language at those times,
for instance, when a singer holds a single word, even a single syllable, over
an entire measure or more. Think of Whitney Houston sustaining her “I” in
the triumphant final chorus of “I Will Always Love You.” These moments of
difference, however, generally work as part of a system in which the rhythm
of lyrics and the rhythm of music accord.
This is not to say that lyr ics must always follow music. The process is
rarely as clear-cut, given the necessity of working back and forth between
language and music in songwriting. “ There is nothing about beginning with
a lyric that prohibits the careful development of a beautiful chord structure,”
Webb reminds us, “and chord structure directs melody into areas of grace
and originality at least as much as the form and meter of a lyric.” Billy Joel,
speaking of his contemporary Elton John, observed the following about the
lyric-or-music-first question: “Now, I’ve seen him write to Bernie’s [collabo-
rator Bernie Taupin’s] lyrics. He looks at the lyric, and he sits down and starts
writing music. I do it the other way around. I write music first, and then I jam
lyrics on top of it. So there’s a totally different dynamic to how we work.”
Willie Nelson, one of the most prolific American songwriters of all time,
prefers to write his lyrics before the music. “Melodies are the easiest part
for me, because the air is full of melodies,” he writes. “I hear them all the
time, around me everywhere, night and day. If I need a melody, I pluck one
out of the air.” He tells the story of sharing the lyric to one of his most fa-
mous songs, “On the Road Again,” with a group of friends, including the film-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

maker Sydney Pollack, before he had written the music to accompany it.

“How about the melody? What does it sound like?” Sydney asked.
I said I didn’t know, I would work on the melody later. I didn’t give
any more thought to the melody until months later, the day before I
was going into the studio to cut it. I saw no reason to put a melody
to something I wasn’t ready to record. I knew I wouldn’t have any
problem pulling the melody out of the air.

Not every songwriter can simply pull melodies out of thin air, of course.
The anecdote underscores the fact that the dominion of melody and song over
lyric is far from absolute. The relationship is dynamic, involving intuitive
moves on both the composer’s and the lyricist’s parts. Gil Scott-Heron, who
wrote some of his best-known songs with his musical collaborator Brian
Jackson, describes the creative process in exquisite detail. It’s worth quot-
ing him at length:

I had an affinity for jazz and syncopation, and the poetry came from
the music. We made the poems into songs, and we wanted music to
sound like words, and Brian’s arrangements very often shaped and
molded them. Later on when we wrote songs together, I’d ask Brian
what he had on his mind, which sometimes I could more or less intuit
from the music, because it carried an atmosphere with it. Different
progressions and different chord structures brought a certain tone
to mind. Sometimes I’d ask him and he’d convey in words what sort
of feeling he was trying to bring about with that particular chord and
that helped me get into it.

The melding of music and language that Scott-Heron describes is a tes-

tament to his songwriting partnership with Jackson and to the mutually con-
stitutive relationship pop music at its best can achieve. Across the pop-music
landscape, one comes across countless instances in which the laws of pros-
ody are trampled, tarnished, or other wise violated, often without compro-
mising the song. Certainly, pop music is a space in which matters of rhythm
and form are less scrupulously governed than in Tin Pan Alley songs or in
today’s musical theater. “The metronomic cadences of classical rhythm must
give way, certain notes must be elongated, space must be allocated for the
singer to take air, long musical phrases may call for more metric feet in one
line than another, other musical lines will be abrupt and attenuated, etc.,”
notes Webb. “In other words there is a nonregimented quality to most non-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

military melody. This calls for a compromise between regular rhythm and
anarchy on the part of the lyricist and composer.” Turn on the radio right
now and listen for five or ten minutes and you’ll likely hear half a dozen
instances where words and music clash in rhythm, either through error or
conscious design.
I felt this rhythmic tension even before I had the words to express it as
such. Listening to Toto’s “Africa” as a seven-year-old in 1982, I can remem-
ber being unsettled by the word “Serengeti”—or, more specifically, by the way

that “Serengeti” sounded in the song. I’ll quote several other lines from the
verse so you can see it in context:

The wild dogs cry out in the night

As they grow restless longing for some solitary company
I know that I must do what’s right
As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti

As performed, it always sounded awkward to me. Part of it has to do with

the pattern of the melody, as reflected in the poetics of the lyric. The lines
establish a pulsing short/long/short/long structure, with the first and third
lines coming in at a compact eight syllables apiece, while the second and
fourth lines dilate that length, with sixteen syllables in line two and a whop-
ping twenty-one syllables in line four. In addition, the rhythmic and melodic
structure of the line forces the lead singer, Joseph Williams, into circumlocu-
tions of stress that end up mangling the final word of that longest line; instead
of “Serengeti,” the rhythm and melody of the song force him to pronounce it
as “Serengeti.”
The melody also subjects the last word in line two, “company,” to a simi-
lar distortion, though it is less severe, perhaps because the word naturally
carries a stress on its first syllable and perhaps because it doesn’t come in
quick succession after “Kilimanjaro” and “Olympus” in a line already packed
with syllables. In any case, I understand this moment now as an unhappy,
though fleeting, collision of contrary rhythms. The song still moves me, how-
ever, all the more now for this small window into the world of its rhythm.
Certainly there are instances in pop music in which a studied tension or
unexpected clash between the rhythms of music and lyric produces a great
song. Tension on the level of rhythm doesn’t always register as a mistake. A
common practice in popular music is introducing rhythmic variation and
complexity after establishing regularity throughout most of the song. Crosby,
Stills & Nash’s “Marrakesh Express” is a rhythmically ordered song that
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

generates much of its mood and energy from the lilting lightness of its mel-
ody and cadence. The song contains three verses, of which the first two are
as close to rhythmically identical as they could be: Each five-line verse
rhymes AABBC with the stressed-syllable count of 6-6-4-4-5. Even the total
syllable count per line is nearly identical across the verses. The third verse,
however, introduces a subtle rhythmic subversion. The third line of the third
verse includes an additional unstressed syllable, for a total of eight sylla-
bles instead of the seven in the third lines of the previous verses. This leads

to syncopation in the singing. I’ve transcribed the third line of each verse
below:

First verse: Ducks and chicks and pigeons call

Second verse: Hope the days that lie ahead
Third verse: Colored cottons hang in the air

It’s a small disruption, one that nonetheless calls attention to itself in the listen-
ing. The result is repetition, but with a difference. The ear registers both the
now-familiar pattern and the slight departure not as an accident, but as a small
embellishment that the song’s otherwise strict formal adherence earns for it.
The relation of musical to poetic rhythms is both an art and a science. “A
song,” writes Webb, “is a magical marriage between a lyric (some words) and
a melody (some notes). It is not a poem. It is not music. It is in this gray area
of synthesis between language, rhythm and sound that some of the most
acute of all sensors of human emotion lie.” This “gray area of synthesis” finds
definition and clarity in one place: performance.

PERFORMATIVE RHYTHM

The language of lyrics divorced from song is a language of pure rhythm. It

is sequenced syllables accorded different levels of verbal stress in keeping
with the natural inflections of speech and the ordered imposition of art. It
behaves, in other words, like poetry. There’s music to lyrics when read in
this way, though that music is primarily percussive. For all their rhythmic
character, however, words are never simply sound. “Words hold meaning—
they serve as vessels for it—whereas musical sounds, by some accounts, are
the meaning,” writes Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis.
Melody casts a spell on language, rendering it wondrous and unpredict-
able. One often finds a generative tension at work between the way a line
appears on the page and the way it is performed in relation to the musical ac-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

companiment and the vocal melody. How singers inflect a given line—what
syllables they emphasize, where they pause or extend a sound—shapes the
melody and, in doing so, maps a dynamic relationship on the lyrics as written.
For analytical purposes, it is useful to draw a distinction between lyrics
at rest—that is, as fixed composition on the page, where they exist as a set
of relations in rhythm— and lyrics in motion—that is, as interpreted by a
singer in the context of a performance, in which the words are shaded with
melody and idiosyncratic emphasis that defy the iterative logic dictated both

by the habits of pronunciation and by the practices of poetic convention. The

melody often overtakes the small rhythm of the words, and the melodic line
exercises a linguistic logic all its own, one that works with and against
the inborn impulses of the words themselves. Melody leaves no footprint in
the lyrics as rendered on the page. To put it another way, melody charges the
words in ways impossible to discern simply with a lyric transcription.
Consequently, one might be tempted to assume that lyrics in motion ren-
der lyr ics at rest superannuated, but that is not the case. Attending to the
resting state of a song lyric offers an unexpected window into the lyric in
motion, one that suggests both a simple causal relationship between the
two versions and an imbricated linkage that attests to the subtle ways that
skilled singers command the language.
The relationship between the lyrics as written—the lyrics as poetry—and
the lyr ics as performed is defining for pop songs. Where are the two qual-
ities in sync and where are they disjointed, and what effect, whether con-
scious or not, do they achieve together? Do poor songs tend to create certain
relations between text and performance in the way that they do with poor
prosody? Do poor singers make mistakes that can be better understood in
the relation between lyric and performance? Equally, do great songs and
great singers evince certain habits that are apparent in this relation between
the lyric as text and the lyric as song?
Consider Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic” both as lyric and as recorded
performance. Where does he follow as a singer the natural course of the lan-
guage as he composed it, and where does he resist it? Do these moments
reliably correspond to certain emotive effects, certain feelings of tension or
ease, that he wishes to conjure in the listener? Two versions of the first verse
of “Into the Mystic” follow, one scanned for its poetic stresses, the other
marked with the stresses Van Morrison accords the language in his original
studio recording of the song:
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

We were born before the wind

Also younger than the sun
Ere the bonnie boat was won
As we sailed into the mystic

We were born before the wind

Also younger than the sun
Ere the bonnie boat was won
As we sailed into the mystic

The lyrics themselves fall into four-beat lines of iambic trimeter, with an
impor tant exception in the fourth line of the verse, which opens with an
anapestic foot (two unstressed and one stressed syllables) and includes only
three stressed syllables, creating a sense of resolution for the verse through
this small rhythmic variation. In per formance, Morrison underscores the
rhythmic shape of his lyric through glissando and tonal shifts. The differ-
ences are few but instructive: augmenting the level of stress in certain sylla-
bles (“bonnie boat”) and diminishing the level of stress in others (“into” from
the fourth line). This sometimes subtle, sometimes seismic shifting of the
patterns of language as expressed from how they are written is one of Van
Morrison’s defining elements of style.
“Van Morrison is interested, obsessed with how much musical or verbal
information he can compress into a small space, and, almost conversely, how
far he can spread one note, word, sound, or picture. To capture one moment,
be it a caress or a twitch,” observed the famed rock critic Lester Bangs. The
poetics of the lyric in “Into the Mystic” is not ancillary to Van Morrison’s
music and performance; it is defining. His pushing and pulling at the syl-
lables relies on them having an expected place in our minds, a place cemented
by their poetic arrangement. If the lyric were less soundly constructed and
less rigorously patterned Van Morrison would not enjoy the performative
freedom that he does, and the song would not be as great as it is.
The move from lyrics on the page to performance is an act of translation.
It requires attending to the specific shape of the song as rendered in the ab-
stract as well as to the song’s spirit. Communicating that spirit may at
times mean complicating or even contradicting the lyrics and music as com-
posed. “I get to a point where I would make so much out of a single line,”
recalls Bruce Springsteen on his early days as a singer-songwriter. “And if
there would be a word or two in there and you’re just not singing that word
right, you get pretty crazy about it.” The process of moving from page to per-
formance is taxing. At least part of the success of a song, though, relies on
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

the poetic construction of the lyric. Contrastingly, a singer can compensate

for certain deficits or elisions in the lyr ics through interpretation and
per formance.
Certain songs carry reputations among singers. “The Star-Spangled Ban-
ner,” for instance, is notoriously difficult to sing because of the vocal range
it requires; it was written, it seems, with little regard for the poor souls who
would have to sing it at sporting events across the United States every night.
Certain songs are known to be easy to sing, both because the range of the

melody suits most voices and because the lyrics ease the process of perfor-
mance. Short melodic lines generally make for smoother singing. In analyz-
ing the declarative vocal per formance style of the Kinks’ Ray Davies, for
instance, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith offered the following compelling propo-
sition: “You know why they sang it like that? Shel Talmey, their producer,
thought that Ray Davies couldn’t sing, so he told him to blurt it out in short
little telegraphic outbursts. That way you don’t have to sing the melody.
Fucking genius, because every word hammers at you, every word is percus-
sion in that song. I love that.”
Sometimes producers and songwriters do the opposite, purposely compos-
ing songs that are rhythmically difficult to sing. “ ‘Backdoor lover always
hiding ’neath the covers.’ You can’t SING that unless you’re a drummer or
have some major sense of rhythm,” Tyler writes, using one of his own lyr ics
to set his own sense of rhythm against that of Davies. Another famous rock
singer with a drummer’s pedigree, Don Henley, argues that a drummer’s
intimate knowledge of rhythm can enhance both songwriting and vocal
per formance.

It helps define the meter of the lyrics. It teaches me how to sing in

the holes, and it helps my phrasing a great deal. When I used to play
and sing at the same time I would sing around my playing, and vice
versa. I try to write conversationally; I try to write like people speak
and put the emphasis on the right syllable. I hear a lot of songwriters
who put emphasis on the wrong syllable of a word and it drives me
up the wall. When you’re singing a word, the emphasis should be on
the syllable that it’s normally on. Sometimes songwriters and sing-
ers forget that. They get a melody in their head and the notes will
take precedence, so that they wind up forcing a word onto a melody.
It doesn’t ring true.

Henley’s rhythmic sensibility, as a singer and a songwriter, seeks out the

inborn rhythms in the lyric line, aspiring to a conversational sound. Of

course, a great melody can sometimes supersede the interests of conversa-
tional lyric expression. The melody of the great pop-song-turned-jazz-
standard “Tenderly,” for instance, forces the emphasis in the title word to
the final syllable rather than the first, as we would expect in normal usage.
We forgive it, though, because the elegance of the melody overpowers the in-
elegance of the wrenched word.

Most often any rhythmic tension between language and melody, between
composition and performance, is hidden from listeners’ ears. On occasion,
though, songwriters seek ways of making the difficulty apparent in a bra-
vura gesture of rhythmic play. Nile Rodgers describes writing Diana Ross’s
“Upside Down” using “excessively polysyllabic words like ‘instinctively’ and
‘respectfully’ in the lyrics, because we wanted to utilize Diana’s sophistica-
tion to achieve a higher level of musicality. Along with the complicated verse,
we deliberately made the chorus rhythmically more difficult to sing than
the catchier, one-listen song hooks for Chic [Rodgers’s band, which scored
its biggest hit with “Good Times” in 1979].” With a par ticu lar aesthetic
aim in mind, Rodgers crafted a song to showcase Ross’s virtuosity, as well
as his own.
Song lyrics at rest follow a Newtonian logic and doggedly insist on stay-
ing at rest. Certain lyrics are difficult to put in motion as song. These lyrics
are often composed before the melody and then retrofitted to music. One
might think here of the “raps” that are often written by those with only the
most rudimentary and incomplete knowledge of rap itself. Think, too, of ama-
teur lyrics written without respect to the limits of normal vocal range, or to
the necessity for space where the music can reside. These are lyrics at perma-
nent rest, lyrics that make sense only on the page and fail to lend themselves
to performance.
The other Newtonian claim is equally true: Lyrics in motion tend to stay
in motion, which is to say that once we hear a song it is nearly impossible to
read the lyrics without referencing their performance in our head. Try read-
ing the lines to “Respect” without an Aretha Franklin concert breaking out
between your ears. For our purposes, though, it is not necessary and not even
desirable to achieve some sort of naïve and impartial relation to the lyrics
we analyze. The vestiges of performance that stick to the lines on the page
provide useful information for analyzing the poetics of the lines as well. They
invite a hybridized process of close reading that engages by turns both ear
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

and eye. Together, it helps explain the practice of phrasing.

RHYTHM AND PHRASING

There’s a difference between reading a novel or a poem or a speech aloud

and performing a lyric from sheet music. Both involve the act of reading,
though the means of articulation is dramatically different. Some of those

differences are obvious: A reader of prose has only the rudiments of syntax
and punctuation to govern the pace and structure of vocalizing. A reader of
a poem generally has more direction, through line breaks that signal subtle
pauses or clusters of rhythms that invite a certain ordered phrasing. But for
the most part, readers have little more than their own sensibilities and
the page.
By contrast, singers have an abundance of instruction when it comes to
performing song lyrics. Sheet music provides the tone and the tempo, even
sometimes the mood. When recording vocals in a studio, a singer generally
has producers, sound engineers, fellow musicians, and a host of hangers-on
ready to provide input on matters of pitch, cadence, and inflection. For all of
this, though, singers also have to read a lyric; even when that lyric is per-
formed from memory or improvised on the spot, there’s a silent negotiation
between the language as conceived and the language as voiced. In this
regard, at least, a singer shares the same burden as any reader. Writing of
poetry, the literary critic David Caplan observes that “a reader who silently
mouths these words fails to experience them fully. Instead, he or she must
perform them, interpret the written document as a script for verbal articu-
lation.” This holds doubly true for song lyrics.
If lyrics are a script for verbal articulation of the lyric phrase, then sing-
ers must attain facility as readers and interpreters as well as vocalists. Re-
flecting on his apprenticeship as a country singer under Chet Atkins, the
father of outlaw country, Waylon Jennings, recalls the hard lesson of learning
how his voice could— and why his voice should—interpret a written lyric.
“Words are so important to country music, you need to hear every one,” Jen-
nings writes. “[Chet] always tried to get artists to enunciate clearly, and
I agreed with him. There are at least three dif ferent ways of saying the
words ‘beautiful’ and ‘darling,’ and each has a dif ferent meaning.” Jen-
nings’s observation extends across genres. The quality of stress and vocal
inflection a singer imparts to a word or phrase can have a radical impact
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

on the audience’s understanding, emotional connection, and enjoyment of

a song.
Phrasing measures the exercise of performance on poetry over and against
the dictates of music. The lyrics are the poetry, the melody is the music, and
the performance resolves whatever differences exist between the other two.
No singer has full autonomy when it comes to performing a song. She must
attend to the dictates of the lyrics, in the particulars of the words as well as
in the way that those words’ arrangement dictates everything from where

the singer can breathe to where the stresses naturally fall along the line.
She must also situate her performance in relation to the music, both the ac-
companiment and the melodic line, which dictate where the voice rises and
falls along the scale, where one finds pockets of breath, and how the song
shades emotions. Singers can take certain liberties both with the lyrics and
with the music, but they do so in a prescribed interpretive frame. Stray too
far from the melody and the song is lost, rendered unrecognizable to the au-
dience. Break the lyrics or even the phrasing established by the poetics and
the music of the line and one risks exposing the inherent vulnerabilities of
the human voice—the gasping for breath, or the fumbling to fit words in a
measure.
When a young Quincy Jones was arranging for Frank Sinatra, he mar-
veled at the quality of Sinatra’s phrasing. “Some singers like to work in front
of the beat. Some lag a little behind it. Frank did it all: in front, dead center,
and slightly behind, as though it were inevitable,” recalls Jones.

Just like Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong, whom he adored, Frank
had grown up singing with the big bands and learning how to sound
like a horn, so he knew exactly where the beat was at all times. He
swung so hard, you could’ve turned him upside down and shaken
every piece of change out of his pocket, and he would have never
missed a beat. He grooved through the first sixteen bars of “Come Fly
with Me,” then took a long drag on his cigarette just before the bridge.
When he hit the bridge and sang, “When I get you up there, where
the air is rare . . . ,” he turned his head so that a pinspot of blue
light onstage would catch his profile, and fi nally blew a stream of
smoke out of his mouth. It was incredible. He had every delicate
nuance down. He wasted nothing— not words, not emotions, not
notes. He was about pure economy, power, style, and skill.

The many rhythms of a song meet in a singer’s phrasing: lyric, music, and
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

performance all relate in balance, and sometimes imbalance. How much

leeway a singer takes with the rhythmic and melodic structure of a song
depends on the particulars of individual style. Sinatra, for instance, pushed
the limits of how a given lyric line can fit in the musical measure, while his
contemporary Johnny Hartman favored a style that adheres more strictly
to the lyric’s prescribed place. In How Music Works, David Byrne offers a
helpful description of how singers’ rhythmic invention recasts the relation-
ship between performers and audience:

A good singer will often use the “grid” of the rhythm as something
to play with—never landing exactly on a beat, but pushing and pull-
ing around and against it in ways that we read, when it’s well done,
as being emotional. It turns out that not being perfectly aligned with
a grid is okay; in fact, sometimes it feels better than a perfectly met-
ric fixed-up version. When Willie Nelson or George Jones sing way
off the beat, it somehow increases the sense that they’re telling you
the story, conveying it to you, one person to another.

The producer Jerry Wexler invokes the term “tempo rubato,” or “stolen
time,” which was coined during the Baroque era, to describe this play with
the rhythmic grid. A singer robs time from one measure and gives it to an-
other when he speeds up and then slows down, or vice versa, to render a
greater sense of expressive freedom and invention. Singing in this style re-
quires an intrinsic sense of time so that the singer understands how much
he or she can “steal” while still respecting the structure of the melody and
the integrity of the lyrics. Stealing time demands breath control, a sense of
how best to shape a phrase, and an understanding of the emotive potenti-
alities one can expose through rhythmic variation. “The three masters of
rubato in our age are Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and Willie Nelson,” Wex-
ler writes. “The art of gliding over the meter and extending it until you think
they’re going to miss the next actual musical demarcation—but they always
arrive there, at bar one. It’s some kind of musical miracle.”
People sometimes criticize Nelson for singing off rhythm; indeed, his way of
rendering a lyric was strikingly out of phase with his contemporaries when he
first broke into Nashville’s country and western scene. In one of his several
memoirs, Nelson reflects on shattering the generic expectations for vocal
phrasing in country music. “Even though I was writing a country song,”
Nelson recalls, “I wasn’t singing it in the traditional way. Not that I couldn’t.
I just wanted to phrase it the way I felt like phrasing it. I could sing on the
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

beat if I wanted to, but I could put more emotion in my lyrics if I phrased in
a more conversational, relaxed way.” By destabilizing the expected balance
of rhythms across lyric and song through his distinctive phrasing, he could
generate emotional tension and energy, teasing out anticipation and, at the
last minute, delivering fulfillment. Too much precision in vocal rhythm can
rob a performance of its humanity and vitality; equally, though, too much
license can render the music muddled and inexpressive.

Nelson explains his innovation in phrasing this way: “I found I could get
ahead of the beat or fall behind the beat and still make it all work out in the
end without breaking meter. . . . I never intentionally broke meter, but I did
intentionally phrase dangerously close to it.” “Phrasing dangerously close”
to the break is one element that makes Nelson’s singing so unmistakable.
His voice—its timbre, its measured twang, its calibrated vibrato—is a rich
instrument.
Nelson’s phrasing also satisfies the inborn human desire for both rhyth-
mic regularity and difference. Writing in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson
reported on a 2011 Harvard study that demonstrated that listeners found
robotic rhythms too precise. “ There is something perfectly imperfect about
how humans play rhythms,” Harvard physics researcher Holger Hennig
told Thompson. “The lurches and hesitations are internalized through
performance, and after a while everyone knows when they’ll happen,” ob-
serves David Byrne. “The performers don’t have to think about them, and
at some point that becomes part of the band’s sound. Those agreed-upon
imperfections are what give a per formance character, and eventually the
listener recognizes that it’s the very thing that makes a band or singer
distinctive.”
Nelson is nothing if not distinctive. His phrasing accounts for how he can
make even other people’s songs his own. You can hear it on Nelson’s cover of
the country classic “Always on My Mind,” where the background singers
abide by the traditional dictates of the rhythm while Nelson wanders off and
on, drawn by his own sense of musical time and space. You can hear it, too,
on Nelson’s rendition of the Cindy Walker song “You Don’t Know Me.” “You
Don’t Know Me” was originally released in 1956 by the country singer Eddy
Arnold, then again later that same year by Jerry Vale, whose version peaked
at number fourteen on the pop charts. It settled into the space of a standard;
it has now been recorded numerous times by artists in and out of the coun-
try genre.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Perhaps the two finest versions of “You Don’t Know Me” belong, not coin-
cidentally, to two singers who employ a high degree of rubato: Nelson and
Ray Charles. Though the shape and emotional impact of their two perfor-
mances are striking in their own ways, they share a similar approach to the
song. Contrast that with Arnold’s original, which more faithfully adheres to
Nashville’s standard performance practices, and one understands what
Nelson means when he attests to the emotive power one can generate

through calculated suspension and release. The simple song, which consists
of only a few chords, and straightforward lyrics convey a sense of vulnerabil-
ity and intimacy that the words alone only partly suggest. Both Nelson’s
and Charles’s performances render the song richer in their emotional shad-
ing of Walker’s words. Both performers exploit the space between the bars,
the pulse that separates the end of the fourth beat of one measure and the
beginning of the first beat of the next. Rather than a space for breath, a
pause to acknowledge the end of the bar and the close of the lyric line, Nel-
son and Charles fill it instead with melody, finding their breath in the midst
of the measure where the pause is unexpected.
How much of that power can be attributed to the fact that Nelson and
Charles both bend but never break the meter? For an instructive contrast,
look no further than Michael McDonald’s overembellished version of the song.
Redolent of melisma (several notes strung across a single syllable) and a sur-
feit of vibrato (the pulsating change of pitch), McDonald’s version comes across
like a display of technique rather than an emotional appeal. He breaks the
meter, repeatedly, and with great prejudice. As a consequence, he draws at-
tention away from the simple beauty of the song and its emotionally naked
lyr ics and, instead, calls attention to his overdressed stylizing and vocal
showboating. With Nelson’s and Charles’s versions one always knows who is
singing the song, but one never loses sight of the song itself.
Phrasing is closely tied to the structure of the lyrics on the level of the
syllable. Although a vocalist’s improvised decision to sing a certain line a
certain way can come across as an idiosyncratic consequence of performance,
the improvisation is frequently a result of the lyrics themselves. Like a Judd
Apatow film where audiences often assume the humor is the product of the
actors’ improvisations, the funny lines are most often in the script itself.
So it is with a good song; those qualities we might attribute to the singer’s
idiosyncratic sensibility are often written right into the language of the
lyric. The same is often true of poetry. Listen to Gwendolyn Brooks reading
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

her most famous poem, “We Real Cool,” aloud and the shape it takes on the
page seems preordained. She bites off the end of each “we” to mark the sharp
enjambments that define the poem’s form (“We real cool. We / Left school.
We”). Like a great vocalist, Brooks luxuriates in the artful tension between
her listener’s expectations of how a semantic unit should unfold and her dis-
tinctive, disruptive phrasing (registered on the page through enjambment)
that endows the poem with its rhythm and meaning. The shape of the lyric,
be it in literary poetry or in song, does far more to encode and to inform its

performance than we usually give it credit for doing. Sometimes the silent
lyrics on the page reveal secrets about the song that no manner of listening
could ever do.
It is instructive to see a gifted singer at work interpreting a familiar song.
One can hear the assertion of style in elements like rhythm and tone as well
as the singer’s restraint and respect for the song itself. The performed rhythm
and tempo of a song lyric are not identical to its meter, nor to the measure
of its music. Often, a singer’s performance works against the implied meter
of the line, the rhythm of the music, or both. Aretha Franklin is such an
interpreter. Gifted with a powerful vocal instrument, she also understands
the liberties she can take with melody without compromising the integrity
of the song. My friend Andy Schneidkraut, longtime proprietor of Boulder’s
Albums on the Hill and repository of musical knowledge, likes to say that
Franklin does not so much sing a note as she locates it. In that seeing-eye
method of finding the notes, Franklin creates small dramas in places where
no drama naturally exists. This can be maddening to some. When balanced
right, though, it can achieve a pitch of emotional intensity unmatched by
other styles of singing. At base, Franklin’s approach to singing relies on
destabilizing the rhythms of both language and song. In this regard, she
shares something with an eclectic assortment of other singers from Ray
Charles to Willie Nelson to Frank Sinatra who, for all their obvious dif-
ferences, share one big thing in common: They know how to exploit the
elasticity of the lyric phrase in the context of the music’s rhythm.
Overdetermined rhyme schemes and rhythm patterns require the elas-
ticity of the human voice to move them toward natural speech. The end re-
sult is artifice without being artificial, stylized but not stilted. That’s why
we can still read aloud with pleasure the metrical verse of Coleridge, which
plays on and off fixed patterns, but Longfellow’s near-perfection of artificial
forms makes it difficult to voice his lines without resorting to singsong. This
holds as well for song lyrics. Many songs, though certainly not all, strive for
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

the natural, albeit ordered, voice. Think of artists as far removed from one
another as James Taylor and Jay Z, each of whom seeks a conversational
tone. Contrast them with Thom Yorke and Rihanna, who consciously stylize
their deliveries and accentuate the sharp edges of lyric. Rather than reach-
ing for the conversational, they seek the confrontational, challenging as-
sumptions of how a word or sequence of words should sound. Many have
observed, for instance, that Rihanna stretches the three syllables in the
word “umbrella” into four—um-bur-el-la—in a way that makes something

familiar exciting and strange. No one, not even Rihanna, speaks like Ri-
hanna sings.
In reading prose, readers govern the tempo; beyond punctuation, para-
graph breaks, and the dictates of the page, readers are free to set the words
to their own pace. Songs present the structure of the music, the duration of
the musical measure, the time signature of the tune, and the span in which
a certain lyric line must be expressed. These constraints are also opportu-
nities, and skilled singers find ways to assert personal style and feeling in
the space the song allows. Writing of Otis Redding, the musicologist Allan F.
Moore calls attention to the ways that Redding would dilate the lyric line.
“Perhaps Redding’s most effective tool in terms of playful voicedness is his
sense of rhythmic play,” Moore notes. “He routinely breaks up lines by in-
serting rests between words that would normally, both in speech and song,
flow together. This is often augmented by the repetition of a word on either
side of the rest. The net result of such effects is to convey the notion of halt-
ing speech, indicating that the singer is getting so emotionally overcome that
he is unable to generate smooth, flowing ‘normal’ linguistic utterances, just
as commonly happens with real people in real life during emotionally loaded
moments.” Redding “reads” the lyric through his distinctive phrasing of the
song, endowing it with emotion that it might not otherwise communicate in
the voice of another singer.
On “Try a Little Tenderness,” for instance, Redding voices the lyrics in
clustered phrases that coil up and release their emotive energy. Compare the
following transcriptions, the first from the Ray Noble Orchestra’s original
1932 recording of the song with vocals by Val Rosing, and the second from
Redding’s 1966 studio recording:

You know she’s waiting

Just anticipating
Things she may never possess
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

(Ray Noble Orchestra)

You . . . know . . . she’s waitiiiing

Just . . . an . . . tiss . . . uh . . . pay . . . ting
A thing . . . that she’ll never-never-never-never-possess
(Otis Redding)

Rosing’s voice glides in easy syncopation with the rhythm of the music
and the metrical inclination of the lyric line, while Redding’s phrasing pushes

and pulls and finally breaks the bounds of the lyric’s rhythmic and poetic
dictates. In the first line, Redding sets the two opening words apart from
one another, separating but not severing their semantic link. In the second
line he revels in the multisyllabic possibilities of “anticipating,” creating
space around every syllable so as better to charge each with emphasis. Fi-
nally, in the third line, he catches on that single, central word, “never,” hold-
ing it up before us to let it refract the light of multiple meanings, containing
them all in prismatic splendor. The song remains more or less the same, but
the singer’s sense of time and language and feel has rendered it reborn,
renewed.
In addition to considering two singers’ renditions of the same song, it is
useful to consider one singer’s version of the same song at different times.
In 1937 a twenty-two-year-old Billie Holiday recorded “I’ve Got My Love to
Keep Me Warm”; it was one of her first recordings. More than twenty years
later she recorded the song for the last time, just before her death in 1959
at the age of forty-four. The words are the same, though Holiday’s voice and
her vocal approach to the song have markedly changed. Think about the
young Holiday’s clarion-clear tone set against her ravaged voice on the late
recording. More than the tempo has changed. With the transformation of
voice comes a transformation of meaning and emotion in the lines. Listen
for the points of emphasis, the words and syllables that take a stress in her
phrasing of the lyric. Is one better than the other? Certainly the vocal tone
on the first recording is technically superior. But what about the emotional
content? What about the conscious ways that Holiday exploits the expres-
sive capacities of her damaged instrument? We’re wont to impute greater
feeling to the later recording, a knowingness and hard-won wisdom. Part of
that is undoubtedly romanticization, the myth that the artist in pain is al-
ways the superior artist. That’s not necessarily true. One can’t deny that,
better or worse or just different, Holiday’s late recording of the song charges
the lyrics with deeper emotional shades, rewrites the song while hardly al-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

tering a word.
When a great pop singer “reads” a song lyric, that song ceases to be the
sum of its language and music. Even the silly becomes sublime. Writing of
opera, Adriana Cavarero observes a tension between the denotative mean-
ings of lyric language and their expression in vocal performance. “Accord-
ing to [Catherine] Clément, therefore, the libretto, the words, count,” writes
Cavarero. “They count precisely because their meaning is erased by a sing-
ing voice that makes even those who know it forget the text. Without the

musical emotion, opera would be ridiculous—not only because of the liter-

ary style of the libretto, but also because of the stereotypical banality of the
misogynist story that it stages. Sung by a voice that challenges human pos-
sibilities, this story becomes sublime.”
One could say the same of so much pop. The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” is
little more than a collection of trite words and canned sentiments. But Phil
Spector’s production and Ronnie Spector’s passionate vocal per formance
make it electric. “When I’d sing a lyric, I’d close my eyes and try to feel the
truest emotion I could find,” she explains. “And I’d keep pushing myself until
I got there. Then Phil would add that sound to the sounds of all the other
singers, musicians, and engineers. And the result would be a wonderful com-
bination of textures and personalities and genius that people started call-
ing the wall of sound.”
Like the librettos of Italian opera, the language of pop songs is at times
ridiculous, simplistic, stereotypic, and misogynistic. Billie Holiday’s lament
that her man is gone is charged with sexist assumptions that deny her agency
and power, but her performance wrests that agency and power back from
the lyrics. Ronnie Spector’s lovelorn longing is charged with dignity as well
as desperation. Song lyrics on the page often betray their absurdity or trivi-
ality. We read them, though, to understand better what happens when a sub-
lime voice enchants them. We read them to understand better why, despite
their limitations, they still move us so.
Two final examples will suffice. The melody of the Police’s 1980 hit “ Don’t
Stand So Close to Me” conjures a sense of temptation and forbearance befit-
ting a song about a teacher grappling with a schoolgirl’s crush. From the
verses to the chorus, this is a song about restraint and release. Sting sings
the first verse in the hushed voice of a rumor, building tension with his over-
dubbed vocals halfway through, and building further with his falsetto
harmonizing coming in on the critical final words of the verse: “this girl is
half his age.” The energy meted out so carefully throughout the verse fi-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

nally comes busting out in the chorus, in ecstatic tones and contrapuntal
harmonies.
A closer look at the lyric reveals a micro version of this macro pattern of
restraint and release. The lines of the verses alternate between bifurcated
phrases, split by a medial caesura (a slight pause in the center of the line),
and whole lines that Sting performs in a single breath. The bifurcated lines
are split in two through natural syntactical divisions (a comma, a colon) and
through stylized pauses in phrasing that Sting employs to shape the line to

fit the song’s rhythmic pattern. In the quatrain that follows, you’ll notice that
Sting pauses briefly in the first and third lines—in the first, to signal the
natural syntactical break of the comma, and in the third, to continue the
stylized effect of phrasing that contrasts the line with the one that precedes
it and the one that follows it. I’ve used a double slash mark to signal the me-
dial caesura born of how Sting performs the line:

Young teacher, the subject

Of schoolgirl fantasy
She wants him//so badly
Knows what she wants to be

The first and third lines lurch and reach, while the second and fourth easily
unfurl. The contrast and tension between these lyric states of being embody
the speaker’s conflicted emotion, rendered in syllable and sound.
In the song’s chorus, the restraint-and-release pattern expresses itself in
the halting, repeated phrasing of the song’s title line. Here the language acts
out in sound and semantics the resistance of the teacher to the allures of
student. For all this, the song leaves the narrative unresolved, unrequited,
and unconsummated. The end rhyme further accentuates the herky-jerky
denial and fulfillment of the rhythm, following an alternating rhymed/
unrhymed ABCBDEFE pattern in the first two verses. The rhyme intensi-
fies in the final verse through alternating rhymes in the first half of the
octet as ABAB instead of the expected ABCB. “ Don’t Stand So Close to Me”
is a rich example of the ways that the lyrics on the page both reflect the per-
formance and, in fact, dictate the terms of the performance they demand.
Similarly playing with this alternating pattern of restraint and release
is Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun.” Like “ Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” its
lyr ics’ imbedded rhythmic structure conditions the song’s per formance.
“Black Hole Sun” was a surprise summer hit in 1994 for the Seattle-based
alternative rock group. The band’s frontman, Chris Cornell, married brood-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

ing lyr ics and a somber theme with a simple, delicate melody. Boasting a
big, memorable chorus, one can understand how so many made space for it
on their summer playlists beside anodyne hits like All-4-One’s “I Swear” and
Ace of Bass’s “ Don’t Turn Around.” Cornell’s performance distinguishes
“Black Hole Sun,” his rich tenor gliding along a pulsing melodic line. There’s
something bluesy about the performance, in Cornell’s tasteful moments of
rhythmic departure and in the repetitions. The lyric begins with a series: “In
my eyes, indisposed / In disguises no one knows.” In the span of a rhyming

couplet, Cornell plays a game of repetition with a difference. “In” dances

across the lines, shifting shapes even as it creates an emphatic pattern of
rhythm and sound.
A broader pattern establishes itself in these first two lines as well, one
that will govern both verses in the song. It is imbedded in the song’s linguis-
tic DNA and does not announce itself, but it nonetheless shapes the song and
the singing. This pattern is the back and forth between a line of six syllables
followed by one of seven. The first verse matches this pattern to precision:
6/7/6/7/6/7/6/7. The missing syllable in the lines of six syllables is given over
to a medial caesura. In all but the penultimate line of the verse, this caesura
corresponds to a natural separation of syntax as well, like this: “Boiling heat,
summer stench.” After the six-syllable line, we experience the seven-syllable
line as a kind of release—an uncoiling, if subtle—in Cornell’s phrasing.
The song’s phrasal patterning is particularly intriguing, however, because
of what Cornell does in the second verse. Rather than simply duplicating the
strict adherence to the 6/7 syllable pattern, he introduces a few instances of
targeted departure from it. These departures are slight enough that they
subvert without surrendering the form. In each of the three instances of the
eight-line verse where he departs from the pattern, he does so by extending
the syllable count. After beginning with the 6/7 pattern in the first two lines,
he dilates the next two to 7/8 syllables, strictly speaking, though his perfor-
mance of the lines downplays the difference as he partly swallows the extra
syllables. You can hear—and see—this play out most prominently in the sec-
ond verse, where I’ve marked his elision of the extra syllables by according
the line a half syllable:

Stuttering, cold and damp 6

Steal the warm wind, tired friend 7
Times are gone for honest men 6.5
And sometimes far too long for snakes7.5
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

In my shoes, a walking sleep 6.5

In my youth I pray to keep 7
Heaven send Hell away 6
No one sings like you anymore 8

Finally, in the last line of the verse Cornell decidedly enunciates all eight
syllables (“No one sings like you anymore”), which conjures a tone of wist-
fulness and longing. The chorus comes in, but, as if to reassert the pattern

of the verses and remind us that the divergences from the pattern were no
accident, Cornell offers something of a coda: two lines that resume the 6/7 syl-
lable count. Instead of leading into a third verse, the rhythm pattern returns
again to the rousing strains of the chorus, getting swallowed up, as it were, in
the black hole sun.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Rhyme
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Bradley, Adam. The Poetry of Pop, Yale University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fdu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4815350.
Created from fdu-ebooks on 2025-02-09 22:08:59.
W
hat rhymes with “liberty”? In 1832 Samuel Francis Smith,
a twenty-three-year- old student at Andover Seminary,
agreed to write lyrics for a patriotic song to be performed at a
children’s Independence Day celebration at Boston’s Park
Street Church. Cribbing his melody from a tune collected in a German song-
book for children, which had borrowed its melody from the British national
anthem, “God Save the King,” Smith soon fitted words to song. “Seizing a
scrap of waste paper, I began to write,” he later recalled, “and in half an hour,
I think, the words stood upon it substantially as they are sung to-day.” Smith
would title his song “America,” though most of us now know it by its famous
first line—which also contains the rhyme he found for “liberty”—“My Coun-
try ’Tis of Thee.”
Rhyming “liberty” with “ ’tis of thee” might seem like surrender. After all,
rhyme is generally understood as the concordance of sound and of stress in
the endings of two words. “Cat” rhymes with “bat,” and “power” rhymes with
“shower” because the words begin differently and end the same. Given a
multisyllabic word like “liberty,” however, one-word rhyming options are few.
Charlotte Brontë rhymes “liberty” with “tyranny” in her poem “Preference,”
and Shakespeare, with “injury” in Sonnet LVIII. Needless to say, neither of
those words would have suited Smith’s patriotic occasion. One can imagine
Smith working backward from the word he knows he wants to use, planting
a rhyme in an earlier line that will let him use it. Just a few lines later we
see him doing it again, devising a pair of rhymes for the multisyllabic word
“mountainside”— a word that has no single-word rhyme partner:

Land where my fathers died

Land of the pilgrims’ pride

From ev’ry mountainside

Multisyllabic words like “liberty” and “mountainside” all but demand that
the songwriter rhyme single words with phrases instead of other single
words. The phrase immeasurably expands one’s semantic options while still
satisfying rhyme’s sonic requirements. Since we experience song lyr ics
through the ears rather than the eyes, any awkwardness and artificiality of

such rhymes that might be exposed on the page are muted: sounds, after all,
are sounds, whether drawn from one word or from many.
In the poetry of pop, rhyme frequently expresses itself in the relation of
words with phrases. Because a multisyllabic rhyme word takes up consider-
able space on a line, it also necessarily implicates itself in that line’s rhythm.
What results are rhythm-rhyme units in which the sonic echo binding
phrases extends beyond the narrow constraints of the rhyming pair to the
words around them. On the Beatles “Michelle” from 1965, for instance, Paul
McCartney sings:

I love you, I love you, I love you

That’s all I want to say
Until I find a way

The rhyme here is full and simple: “say” and “way.” But the pattern of rhyth-
mic stress extends past those two words, securing the lines in rhythm as
well:

That’s all/I want/to say

Until/I find/a way

Both lines are written in iambic trimeter, with the heaviest stresses falling
on the final accented syllables “want to say” and “find a way.” You’ll hear
this same joining of rhythm and rhyme on Smokey Robinson and the Mira-
cles’ “Tears of a Clown,” where Robinson writes (and sings) the following cou-
plet: “Just like Pagliacci did / I try to keep my sadness hid.” The lines are a
wonderful collusion of the high cultural (the reference to the pagliacci—
Italian for “clowns”—from the 1892 Ruggero Leoncavallo opera of the same
name) and the colloquial contrivance of the second line (“sadness hid”). As
with the Beatles example, Robinson offers a simple rhyme (“did” and “hid”)
that he imbeds in parallel rhythmic phrases (“Pagliacci did” and “my sad-
ness hid”). As a consequence, we experience rhyme in these lines not simply
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

as a connection between two words but as the union of two phrases in rhythm
and rhyme. “I think that a song should be poetic,” Robinson told the Detroit
Free Press in 1966, around the time he wrote “Tears of a Clown.” “I want to
hear something that rhymes.”
In instances of such asymmetrical rhyming—where a multisyllabic word
is paired with a phrase—the attendant rhythm pattern plays an even greater
role. A compelling rhythmic echo across lines underscores the connection

between rhyming units, rendering that which might come across as artifi-
cial in print seem natural in sound. Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” is a
study in rhyme’s fluidity of form. Almost any lines from the song will do to
illustrate this. Look at these from the beginning:

Rows and floes of angel hair

And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I’ve looked at clouds that way

These four lines set the AAAB rhyme pattern that all the song’s verses will
follow. They also model the collaborative work of rhythm and rhyme to erase
any awkwardness of rhyming “angel hair” and “in the air” with “everywhere.”
Save for the trochees that dominate the opening lines of each verse, the song
is structured entirely in the rising rhythm of iambs—iambic tetrameter, with
iambic trimeter in the concluding line of each verse. Mitchell’s ordered rhyth-
mic universe in “Both Sides Now” creates a fixed form against which to play
with patterns and disruptions in end rhyme, befitting a song about the loss
of innocence in the face of life’s experience.
Almost all pop songs contain rhyme, at the ends of lines and sometimes
inside of them as well. End rhyme keeps time. It governs the rhythmic flow
of the language, marking units of sound and of thought. Rhyme is the defin-
ing aesthetic demand on the song lyric, something that cannot be said for
poetry written for the page. It’s ironic that rhyme, the quality that once
defined poetry, now clearly distinguishes poetry from song lyrics. We live in “a
rhyme-drenched era” where “strong rhyme breathe[s] again” through rap and
other forms of popular song lyric, not to mention advertising jingles, catch-
phrases, and political slogans. “As all those songs stuck in our heads confirm,”
writes the literary critic David Caplan, “the nature of rhyme has changed. It
has grown more confident and assertive; it claims the airwaves and Internet;
it swaggers and seduces.” For all the variety of rhyme sources, song lyrics are
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

by far the richest archive of rhymes of all types—full, slant, multisyllabic, and
many others.
The story of rhyme’s flight from contemporary lyric poetry is a familiar
one, having to do with twentieth-century poets’ conscious retreat to the page
and studied submersion of the songlike qualities that once predominated in
poetry meant for the ear as much as for the eye. “One ‘discards rhyme,’ ” Ezra
Pound wrote in his influential 1915 essay “Affirmations: As for Imagisme,”
“not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat,

feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are not to be
represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns.” Rhyme begins as sur-
prise, a coincidence of sound that spans differences of sense. Overfamiliarity
of par ticu lar rhyme pairs (the “moon” and “June” that songwriters often
bemoan) threatens stagnation.
For most poets today, and for their patient readers, rhyme is a vestige of
the past. “And now,” writes the English poet Glyn Maxwell, “your kinsfolk
think rhyme is sepia, Modernism stark black-and-white, and whatever he
or she did this morning high-definition colour.” Contemporary poets often
eschew rhyme entirely or choose subtler sonic devices such as assonance,
which The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics defines as “the rep-
etition of a vowel or diphthong in nonrhyming stressed syllables near enough
to each other for the echo to be discernible.” Songwriters sometimes do the
same. Robert Plant substitutes assonance for rhyme in the following lines
from “Stairway to Heaven”: “When she gets there she knows / If the stores are
all closed.” The long “o” sound binds the end words in the successive lines,
albeit not as tightly as a full rhyme would do.
It is possible that this rhyme-deprived period of poetry will be looked upon
generations hence as an anomaly. Though one is not likely to make a strong
claim for the cultural permanence of the rhyme-rich lyrics found on the Bill-
board Hot 100 chart, one can nonetheless argue for their continuity with
the long-standing poetic tradition of rhymed verse. “A striking feature of the
history of rhyme is that even when, as in our own era, rhyming does not
dominate poetry, the use of rhyme, continuing or renewed, does not acquire
an archaic cast,” observes the poet and critic Susan Stewart. If anything,
rhyme today is at the cutting edge of culture—at the very least, it is at the
cutting edge of popular culture.
Rhyme’s history in pop music has been far from fixed. Quite the contrary,
the story of rhyme in twentieth- and early twenty-first-century pop songs is
one of revolution and dramatic change. That story begins with Tin Pan Al-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

ley, which cultivated a catholic rhyme aesthetic that required full rhymes at
all times. Within that rhyme constraint, songwriters sought novel pairings
to display their wit and skill. Ira Gershwin, who handled many of the lyric
duties for his brother George’s tunes, went to great lengths to find a rhyme
for “enjoyment” on the jaunty “Nice Work If You Can Get It” from 1937: “The
fact is, the only work that really brings enjoyment / Is the kind that is girl and
boy meant.” A generation later, Johnny Mercer devised unusual—though still
perfect—rhymes like “Parcheesi” and “real easy.” This tradition survives to

this day on Broadway. Witness these lines from “Right Hand Man,” a song
from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: “Now, I’m the model of a modern major
general / The venerated Virginian veteran whose men are all / Lining up . . .” A
sharp enjambment between the second and third lines puts Miranda in posi-
tion to rhyme “general” with the unexpected phrase “men are all.” On the
page, it looks contrived; in performance, it flows fluidly.
Early rock and roll eroded but did not entirely efface the practice of per-
fect rhymes. The 1960s rock revolution, which changed so much about the
pop song, changed rhyme as well. Recalling his days with the British beat
band the Hollies, Graham Nash describes the new rhyme perspective like
this: “We abandoned the trite moon-and-June rhymes, the hold-your-hand
and just-one-kiss fluff that had governed lyrics for so long, in order to express
ourselves musically. As songwriters, everyone’s perspective was expanding,
and with it their imaginations, their command of language, their facility
with rhyme.” The Hollies’ 1966 song “Stop Stop Stop,” for instance, includes
conventional full rhymes like “door” and “floor” as well as textured slant
rhymes like “breathe” and “leave” and instances of assonance like “week” and
“street.”
Increasingly, popular music has taken a more relaxed approach to rhyme
or, to put it in the active sense, it has expanded the rhyme palate for the pur-
poses of sound, sense, and feeling. Indeed, many pop music performers now
unmoor their lyr ics entirely from rhyme. On Alison Krauss and Robert
Plant’s marvelous Raising Sand (2007), they recorded a Rowland Salley com-
position called “Killing the Blues” that largely avoids rhyme. Instead, it re-
lies on patterned repetition of sound and phrase; the chorus repeats four
times and grounds the song in its familiar diction. But that song is an anom-
aly on the album, a promise of what a lyric without rhyme can achieve.
Rap music, emerging in the 1970s and reaching pop-music saturation by
the turn of the century, apotheosized rhyme—indeed, “rhyme” became syn-
onymous both with the product of the rapper’s composition (a rhyme is a rap
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

lyric) and with the act of rapping itself (to rhyme is to perform a rap lyric).
In its early years, rap favored neat couplets and full rhymes. As the art ex-
panded, it embraced a far broader rhyme palate. In the process, it breathed
life back into ancient rhyme practices while developing rhyming techniques
without precedent. “Who now, in your now, makes the strong rhyme breathe
again?” asks Maxwell. “The rap artist, for one. Rap rhymes for show, for fun,
for power. Why is rap the shape it is? Why doesn’t it pause for breath? Because

it’s an urban form, it formed with others standing close, itching to interrupt
it, to break it, best it, it won’t stop till it’s had its say: This-and-hey-this-and-
how-about-this-and-then-this-and-also-this-and-hell-yes-this! It wants you
to feel it was conjured into life, whipped up under pressure, not handed down,
owing nothing, made up right now.” Maxwell has much of this right, though
he overstates the degree to which rap is breathless in its expression, flooding
the lyric line with words, rhyming and otherwise. “Rap—so many words, so
little said,” Keith Richards quipped to the New York Daily News in 2015. But
rap can also be deliberate and measured. Now that rap is in its fifth decade,
one can also see the many formal influences it has exercised on other genres,
particularly when it comes to rhyming.
Simply pointing out that rhyme lives in pop songs, however, gets us no-
where beyond curiosity. I could spend the rest of the chapter diagramming
a menagerie of rhyme varieties, linking them up with those of print-based
poetry, and call myself quite clever. For analysis of these rhymes to matter,
though, for it to offer something useful for our larger analysis of the poetry
of pop songs, we need to focus on rhyme’s reason for being in a song lyric. Is
it possible to discern patterns in how the lyrics to pop songs use rhyme that
suggest something about the development of the song form? What does it tell
us that rhyme has continued to thrive in recorded music when it has with-
ered in poetry? What is it about rhyme that serves the needs of our con-
temporary culture, and how, if at all, do those needs differ from the needs of
the past?
This chapter is dedicated to exploring these questions. It posits that, though
rhyme serves numerous functions, we can usefully identify three core pur-
poses. The first of these is rhyme’s relation to pattern. Rhyme, like rhythm,
satisfies an inborn human desire for repetition with a difference. The small
music that rhyme makes, especially when conjoined with rhythm, pleases
us on a deep, neural level. This is tied up equally in rhythm’s and rhyme’s
oft-touted mnemonic effects. After all, we remember lines with rhythm
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

because they fashion a pattern that the mind fills with the right words; we
remember lines that rhyme because rhyme is addictive, compelling us to find
more instances that echo the same sound across distance and difference.
Everything from nursery rhymes to Kendrick Lamar verses stick to the
mind because of their par ticular patterning of rhythm and rhyme. “How
much such recitation depends on musical rhythm and how much purely on
linguistic rhyming is difficult to tell,” writes the neurologist Oliver Sacks,

“but these are surely related— both ‘rhyme’ and ‘rhythm’ derive from the
Greek, carrying the conjoined meanings of measure, motion, and stream. An
articulate stream, a melody or prosody, is necessary to carry one along, and
this is something that unites language and music, and may underlie their
perhaps common origins.” The patterned music of rhythm in rhyme in song
is perhaps the primary pleasure to be taken from the language of pop music.
The second function of rhyme is its specific expression in recorded song:
the way that songwriters harness rhyme’s capacity to govern the flow of
rhythm and melody in vocal performance. The distance or proximity of rhyme
is the most obvious way that rhyme helps control a song’s rhythmic flow. A
rhyme marks a resolution; its deferral can prompt either excitement or frus-
tration depending on how the lyric accounts for that span of absence. The
rock-rap group 21 Pilots begins their 2015 song “Stressed Out” with a rhym-
ing couplet that sets up the expectation of another couplet to follow. Rather
than satisfying that pattern, though, they subvert it to illustrate the content
of the lyric:

I wish I found some better sounds no one’s ever heard

I wish I had a better voice that sang some better words
I wish I found some chords in an order that is new
I wish I didn’t have to rhyme every time I sang

The result is jarring, but the effect is temporary; the next two lines restore
the couplet with a perfect rhyme, “shrink” and “think.” Though resisting
rhyme both in form and meaning, the song ultimately accedes to rhyme’s im-
placable force.
Finally, rhyme is perhaps the songwriter’s greatest creative constraint,
and this constraint is the songwriter’s greatest opportunity to put virtuosity
in evidence and, importantly, to underscore thought and feeling. In the Broad-
way tradition, for instance, one finds lyricists working to resolve the tension
between their desire to expand the language of their lyrics and the responsi-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

bility of maintaining perfect rhyme pairs. When Hal David wrote the lyrics to
Burt Bacharach’s music for “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” from the 1968 mu-
sical Promises, Promises, it seems as if he chose some words precisely because
they would prove difficult to rhyme. In the first verse, for instance, he pairs
“bubble” with one of its few perfect rhyme pairs: “trouble.” In the second verse,
he offers this couplet in response to the question “What do you get when you
kiss a girl?”: “You get enough germs to catch pneumonia / After you do, she’ll
never phone ya.” The rhyming pair “pneumonia” and “phone ya” satisfies the

need for a sonic echo even as its artificiality embodies the sardonic tone of
the song.
Most often, though, songwriters seek to resolve rhyme’s challenge in more
naturalistic and conversational ways. The Australian singer-songwriter
Courtney Barnett’s playful “Elevator Operator” from her 2015 debut LP
Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit is a study in conscious
constraint and creative evasion in rhyme. The opening lines sound rich in
rhyme when performed without including perfect rhyme at all: “Oliver Paul,
twenty years old / Thick head of hair, worries he’s going bald.” “Paul,” “old,”
and “bald” roughly relate to one another through assonance, while “old” and
“bald” connect even more securely in a slant rhyme. The effect is a pleasing
difference with a reassuring unity.
Not all songwriters, of course, are thrilled with the expectation of rhym-
ing their lines. “I’m not a big believer in rhyme,” says Tori Amos. “Who deci-
ded that rhyming was the way to do it? Who was that guy? Let’s go find him
and have a little chat, because this has really cramped writers for a long,
long time. It’s about content, it’s not about the rhyme.” Billy Joel, though a
very different kind of artist from Amos, concurs with her. “I hate the tyr-
anny of rhyme,” he says. “But if you’re going to be musical and you’re going
to make something work, nine times out of ten you do have to rhyme because
it would be as if you ended a musical phrase in a different key with no rela-
tion to anything else that had happened before.” This resignation to rhyme
speaks as much to audience expectation as it does to tradition and songwrit-
ing craft. When it comes to pop songs, rhymes just sound right.
Working with and against the posited ideal of the perfect rhyme pair,
songwriters stretch and bend rhyme’s capacity, and sometimes even break
it, in the name of making sound, feeling, and meaning through their songs.
An effective rhyme pair or rhyme scheme both entertains and instructs the
listener. Song lyrics are by far the most robust living repository of rhymed
words, so it seems fitting to look here to discover just why rhyme matters so
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

much to us, what cultural and aesthetic functions it serves, and the many
ways that it lives in lyrics.

RHYME DEFINED

Rhyme is the amity of sounds. In its perfect form, it consists of the repeti-
tion of the last stressed vowel sound and all the sounds following that vowel
(such as in “demonstrate” and “exonerate”). “Rhyme is a play with words and

its first effect is pleasure,” writes the poet and critic Jeffrey Wainwright. “It
comes from delighted surprise as words, remote from each other in mean-
ing but which happen to sound alike, are made to coincide.” Rhyme, there-
fore, works on a principle of expectation and surprise. The mind is tasked
with linking the familiar (in sound) with the unfamiliar (in meaning), re-
sulting in a pleasure akin to what one feels in completing a puzzle.
A taxonomy of rhyme begins with the division between “masculine” and
“feminine” rhyme. Masculine rhymes terminate in stressed syllables, such
as “can” and “man.” Feminine rhymes add an additional unaccented syllable
after the accented rhyming syllable, as in “mountain” and “fountain.” Often
songwriters will fashion multisyllabic patterns that echo both rhyme and
rhythm across multiple syllables. Consider the opening lines from Graham
Nash’s “Marrakesh Express,” recorded by Crosby, Stills & Nash:

Looking at the world through the sunset in your eyes

Traveling the train through clear Moroccan skies

This couplet is bound by the simple masculine end rhyme of “eyes” and “skies”
and also by the five-syllable rhythmic pattern of stressed-unstressed-stressed-
unstressed-stressed syllables. Rhythm and rhyme combined produce a lilting
tone in keeping with the electric guitar and Hammond organ instrumenta-
tion and the exotic train ride the lyrics describe.
So far, it might seem that rhyme functions almost identically in song lyr-
ics and in poetry. The difference, of course, is that songwriters express rhyme
solely in sound; the secondary pleasure that poets employ of patterning for
the eye is unavailable to them. Rhyme in song lyrics is an aural expression
that makes no necessary distinction in orthography or even, at times, in the
placement of the rhyme along the line. “Songs are made for ears, not eyes,”
writes Pat Pattison. “Because people listen to songs, you must learn to write
for eyeless ears. Rhyme creates a sonic roadmap: it tells those eyeless ears
where to go and when to stop. It shows them the way.” In this regard, rhyme
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

serves a greater structural purpose in recorded song than it does in poetry

meant for the page. Rhyme marks the breaks in the lyric much the way that
a line break does for the reader of poetry; it generates associations between
words and linguistic structures that a poet might rely on visual means to
create in a poem.
This sonic roadmap supplies structure, both of sound and of meaning. “We
expect lyrics to behave in a certain way when combined with music,” explains

the songwriter Jimmy Webb. “For instance, we expect rhymes or near rhymes
or even false rhymes to fall in certain precise and predetermined locations.”
These “precise and predetermined locations” include the ends of lyric lines
and other places along the line that are accorded rhythmic stress. For the
listener, then, rhyme gives shape, signaling points of transition, completed
thoughts, and connections across the lyric. More than any single element of
poetics, rhyme sets up a habit of linguistic expectation in the listener. The
pleasure rhyme brings is based on the balance of that expectation with vari-
ation in a process of repetition and revision.
For song lyricists and poets, rhyme imposes a discipline of craft that in-
spires rather than curtails creative expression. “Far from a constraint,”
writes Susan Stewart, “rhyme endows us with certain freedoms— among
them: the vernacular, including the locality of the poem itself, released from
the standard; the monolingual in dialogue with the multilingual; sound
opened up by vision, and sound released from meaning entirely; expectation
released into surprise; and pattern drawn from the oblivion of time. Rhyme
is perfect, imperfect, total, and partial at once.” Rhyme’s liberating poten-
tial can tether sound and meaning tightly to one another or unloose them in
an orgy of sound play. Matched with voice and song, rhyme realizes potential
that it only hints at on the page. “Rhyming, while being a limitation, has also
an element of magic to it,” writes Sting. “It is essentially a shamanic art, and
to follow its winding path is to reenter that realm that is halfway between
sleep and waking, where the mysterious imperative of the unconscious can
reveal itself on the page.” To understand why rhyme means so much to song
lyrics, it helps to begin with the mind and body and end with the imagination.

PATTERN AND RHYME

Just as the body responds to rhythm, the mind responds to rhyme. The
brain’s predictive capacity filters out things that we can anticipate and re-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

wards us with dopamine when we discover something out of place. In other

words, we are pattern-seeking animals that delight in the surprise of a break
in those patterns. Rhyme satisfies this cognitive reward system. “We may
expect a rhyme sound, but in a good poem we enjoy the unexpected, perhaps
farfetched, move, and the unexpected word, that lead us to the right rhyme,”
writes the literary critic Brian Boyd. Boyd’s idea of the “right” rhyme is key.
“It is not so much necessary that rhyming be conspicuously clever,” explains

the songwriter Gene Lees, “although clever rhyming is an attractive and of-
ten charming effect, as that it be good rhyming: solid, correct, and executed
in such a way that it has a feeling of the natural, the improvisatory, the un-
premeditated.” In pop songs, the expression of rhyme ranges from the showy
to the workmanlike to the unobtrusive and even to the nonexistent.
Consider this simplistic but serviceable rhyme from the Beatles: “Love,
love me do / You know I love you.” As Ben Blatt pointed out in early 2014 on
Slate.com, do/you is the most prevalent rhyme pairing among songs appearing
on Billboard’s Year End Hot 100 chart between 1960 and 2013. The twenty
most popular rhymes over that same period are, in order: do/you; be/me; me/
see; true/you; baby/__ me; go/know; through/you; around/down; night/right;
mind/time; to/you; mine/time; day/way; free/me; away/day; say/way; away/say;
too/you; be/see; gone/on. Among the twenty rhyme pairs on the list, twelve are
full (or perfect) rhymes and the remainder are what is variously termed
half, slant, or false rhymes. Sixteen of the pairs involve only single-syllable
words.
Given the nature of lyric address, particularly in love songs, it should
come as no surprise that “you” and “me” are among the most common words
in search of rhymes. It is a cruel twist of linguistic fate that pop music— a
music preoccupied with the theme of love—must contend with the fact that
English offers only four full rhymes for “love”: “above,” “dove,” “glove,” and
“shove.” In the face of that expressive paucity, songwriters have devised a
number of strategies. Many, of course, expand the rhyme palate to include
slant rhymes. Others avoid rhyming the word “love”—or even using it—
altogether, expressing the intensity of love’s emotions by other means. Still
others embrace the limitations of love’s full rhymes and devise creative
ways to turn a phrase. It stands to reason that when the point of view and
themes of a song are familiar, the rhymes will be as well. The inverse might
also be true: Find a song with unusual themes and it might just present some
unusual rhymes as well. Queen, who Blatt points out makes a practice of
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

seeking unusual rhyme pairs, rhymes “poor family” with “monstrosity” on

their operatic hit “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
Uniqueness alone, however, does not guarantee a great rhyme. Some song
lyrics render familiarity a virtue. There’s something deeply comforting in
having one’s expectations satisfied. Graham Parsons’s “Return of the Griev-
ous Angel,” a duet with Emmylou Harris, is a remarkable song with mostly
unremarkable rhymes. The song’s final lines illustrate the power of the pro-
saic one often finds in the rhymes of song lyrics:

And I remembered something you once told me

And I’ll be damned if it did not come true
Twenty thousand roads I went down, down, down
And they all led me straight back home to you

Right before our eyes and ears is what Blatt tells us is the fourth most com-
mon rhyme pair from the Billboard Hot 100 charts—“true” and “you.” It’s
here for a reason, though, one that communicates conflict, comfort, and
resolution—an entire relationship captured in a single rhyme pair.
What differentiates a clever rhyme from a stale one is the balance between
expectation and surprise. There’s a communal context to it as well: a rhyme
pair might be fresh and surprising at its moment of conception but grow stale
from overuse, just as often happens with similes and metaphors. A rhyme may
be richly emotive in one lyric and simply wooden or trite in another.
Placement also often dictates the form a rhyme takes. Not all word sounds
are created equal, especially when it comes to end rhymes. “Do you know
Keith Richards’ theory of songwriting?” Billy Joel asks.

He has this theory and I subscribe to it—it’s called vowel movements.

When you write certain combinations of notes, certain chords, the
rhyme and the sound of the words that came before it have to have a
certain sound to it. Like if I wrote a song like, “I love you just the way
you ARE .” It’s a good way to end that phrase. ARE . You can’t say “da da
da da da FRED.” FRED wouldn’t have flown. So that vowel sound, “ah(r),”
is soft. So Keith says when they write their songs, that’s what they
do. They just go “ah, ee, oh,” what sounds right, and then they figure
out what word it’s gonna be. I do that a lot. Just the way you are.
Zanzibar. I like that “ah(r)” thing.

Leave it to Keith Richards to make a scatological pun out of his rhyme

theory. A quick glance at the Rolling Stones’ biggest hits suggests that Jag-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

ger and Richards put the theory into frequent practice. “Sympathy for the
Devil” offers up open vowel rhymes like name/game and taste/waste. A later
hit, “Mixed Emotions,” contains languorous rhymes like coat/throat and
going/fro-ing. Richards’s vowel movement theory is in keeping with the prac-
tice of Tin Pan Alley lyricists, who also sought out long vowel sounds for
rhymes at the ends of lines.
Though end rhymes are an expectation in pop, they are by no means an
immutable law. Singers and songwriters sometimes work together to affirm

while resisting these end rhyme expectations. A rare and remarkable in-
stance of this occurs when a rhyming couplet includes another unrhymed
word at the end of the second line. The second verse of Kacey Musgraves’s
“Back on the Map,” for instance, begins like this:

Something steady, something good

It’s probably closer than I thought it could be

Just as soon as the couplet “good” and “could” registers in our ear, the lyric
subverts that sonic resolution by insisting on the semantic closure that
the phrase’s meaning demands. Looking only at the words on the page, one
might think that what we have here is a rhyming couplet with a sharp
enjambment—that “be” should fall on the next line. Listening to the recorded
song, though, leaves no room for debate: the melodic phrase demands that
“could be” belong on the same line, embedded in the same musical space that
the line before it inhabits. Why would a songwriter wish to mess up a per-
fectly good rhyming couplet? The answer lies in the desire to balance expec-
tation with novelty. These orphan-word rhymes set the unrhymed word in
relief, calling attention to its meaning in thought, sound, and feeling. This
practice finds powerful expression in the chorus to Adele’s “Hello.”

Hello from the outside

At least I can say that I’ve tried
To tell you I’m sorry for breaking your heart
But it don’t matter; it clearly doesn’t tear you apart anymore

Whereas Musgraves’s appended word is required to complete the syntac-

tical meaning of the couplet, Adele’s couplet is complete in itself. The added
word transforms a thought that already seems whole. Adele’s realization that
the hurt she caused her estranged lover no longer tears him apart anymore
admits that it once did, and that his recovery from the pain closes all pos-
sibility of finding their love again. “Anymore” might be the single most heart-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

breaking word in the song; Adele’s singing charges it with all the regret
and loss of the lyric as a whole. It’s no surprise that both Musgraves’s and
Adele’s examples come from songs about lost love; these acts of rhyme
disruption underscore the unsettled nature of the relationships the lyrics
describe. The form fits the function of the rhyme.
Pop songs are often calculating in the ways that they play on the listen-
er’s expectations of rhyme. The mind quickly acculturates to rhyme patterns,

especially when it comes to full, single-syllabic end rhymes. Lyricists use

their knowledge of this habituation to achieve a number of effects: conjuring
a mood of imbalance or dis-ease through complicating or withholding the ex-
pected rhyme; intensifying the emotion of the end rhyme by augmenting it
with internal rhymes; or, in rare cases, leading the mind to a particular
rhyme word even though the word actually in the lyric is something entirely
different. I call these last rhymes “ghost rhymes,” because the rhyming word
our mind fills in hovers unexpressed over the word we hear.
Ghost rhymes often serve a comic purpose. At the 2003 ESPY Awards, the
actor and singer Jamie Foxx performed a silly slow jam for the tennis player
Serena Williams called “Can I Be Your Tennis Ball?” that telegraphs a
risqué rhyme only to correct it in time to meet the scrutiny of basic cable: “Do
it slow or do it fast / Can I fit inside your . . . bag.” The implied slant rhyme
( fast/ass) set beside the assonance of the lyric as performed ( fast/bag) cre-
ates an impish, if easy, punch line. It invites just enough shock to prompt a
few laughs. Ghost rhyme often follows what Peter McGraw and Joel Warner
describe in their study of comedy, The Humor Code, as a “benign violation.”
By this theory, “humor only occurs when something seems wrong, unsettling
or threatening (i.e., a violation), but simultaneously seems okay, acceptable,
or safe (i.e., benign).” In the case of the ghost rhyme, the stated rhyme word
provides benign cover for the ghost-rhyme word that would otherwise be
experienced as a violation of taste and decorum.
Not every ghost rhyme serves a comic purpose; sometimes songwriters
harness its power and appeal to achieve a more sobering effect. A good ex-
ample of this is the Killers’ “Mr. Brightside,” where the entire payoff of the
lyric relies on rhyming sleight of hand. The song describes a man witness-
ing a romantic assignation between an ex-girlfriend whom he hasn’t gotten
over and her new lover. The band’s front man, Brandon Flowers, sings these
lines in the pre-chorus:
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Now I’m falling asleep and she’s calling a cab

While he’s having a smoke and she’s taking a drag
Now they’re going to bed and my stomach is sick
And it’s all in my head but she’s touching his . . . chest

The first two lines establish a rhyme expectation, with slanting end rhymes
(cab/drag). The next two lines embed rhyme, introducing a perfect internal
rhyme that is picked up in the fourth line (bed/head), further underscoring

the expectation of a perfect end rhyme to go with “sick.” It takes little imag-
ination to figure out what rhyme word might fit the circumstance; the lyric
coyly evades it by substituting the word we hear in our head (“dick”) with
a PG analog (“chest”) that not only doesn’t rhyme, but actively disrupts the
rhyme pattern. The music shifts here as well, setting the lyric even more
dramatically in relief. Why do this? One obvious reason is that it offers a
clever way for the band to make a radio-friendly song that still slyly com-
municates its sexualized intentions. It also externalizes the singer’s inter-
nal dilemma as he struggles with the fact that his imagination is conjuring
images that might well be false (“and it’s all in my head”). In other words,
the song aptly displays what the singer actually sees and what he imagines
in the deep corners of his jealousy. The rhyme pattern also creates a vital
point of aesthetic interest in the song, one that plays upon the fundamental
lyric practice of repetition with a difference. And finally, it implicates the lis-
tener in the taboo; after all, we are the ones supplying the naughty word, not
the band.
The history of ghost rhyme in popular song stretches back in the Ameri-
can context at least to Tin Pan Alley. Cole Porter, for instance, writes the
following lines in “I’ve Come to Wife It Wealthily in Padua”:

If she scream like a teething brat,

If she scratch like a tiger cat,
If she fight like a raging boar,
I have oft stuck a pig before.

After the brat/cat rhyme, the mind is inclined to complete the rhyme for the
word at the end of the next line, “boar,” and what comes most easily? It must
be “whore.” Porter disdains that easy rhyme for another, but in keeping with
his assiduous craft he simply finds another word that rhymes (“before”) in-
stead of subverting the rhyme entirely as the Killers would later do.
A direct descendant of the Broadway stage musical, Disney’s recent ani-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

mated megahit Frozen also employs the ghost-rhyming technique. Josh Gad’s
character of Olaf, the snowman, has a big musical number, “In Summer,”
that includes the following ghost rhyme that plays up Olaf ’s ignorance of his
fate should he find himself under the sun: “Winter’s a good time to stay in
and cuddle, / But put me in summer and I’ll be a . . . happy snowman!” Olaf ’s
unknowing evasion of the obvious rhyme of “puddle” with “cuddle” under-
scores his obliviousness. It’s a knowing nod from the songwriters, Kristen

Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, aimed not at the core demographic of

four-year-olds, but at older children and adults who will be in on the dra-
matic irony.
This ghost-rhyming technique may have been exploited most effectively,
though, in the thrash metal band Anthrax’s “I’m the Man.” “I’m the Man” is a
raucous fusion of ear-sheering guitars and rapid-fire, rap-inspired wordplay.
The band started playing it live in 1986 before recording a studio version in
1987, making it among the earliest rap-rock hybrids ever released, alongside
Aerosmith and Run-D.M.C.’s “Walk This Way” (1986) and the Beastie Boys’
debut album, Licensed to Ill (1986). The song is structured on a series of
playful verses, each ending with a conscious error or euphemistic substitu-
tion that invites a ghost rhyme. Here’s an example:

For a heavy metal band, rap’s a different way

We like to be different and not cliché
They say rap and metal can never mix
Well, all of them can suck our . . . sexual organ in the lower
abdominal area!

In the style of groups like Run-D.M.C., the Anthrax guys trade bars, with
drummer Charlie Benante gleefully flubbing the rhyme in the last line only
to face quick correction from his bandmates: “No, man, it’s ‘dicks’!” The song
is a series of these silly, self-deprecating gestures that entertain the audi-
ence both because they balance anticipation of and surprise in the rhyme’s
disruption and because they reject the atmosphere of effortless cool that real
rap rhymes often inspire. “Although we were really serious about our love
for rap, the song is a total joke,” recalls Anthrax’s rhythm guitarist Scott
Ian in his memoir, which takes its title from this very song. “I’m the Man”
apotheosizes the ghost rhyme, rendering this strategy of studied imperfec-
tion the very form of its art.
Songwriters often respond to the exhaustion of full rhyme by consciously
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

choosing imperfection. There’s something unsettling but appealing in the lack

of rhyme resolution in the following couplet from Bob Dylan’s “Thunder on the
Mountain”: “I’m gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches / I recruit
my army from the orphanages.” Technically, this is a mosaic slant rhyme—
mosaic in that Dylan rhymes multiple words (“sons of bitches”) with a
single four-syllable word (“orphanages”), and slant in that “sons of bitches”
and “orphanages” do not make a perfect rhyme. In the slippage between

the rhyme, however, Dylan wrests interest and energy. “Staying in the un-
conscious frame of mind, you can pull yourself out and throw up two rhymes
first and work back,” Dylan told the music historian Paul Zollo. “You get the
rhymes first and work it back and then see if you can make it make sense in
another kind of way. You can still stay in the unconscious frame of mind to
pull it off, which is the state of mind you have to be in anyway.”
In his 2015 memoir, Elvis Costello recalls engaging in an impromptu
rhyme battle of sorts with Dylan in 2011. Dylan started off by pulling from his
pocket a narrow scroll of paper on which he had written a new lyric. Costello
remembers the language Dylan read as being strange and remarkable. Not to
be outdone, Costello recited a new lyric of his own from memory, ending in
this downright Dylanesque multisyllabic rhyming couplet: “Eyes going in and
out of focus / Mild and bitter from tuberculosis.” “I saw that rhyme register
in Bob’s eyes like a glancing glove and I thought, Okay, I got one shot in, I’d
better not push my luck,” Costello writes.
In the minds of some songwriters, the techniques Dylan and Costello em-
ploy are cheating. A significant number of songwriters, particularly Broadway
lyricists, espouse the view that anything less than a full rhyme is an abdica-
tion of the songwriter’s solemn duty. “All rhymes, even the farthest afield of
the near ones (home/dope), draw attention to the rhymed word; if you don’t
want it to be spotlighted, you’d better not rhyme it,” Stephen Sondheim writes.
“A perfect rhyme snaps the word, and with it the thought, vigorously into
place, rendering it easily intelligible; a near rhyme blurs it.” Here Sondheim
connects clarity and cognition; the rhyme is no mere adornment, but the ves-
sel through which the song communicates most clearly and most evocatively.
On the opposite side of the argument are those who claim that adhering
to perfect rhymes is too restrictive, both of sound and of meaning. “I’ve
gotten to where I just don’t give a damn anymore,” Tom Petty says. “ Because
I’d rather just deal with what I want to say, as exactly as I want to say it,
and I don’t want to compromise it for a rhyme. Sometimes, though, if you
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

don’t rhyme it, it don’t feel good. So, it is the great thorn in the songwriter’s
side that you’ve got to pretty much rhyme what you’re gonna sing. So that’s
part of the trick, getting that rhyme to say what you want.” Petty’s “Ameri-
can Girl” includes only one perfect rhyme pair in the entire song (“alright”
and “all night”), but one must listen closely to notice, and once noticed, one
hardly cares. What’s communicated instead is the song’s restless energy and
its plainspoken eloquence, embodied in the final lines of the second verse:
“God, it’s so painful / Something that’s so close / And still so far out of reach.”

The craft of rhyming is in no small measure, as Petty explains it, the craft
of “getting the rhyme to say what you want.” For this reason, rhyme diction-
aries are many songwriters’ constant companions. They aren’t a way of
cheating, but of surveying the field of possibilities. “Instead of always mak-
ing the music responsible for a feeling of resolution or irresolution at the end
of a section, why not add a further possibility: let the music resolve, but let
the rhyme feel a little incomplete, like tide/life or friend/wind,” writes Pat-
tison. “It could give the songwriter a whole new set of possibilities—more
musical flexibility and more lyrical flexibility. Or, let both the music and
the rhyme feel incomplete. Add to the musical emotion. Or, let them both
slam the door shut. It’s all about prosody: creating musical and lyrical struc-
tures that support (indeed, create) your emotional intent.”
Sometimes a studied tension between music and lyric is precisely what
the songwriter seeks. Leonard Cohen’s exalting and exalted “Hallelujah,” a
modern-day hymn of faith and love and sex, presents the seemingly intrac-
table challenge of identifying rhymes for the song’s multisyllabic title. Cohen
finds a sly solution, rhyming “hallelujah” across multiple verses with “do you,”
“overthrew you,” “I knew you,” “what’s it to you,” “who outdrew you,” and
“come to fool you.” “They are really false rhymes,” Cohen admits, “but they are
close enough that the ear is not violated.” How close the rhymes are also relies
on the choice the singer makes in pronunciation. On both Cohen’s original
studio recording of the song from 1984’s Various Positions and Jeff Buckley’s
famous 1994 cover recording, the singers emphasize rhyme’s proximity by pro-
nouncing the phrases as “do ya,” “overthrew ya,” and so forth. The casual and
colloquial voicing underscores rhyme and also introduces a sardonic note, in
keeping with the tone of Cohen’s overall performance but in contrast with
Buckley’s sincere and soaring rendition. Years later on his haunting record-
ing from 2009’s Live in London, Cohen takes a different vocal path: care-
fully, almost defiantly, enunciating “you” throughout. It’s as if he’s winking
at the audience, letting us know that he’ll no longer capitulate to rhyme’s
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

small tyranny.
Sufjan Stevens’s “Decatur, Round of Applause for Your Step-Mother!” is
also a study in rhyme’s capacity to express emotional intent by leaving a little
irresolution and mystery. The song revels in sound first, playing with the
rhyming potential of the word “Decatur” and the way it resists full rhyme.
Stevens embraces this kind of multisyllabic rhyme, often termed mosaic
rhyme, which Lord Byron used to such great comic effect in canto I, stanza 22
of Don Juan with the triple rhyme “But O ye lords of ladies intellectual, /

Inform us truly, have they not henpecked you all?” While Dylan and Cohen
largely subvert the comic impulse of the method, Stevens exults in it. Over the
course of the song he rhymes “Decatur” with “hate her,” “take her,” “alligator,”
“operator,” “aviator,” “great debater,” “emancipator,” “congratulate her,” and
“anticipate her.” This cluster of words, also a cluster of sounds, defines the
song’s playful character even before we hear the whimsical music. “ ‘Decatur’
was more fun to sing because of those half-funny half-rhymes (‘aviator’?!),”
the music critic Jessica Hopper wrote in the Village Voice. By embracing the
rhyme limitations of an unusual proper noun, Stevens harnesses craft for
the purposes of his art.
Rhyme for rhyme’s sake can be a cul-de-sac, a cold display of cleverness
and craft that actually diminishes the song. “You can rhyme to a fault,” ar-
gues Jackson Browne. “Often when I don’t know where I’m going in a song
I begin rhyming. Then I think, ‘Come on, cut it out. These sounds rhyme
but what does it mean? Talk about something real.’ ” Talking about some-
thing real in a song often means getting a rhyme to say what you want
through a certain degree of dilation, breaking the rules of perfect rhyme in
favor of capturing a particular grain of meaning. The country legend Loretta
Lynn describes the process of composing the lyrics to her best-known song,
“Coal Miner’s Daughter,” as a struggle with rhyme:

It started “Well, I was borned a coal miner’s daughter . . .” which was

nothing but the truth. And I went on from there. I made up the mel-
ody at the same time, line by line, like I always do. It started out as a
bluegrass thing, ’cause that’s the way I was raised, with the guitar and
the banjo just following along. Really, the way you hear it on the rec-
ord is the way I imagined it.
I had a little trouble with the rhymes. I had to match up words like
“holler” and “daughter” and “water.” But after it was all done, the
rhymes weren’t so impor tant.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Perhaps the rhymes were no longer so important because they no longer

announced themselves as rhymes. By bending to the vernacular of Lynn’s
speech and the grain of her voice, the language comes across with little of
the artifice that rhyme often entails. Instead, one hears the conviction, self-
revelation, and confession at the heart of Lynn’s autobiographical song.
At the opposite extreme are instances when the rhymes themselves dic-
tate their own terms. These are forced rhymes, where the conditions of a lyric

lead naturally to a particular rhyme pairing—usually a stale one— and the

lyricist appears helpless to resist it. Forced rhymes can cheapen a song’s
content. “Just because it rhymes doesn’t mean it’s the right line,” says John
Rich of the country duo Big & Rich. “Too many times a rhyme short-circuits
the process of digging deeper into a lyric and saying something that really
matters.” The Christian singer-songwriter Amy Grant agrees: “So some-
times writing a song is not a matter of just hammering yourself in the
head until you complete the rhyme scheme. A lot of times, it’s a matter of
walking away from it for ten or fifteen minutes, and waiting for the next
line to present itself. And it will eventually, if it’s something you really want
to say.”
It would probably be amusing to spend the remainder of the chapter list-
ing forced rhymes in bad songs, but it’s more instructive to look at forced
rhyme in a good song. Consider the 2003 Grammy winner for Song of the
Year, Jesse Harris’s “ Don’t Know Why,” recorded by Norah Jones. The song
consists of a series of rhymed couplets, with the important exception of the
first verse, which reads:

I waited ’til I saw the sun

I don’t know why I didn’t come
I left you by the house of fun
I don’t know why I didn’t come

One hears the contrast between the repetition of an entire refrain (“I don’t
know why I didn’t come”) in the second, fourth, and fifth lines, and the per-
fect sun/fun rhyme in lines one and three. The rhyme, however, comes across
as too perfect, given that it has no obvious meaning. Though “saw the sun” is
clear and concrete, “house of fun” is opaque. Is it an awkward circumlocution
for “funhouse”? If so, how does that situate the scene? Was Harris insistent
on the opening line and simply seeking a way to resolve it in a perfect rhyme?
Nothing in the remainder of the lyric illuminates the meaning of the refer-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

ence. Fortunately, the recording’s incantatory melody and Jones’s melliflu-

ous voice make up for any lyric obscurity born of forced rhyme.
Forced rhymes would seem anathema to good songwriting. Some songs,
however, elevate forced rhyme to a conscious aesthetic. Macklemore’s 2015
hit “Downtown” is an old-school affair, with stripped down, funky cowbell
percussion and guest appearances from rap legends Grandmaster Caz, Melle
Mel, and Kool Moe Dee. This old-school aesthetic and comic tone inform

Macklemore’s rhyme practice as well, which is marked by lots of full rhymes

and a conscious embrace of rhyme’s constraints.
Two lines demonstrate how Macklemore artfully resolves a rhyme diffi-
culty by capitulating to sound over sense. For the rhyme play to be under-
stood, it is important to know that Pend Oreille, pronounced pond-eray, is a
lake in northern Idaho, near where Macklemore recorded much of the album
on which this track appears. The lines read: “I take her to Pend Oreille and
I water skate / I mean, water ski, ollie ollie oxen free.” Here internal rhymes
satisfy our rhyme expectations. For the lines to work, Macklemore must con-
ceive a rhyme to fit “Pend Oreille,” one that makes both sonic and semantic
sense. It would make semantic sense for him to say “water ski,” something he
could conceivably have done on the lake. Instead, he decides to bend to the
sonic demands of the rhyme with the nonsensical but successfully slant-
rhyming “water skate.” Keeping with the mildly absurdist tone of the song, he
offers a correction in the next line and uses the phrase he wanted to use in
the first place, “water ski,” which he then parlays into another forced rhyme—
the full rhyming “oxen free,” a throwaway phrase. Plenty of things rhyme with
“ski,” most obviously “me,” but the left-field choice Macklemore makes serves
the song better than a more logical rhyming word would. Forced rhyme
works here because it underscores the comic tone of the song in a way that
more natural rhymes would not.
A rote grammarian would be quick to criticize the obvious and hackneyed
rhymes in so many pop songs. But why do these rhymes rarely bother the
rest of us? More than that, such rhymes often function as an aesthetic vir-
tue, a vessel for profound thought and feeling as expressed in the music of
the song. Think about Arlo Guthrie singing these lines:

Coming into Los Angeles

Bringing in a couple of keys
Don’t touch my bags if you please
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Mister Customs Man

Forced or not, the run of rhymes—“Los Angeles,” “couple of keys,” “if you
please”—has a playful insouciance that fits the tone and subject of the song.
The rhymes are carefully crafted; Guthrie deranges the pronunciation of
“Los Angeles” (Loss Angel-eeze) to fit it to the rhyme sounds that follow.
Elsewhere, I’ve termed this technique “transformative rhyme,” where an art-
ist takes words that only partially rhyme or don’t rhyme at all and alters

the pronunciation of one of them to fashion a perfect rhyme with the other.
A famous example comes on Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg’s “If I Only Had
a Brain” from the soundtrack to the 1939 film classic The Wizard of Oz when
the Scarecrow sings “I’d unravel any riddle / For any individ-le.” More recently,
Kanye West employed the same technique on “Gold Digger” when he rhymes
“Serena” and “Trina” with “Jeena-fa” (as in Jennifer Lopez). Both of these
rhyme gambits work because they extend the spirit of their respective songs.
Transformative rhymes are most effective when the listener gets the sense
that the performer and songwriter are in on the joke. When that awareness is
in doubt, the rhyme can seem forced or downright cringeworthy, as it does on
the R&B singer Blu Cantrell’s “Hit Em Up Style (Oops!),” which inexplicably
rhymes “Mia” with “shopping spree-ya.” Sometimes forced rhymes are just,
well, forced.

RHYTHM AND RHYME

Rhyme serves an important function for rhythm, though this function is far
from straightforward. The analogy that some draw is to imagine rhymes as
traffic signs: A perfect couplet is a stop sign; a slant rhyme feels like a yield;
a series of rhymes in the middle and at the end of lines and the speed limit
suddenly increases with the hastening of lyric pace; a sudden dearth of
rhymes and you’ve entered a school zone. “Rhyme is the best way to control a
lyric’s FLOW. Nothing can match rhyme’s power in this area. Not phrase
length. Not rhythm,” argues Pat Pattison. Not everyone agrees. Susan Stew-
art usefully points to the complications that rhyme introduces to a poem; the
same holds for a lyric:

Rhyme is in this sense always a showcase for the arbitrary nature

of the sign and limits our efforts to dominate meaning; rhyming
draws us beyond ourselves with its potential for aural pleasure,
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

which, when one is trying to concentrate on univocal meaning and

syntactical sequence, can be something like aural pain. Here is
the basis of the tension between rhyme and syntax, a tension at the
heart of the modernist rejection of rhyme. This disparity is also the
reason why syntax motivated by the requirements of rhyme will
seem unnatural. Rhyme punctuates and concentrates, it does not
flow.

In most respects, Stewart and Pattison are saying the same thing: that
rhyme governs the pace of a lyric, from acceleration all the way to a dead
stop. While Pattison emphasizes the lyric momentum rhyme generates,
Stewart calls attention to the rhythmic cul-de-sacs and the “aural pain” that
they often occasion. The tension among unrestrained rhythmic flow; unfet-
tered syntactical expression; and the musical, temporal, and ideational in-
fluence of rhyme makes for a complicated interplay of competing forces. The
results can be striking and powerful, or chaotic and enervating.
Some of the best examples of this tension between rhythm and rhyme
come from rap, with its sheer rhyme density. Consider Lauryn Hill’s virtuo-
sic third verse from “Final Hour,” a master class in rhyme’s many uses. Hill
knits a tapestry of patterned sounds made up of full and slant rhymes, both
single-syllable and multisyllabic, that overlap with no audible sign of the
seams of their construction.

Now I be breaking bread, sipping Manischewitz wine

Pay no mind, party like it’s nineteen-ninety-nine
But when it come down to ground beef like Palestine
Say your rhyme, let’s see if that get you out your bind
Now I’ma get the mozzarella like a Rockefeller, still be
In the Church of Lalibela, singing hymns a cappella
Whether posed in Mirabella in couture—or
Collecting residuals from off The Score
I’m making sure I’m with the Hundred-Forty-Four
I been here before, this ain’t a battle, this is war
Word to Boonie, I make Salaat like a Sunni
Get diplomatic immunity in every ghetto community
Had the opportunity, went from Hoodshock to ’hood- chic
But it ain’t what you cop, it’s about what you keep
And even if there are leaks, you can’t capsize this ship
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

’Cause I baptize my lips every time I take sips

On lines five through seven, where Ms. Hill introduces a dizzying series
of multisyllabic rhyming words, she accelerates her rhythm to accommodate
the extra syllables. In this case, the rhymes as well as their frequency dic-
tate the pace and tone of the lyric delivery. Hill calls attention to this dra-
matic pace shift by injecting an extended pause before returning to the more
measured flow of the next few lines. The easy delivery doesn’t last long; by

lines twelve and thirteen the multisyllabics have returned, as has her fran-
tic flow. All of these calculations and adjustments are done on the fly, with a
sense of spontaneity that belies the conscious craft at work in rhythm and
rhyme conjoined.
Does rhyme serve a distinct set of functions in rap that it does not serve
in other genres, such as country or rock or reggae? How might we distin-
guish rap’s use of rhyme from what we’re likely to find in metrical poetry?
“I hate most contemporary rhyming poetry,” the poet Kyle Dargan once told
me. “If somebody gives me a poem and I see that it rhymes, I just hand it
back to them without comment. But I don’t have that same response when it
comes to rap. Why is that?” Lucky for me, Dargan answered his own ques-
tion. The reason, he argues, is the rhythmic variety rap most often confers
on the performance. The distance between the beginning of the line and the
end rhyme is a space in which a great deal of poetic energy and interest can
come to life. “On ‘Jigga What, Jigga Who,’ Jay Z starts with three trochees,
then comes in with three dactyls, then a final spondee: ‘Y’all cats wan’ act
loco? / Hit ’em with numerous shots with the four-four,’ ” Dargan observes.
“ There’s just so damn much rhythmic variety that when we get to the end
rhyme it’s a welcome regularity—it’s a way of grounding us in the familiar
and giving license to the rhythm to do its thing.”
One rhyme practice that distinguishes rap from other genres is rhyme
that follows an aural structure. This offers the welcome points of familiar-
ity that Dargan describes. Lil Wayne may be the greatest exemplar of this
rhyming practice. His rhymes exhibit free-associative flexibility, fit through
accent rather than perfect structure, and often appear in places other than
at the end of the line. After all, when a rhyme is never written down, the
difference between internal and end rhymes ceases to carry the same im-
portance as it does for the songwriter working on the page or the poet writ-
ing for the reader. To the extent that Lil Wayne’s rhymes follow conventional
patterns, it is due to the organizing function of the musical bar, which binds
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

his lyrics in the space that a line inhabits in sound. On “6 Foot 7 Foot” he
opens with a series of loose rhymes on the same sound:

Excuse my charisma, vodka with a spritzer

Swagger down pat, call my shit Patricia
Young Money militia and I am the commissioner
You no wan start Weezy cause the “F” is for finisher

The rhymes—full and slant—fly by so fast that it soon becomes unclear

which rhyme marks the end of the line and which falls in the middle. Weezy’s
performance, charged with the idiosyncrasies of his intonation and pronun-
ciation, also elides the difference between full and slant rhymes. The fact
that Lil Wayne never writes his lyrics down no doubt critically influences
his rhyme style. In this space of sound, the studied rigors of the Tin Pan Al-
ley line seem beside the point.
Another practice popularized by certain rap traditions, but not invented
by them, is the oft-frowned-upon act of “rhyming” a word with itself. I use
“rhyme” in quotation marks because rhyming in this manner does not con-
stitute a rhyme but an identity. An identity can serve some of the functions
usually expected of a rhyme, such as calling attention to a word or estab-
lishing patterned repetition, but it does so without the attendant surprise
that comes with the unexpected coupling of words at a remove from one an-
other. “An identity makes the word clear, but blunts the line’s snap because
the accented sound is not a fresh one,” observes Stephen Sondheim. He adds
that identities are also “death to wit.” Certainly identities are often a sign of
creative resignation, an exhaustion of inspiration that leads literally to dupli-
cation. At other times, they generate an intentional effect, from the incanta-
tory to the numbing to the replicatory. Identities can also be an effective
vehicle for emotional expression, be it in circling around the same concept or
fixating on feelings of extreme emotion.
The unlikely pair of lyr ics that follows illustrates the creative use of
identities.

Got to pay your dues if you wanna sing the blues,

And you know it don’t come easy.
You don’t have to shout or leap about,
You can even play them easy.
(Ringo Starr, “It Don’t Come Easy”)
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Sat it on them twenty-twos, birds go for twenty-two

Lil mama super thick, she say she twenty-two
She seen them twenty-twos, we in room two-twenty-two
(Rick Ross, “Hustlin’”)

In the first instance, Ringo Starr presents identity as part of a quatrain

structure that satisfies the listener’s desire for rhyme with the perfect internal
rhyme in the first line (“dues” and “blues”), which frees “easy” to do a subtler

kind of structural work—and liberates Starr from conjuring some awkward

perfect rhyme to go with “easy.” The repetition of the word also underscores the
song’s title, therefore contributing on the level of meaning as well.
The next example, from the Miami rapper Rick Ross, displays a relent-
less patterning of identity across the verse. Ross repeats some version of
“twenty-two” five times in three lines. This repetition calls attention to shift-
ing meaning of the identity in different contexts. In the first use, “twenty-
two” refers to twenty-two-inch rims on his car; in the second, to the $22,000
he earns for selling a bird (a kilo of cocaine) wholesale; the third use is the
age of the young woman he meets, noteworthy because she has reached
the age of majority; the next usage is ambiguous, but seems to reference the
rims on his damn car again, which supposedly impress the young woman;
and the final use refers to the last two digits of his hotel room, where we
imagine that he and the young woman have now retired. These shifting de-
notations of the same word stretch the meaning of the verse and code Ross’s
language while displaying his lyrical virtuosity. “Look at how I can use the
same words and yet set off new meanings in your head,” the lyric announces.
If identity lies in the middle of the rhyme spectrum and perfect rhyme
marks a far extreme, then the absence of rhyme entirely marks the other
extreme. The conscious act of not rhyming is now unremarkable in literary
poetry, where rhyme has long since receded from the aesthetic forefront.
However, in song rhyme is still an expectation, if not quite a requirement,
of lyric expression. I have already talked about subtler subversions of this
expectation, from the unsettling of sound in slant rhyme, to the disruption
of placement through internal rhymes, to the profusion of rhyme in every-
thing from regular patterns to seemingly disordered repetition. A few songs
forgo rhyme entirely. Sometimes these songs call attention to rhyme’s omis-
sion, but usually the listener does not even take notice. George and Ira Gersh-
win’s classic “I Got Rhythm” forgoes rhyme in its first verse. In an art in
which full rhymes are the rule, how could such subversion escape attention?
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

The answer lies in the ways that these lyrics compensate for the absence of
rhyme through other devices of language and sound that satisfy the same
desires for repetition and difference. Here are the lyrics:

I got rhythm
I got music
I got my man
Who could ask for anything more?

I got daisies
In green pastures
I got my man
Who could ask for anything more?

In the place where rhyme should be, Gershwin introduces several other
rhetorical patterns. First, he uses anaphora (kin to epistrophe, it is the rep-
etition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses), beginning
five of the eight lines with the same words, “I got.” Next, he employs identity
on the level of the line, with the repetition of an entire syntactical unit: “Who
could ask for anything more?” He also creates a moment of generative ten-
sion between the lyric line and the syntactic unit by enjambing the phrase
between lines five and six (“I got daisies / In green pastures”). Finally, the re-
peated melodic line sets off a percussive pattern that, combined with the
vocalist’s syncopated delivery, creates a measure of the repetition with a dif-
ference that one craves in rhyme. These rhetorical effects combine to cover for
the absence of rhyme.
Sometimes rhyme’s absence maps onto mood, when the unsettling feel-
ing born of missing something without quite knowing what underscores the
emotion of music and lyric. One such example is the lovely ballad “Separate
Lives,” written by Stephen Bishop and popularized in a 1985 power-ballad
duet by Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin. This is a song about disconnec-
tion, loss, and longing. Whether listening through the dated overproduction
of the Collins/Martin version to catch the beauty of the song itself, or listen-
ing to Bishop’s own stripped-down acoustic rendition, which has aged far
better, “Separate Lives” communicates vulnerability in its lyrics and mel-
ody all at once.
As the Gershwin example does, “Separate Lives” compensates for the
rhymes it denies us. The absence of definitive rhyme in favor of more sub-
tle assonance underscores the conversational and confessional quality of the
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

lyric. Bishop’s version, with its spare acoustic guitar accompaniment, does
not provide a foundational rhythm; Bishop strums his chords only when he
sings, pausing between lines as if to steel himself for the confession to come.
Perhaps the song succeeds in obviating listeners’ expectations of resolution
in rhyme precisely because it promises so little resolution in any other facet
of the song either. Though carefully crafted, “Separate Lives” sounds like
spontaneous expression of uncomposed vulnerability.

“Separate Lives” stages a moment of intimacy between the two figures in

the song, the lover and the lost beloved, a point of fleeting connection that
only underscores the growing distance between them. It’s hard to imagine
the song generating the same depth of feeling had it followed instead a more
conventional structure of end rhymes. Rhyme’s absence here serves the song.
Even in absentia, though, rhyme still announces its importance to the lyr-
ics. All the energy required to compensate for the loss testifies to the func-
tion and value of rhyme in the poetry of pop.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Figurative
Language
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Bradley, Adam. The Poetry of Pop, Yale University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fdu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4815350.
Created from fdu-ebooks on 2025-02-09 22:08:59.
I fell for you like a child. Like a child, you whisper softly to me. Like a
bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down. Like a bird on a wire,
like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free. Free
as a bird. My heart is like an open highway. Like a drifter, I was born
to walk alone. Walk like an Egyptian. Like a virgin. Like a complete
unknown. Like a rolling stone.

Songs often speak in simile. Similes, among dozens of other rhetorical fig-
ures and forms, are capable of making language memorable, emotive, and
strange. As some of the examples above illustrate, however, they can also
make lyrics sound predictable and stale. Effective or not, figurative language
is a means of unsettling expression, be it through figures of speech that aug-
ment, ornament, or otherwise alter everyday language, or through rhetori-
cal forms that fashion patterns of structure and sound. The Romantic poet
Percy Bysshe Shelley writes in his Defence of Poetry that poetry “awakens
and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand un-
apprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden
beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not famil-
iar.” By lifting what Shelley calls “the veil of familiarity” from the world, po-
etry renders the familiar unfamiliar, newly charged with wonder and mystery.
Rhetorical figures and forms are perhaps the poet’s most potent tools for
awakening and enlarging the mind. They are the same for the songwriter.
The two preceding chapters grappled with the ways that words shift shape
under the enchantment of rhythm and the sonic identity and difference that
happens in rhyme. Rhythm and rhyme, most acutely felt in performance, un-
derpin the reason that song lyrics distinguish themselves from most lan-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

guage that we encounter throughout the day. But another strangeness

resides primarily in the language of song lyrics itself rather than in how
that language sounds when sung. Rhetorical figures like similes and meta-
phors, and even patterns of language like anaphora and epistrophe, are
usually matters of meaning first and only secondarily of sound. They en-
courage us to imagine one thing as another, or to identify patterns and
breaks in patterns, or to reconcile opposing ideas. Figures and forms are
the originary space of thought in songs. They may lack the emotive direct-

ness of rhythm and rhyme, but they might just mark the closest point of
contact between the minds of songwriters and the minds of their listeners.
Song lyrics shine a light on figurative language more so than does com-
mon speech, though both are festooned with figures and forms. The language
of the lyrics often aims to adorn and to refine whatever nonverbal impulse
the song implies. Song lyrics sometimes complicate as well, generating ten-
sion by unsettling the emotive inclinations of the music. Yes, song lyrics are
sometimes clichéd and trite; clichéd and trite ideas are often just calcified
figures of speech. But song lyrics also aspire to novelty and freshness, to ren-
dering the familiar unfamiliar. Because of these and other reasons, song
lyrics comprise perhaps the broadest, most accessible body of language upon
which to catalog, to explore, and to celebrate the emotive and imaginative
potential of rhetorical figures and forms.
Figurative language is so common in pop music that one could pick any
week on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and find songs that display simile and
metaphor as well as a range of more exotic figures and forms. Take the week
of December 13, 2003, when the following songs sat atop the singles chart:

1.OutKast, “Hey Ya!”

2.Ludacris, “Stand Up”
3.OutKast feat. Sleepy Brown, “The Way You Move”
4.Kelis, “Milkshake”
5.Beyoncé feat. Sean Paul, “Baby Boy”
6.Chingy feat. Ludacris and Snoop Dogg, “Holidae In”
7.3 Doors Down, “ Here without You”
8.Baby Bash feat. Frankie J, “Suga Suga”
9.R. Kelly, “Step in the Name of Love”
10.Jagged Edge, “Walked Outta Heaven”

Okay, maybe I didn’t select this date at random. After all, “Hey Ya!” might
contain the most memorable pop-music simile of the new millennium: “Shake
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

it like a Polaroid picture.” The evocative quality of the figure was in no way
diminished by the Polaroid company’s press release urging their dramati-
cally shrinking customer base not to follow André 3000’s advice: “Rapid
movement during development can cause portions of the film to separate pre-
maturely.” Though I sought out “Hey Ya!,” I couldn’t have guessed what the
other songs on the chart that week had in store in the hunt for figures and
forms. Kelis’s “Milkshake” centers on a provocative, if imprecise, extended
metaphor. “My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard,” Kelis boasts. The

seductive spirit of the statement is clear even if the letter of it is not. On

“Suga Suga” Baby Bash and Frankie J use a common figurative ploy when
they charge the “suga” in question with a not-so-subtle ambiguity: it’s either
a woman or weed. Rounding out the top ten is Jagged Edge’s “Walked Outta
Heaven,” which threatens a simile in the first verse only to retreat from it:
“The night’s as black as . . . black as it’s ever been.” Whether we read that
line as a runaway train of thought or as a spark of plainspoken inspiration
is a matter of taste, I suppose.
Just to be fair, consider another week, this time truly at random—
September 6, 1969:

1.Rolling Stones, “Honky Tonk Women”

2.Johnny Cash, “A Boy Named Sue”
3.The Archies, “Sugar Sugar”
4.Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Green River”
5.Youngbloods, “Get Together”
6.Jackie DeShannon, “Put a Little Love in Your Heart”
7.Bob Dylan, “Lay Lady Lay”
8.Three Dog Night, “Easy to Be Hard”
9.Neil Diamond, “Sweet Caroline”
10.Tom Jones, “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”

On “Honky Tonk Women,” the Rolling Stones deploy the exotic figure of
zeugma (more on that later). Dylan invites his lover to lay across his “big
brass bed” in “Lay Lady Lay” and shades the experience in the abstract
promise that “whatever colors you have in your mind / I’ll show them to you
and you’ll see them shine.” Johnny Cash’s sly cover of children’s poet Shel
Silverstein’s “A Boy Named Sue” invokes simile to describe the narrator’s
tussle with the father who gave him a girl’s name: “He kicked like a mule
and he bit like a crocodile.” Perhaps the strangest entry on the list is “Sugar
Sugar,” by the comic-book characters come to life, the Archies. Unlike Baby
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Bash and Frankie J’s “Suga Suga” from thirty-five years later, this song
makes its metaphoric meaning clear from the opening chorus:

Sugar. Ah, honey, honey

You are my candy girl
And you’ve got me wanting you
Honey. Ah, sugar, sugar
You are my candy girl
And you’ve got me wanting you

Sweetness with a hint of seduction: Though the metaphor of the beloved

as a “candy girl” might lack imagination, it is more than serviceable here.
The lyric structures itself in two parts, each of three lines, that work on the
principle of repetition with a difference: “sugar” and “honey” take each oth-
er’s places in lines one and four, while the other lines repeat. Choose any
week on the Billboard charts— start with the week that you’re reading this
book— and you’ll find examples of what pop songs ask figurative language
to do.

FIGURES AND FORMS DEFINED

Rhetorical figures and forms adorn, derange, and organize. They range from
patterns of sound, like alliteration, to patterns of thought, like metaphor and
metonymy. Some of these figures and forms in songs are nearly invisible,
while others call attention to themselves as clever or confusing. Though pop
figures and forms generally seek novelty, they tend to do so within the terri-
tory of the familiar. An effective figure discovers new things on common
ground, even if the newness is only in the point of view or in a subtle reshap-
ing of sound.
One way to group pop’s rhetorical tropes is to decide what kind of work
they do in the lyric. Figures work primarily in the realm of thought, while
forms work primarily in the realm of language and its arrangement. We
might usefully divide these two larger categories into smaller ones based on
specific functions. Rhetorical figures include tropes that transfer meaning
from one thing to another (simile and metaphor, for instance), tropes that
exchange meaning between one thing and another (chiasmus), and tropes
that transform meaning entirely (antanaclasis). Rhetorical forms impose or-
der (anaphora and epanodos), fashion more idiosyncratic patterns (repetitio),
and combine both thought and language into one.
The goal of this chapter is not, however, simply to provide a taxonomy of
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

rhetorical figures and forms as they appear in pop songs. It is not even pri-
marily to explain the songwriter’s craft; plenty of books provide step-by-step
instructions for building a better metaphor for your song lyric. Rather, my
goal is to help explain why certain words or phrases from song lyrics end up
lodged in our heads or tattooed on our bodies. Through the alchemy of music
and the craft of lyric, the dross of common or even trite ideas becomes the
gold and the platinum of great pop songs. A lover bemoaning a lost love be-
comes “a fat house cat / Nursing my sore blunt tongue” in Iron & Wine’s

“Flightless Bird, American Mouth.” For the country singer Kacey Musgraves,
love “plays you like a fiddle, shakes you like a rattle / Takes away your gun
and sends you into battle.” Rhetorical figures can transform even run-of-the-
mill heartache into a subject of wonder.
Beyond taxonomy, this chapter asks a more basic question about the rhe-
torical construction of pop songs: Why do pop songs take the shapes that they
take? Songs, after all, are the art of emotion, which is to say that they are
also the art of rhetoric. Songs make the familiar unfamiliar, transforming
common themes into language that, when set to song, excites the senses.
Figurative language is so prevalent in everyday speech and in the lan-
guage of song lyrics that it’s necessary to bracket off what this chapter is
not about. This chapter is not about incidental or accidental figures of speech,
words or phrases that the song intends as direct expression even if there is
a figure lurking within it. If, as Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, all language
is “fossil poetry,” then one can undoubtedly find figures of speech at work
in every lyric. When Oasis’s Noel Gallagher asks, “Where were you when
we were getting high?” on “Champagne Supernova,” “getting high” is a figure
of speech since those involved are almost certainly seated or recumbent while
enjoying their elevating substance of choice. The meaning is plain, though
the metaphor remains. In this instance, the figure of speech exists as short-
hand, a well-worn phrase to describe a particular activity. Metaphor here is
a matter of convenience, or even indifference, to the lyricist.
The figures and forms of song lyrics that hold the most interest are the
products of lyric craft. When I was a graduate student, my teacher Helen
Vendler challenged me and my classmates to find within poems what she
termed their “salient oddities,” those qualities of language that present an
enigma, that hold themselves out as indispensable even as they escape full
understanding. Listening to song lyrics, the figures and forms that attach
themselves most firmly to my consciousness satisfy this same dual aim. They
are salient oddities—of language and thought, shape and feeling— and the
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

goal is not so much to resolve them as it is to metabolize them into one’s own
experience.
What happens when singers and songwriters consciously design figures
of speech in order to do something with language and to the listener? Their
aim may be to jar a listener’s consciousness in tension with the music, or it
may mean leaving the figure lurking below the surface of the sound, to be
discovered only later in quiet recollection of the lyrics or in close study of

them on the page. In such cases, the figure is an instrument of utility and of
aesthetics. The figure makes an idea beautiful, ugly, or strange.

THE POWER OF THE STRANGE

Attaching words to things is a figurative act. Most words or phrases, how-

ever, become so expected in the language that their figurative strangeness
is no longer apparent. We’re bombarded every day by esoteric forms that clas-
sical rhetoricians came up with names to codify. When a CNN anchor re-
marks that “the White House announced today that it is seeking to normalize
relations with the nation of Cuba,” that anchor is employing the rhetorical
figure of metonymy by using a building (the White House) to stand in for a
government or a person (the president of the United States). There’s noth-
ing remarkable about hearing this, though, because we’ve normalized our
own cognitive relation to a figure of speech that would have us believe that
a white house can speak.
The first thing to say about artful and striking rhetorical figures and
forms is that they are somehow strange. When it comes to similes and meta-
phors, the best of them tend to find a sweet spot between the conventional
and the quirky. “The world is a vampire / Sent to drain,” Billy Corgan sings
in the arresting metaphor that begins Smashing Pumpkins’ “Bullet with
Butterfly Wings.” That metaphor demands an attendant image. If a figure
of speech is too strange, then it will baffle comprehension. If it is too ex-
pected, then it will have little impact and may not register as a metaphor at
all. When Simon LeBon of Duran Duran sings that he’s “hungry like the
wolf,” it is not a particularly evocative simile because “hungry” is pretty
much the first thing one thinks of when it comes to wolves. Certainly, the
rhetorical figure does its work by transferring the quality of hunger from
animal to man, and from sustenance to passion, but the mind hardly both-
ers conjuring an image to accompany it.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Compare that simile to the far stranger, and thus more evocative, simile
from Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” where he describes the life
of a character who “end[s] up like a dog that’s been beat too much.” It’s hard
not to conjure a mental image of the animal, cowed and quivering, chained
in the yard, quick to snarl at a passerby but too broken to bark for long. The
assumption behind the simile is strange as well; a dog being beaten “too
much” suggests that it’s possible to beat a dog just enough. The power, too,

comes in the casual colloquialism of the grammatically incorrect “been beat

too much.” The simile sits seamlessly in the verse as a whole:

Born down in a dead man’s town

The first kick I took is when I hit the ground
End up like a dog that’s been beat too much
’til you spend half your life just to cover it up

Springsteen’s simile says a simple thing in a powerful way. It tells a com-

mon story through uncommon language, opening up a new avenue of emo-
tional connection for the listener. Like Wendy from “Born to Run,” like the
people from “Darkness at the Edge of Town” with “lives on the line where
dreams are found and lost,” prosperity for this speaker is always just around
the corner but destined never to arrive. Time moves much too fast. Literal-
izing the figure of speech of “spend[ing] half your life just to cover it up” is
particularly tragic for someone who doesn’t have that time to spare. Little of
that complexity comes through, though, in a paraphrase: I was born in a town
with high unemployment where I never learned the resilience to face setbacks;
instead, I simply disguised my weaknesses—to others and even to myself. Told
this way, the story is clichéd. What makes Springsteen’s lyrics original and
specific is the way he renders the familiar story unfamiliar through figurative
language.
In comparison, Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf ” extends its fig-
ure of speech to the point of attenuation: “I’m on the hunt, I’m after you,”
“mouth is alive with juices like wine,” and “I howl and I whine, I’m after
you.” Attenuation isn’t a strong enough word for what happens to this al-
ready prosaic simile when belabored in the lyric. The difference between
what Springsteen does and what Duran Duran does is a matter of craft: In
the first instance, the simile functions as an instrument of character devel-
opment and emotive shading; in the second, it is a lyrical cudgel. Both do their
jobs well. One could make the argument that Duran Duran does its job bet-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

ter given how clear its comparison is when set beside the dark and challenging
lyric of “Born in the U.S.A.,” which is often mistaken as an anthem of unre-
constructed American patriotism, a song to play at firework displays. With-
out a doubt, Springsteen’s lyric is more compelling on the page. The Duran
Duran lyric, however, silly simile and all, is no less an instance of figurative
language put to good use in the service of its song.
These disparate lyr ics demonstrate another distinction worth making
about figures and forms in popular song. It is the difference between using

figures and forms to render the subject something to be puzzled over (“Born
in the U.S.A.”) and using them to render the subject something readily ap-
parent (“Hungry Like the Wolf ”). Both of these, when done well, give birth
to meaning, but with dramatically different emotional and cognitive rewards.
The first approach, using a rhetorical figure like the simile to create a
moment in the lyric that demands contemplation, is common to the practice
of poetry for the page. In her brief and beautiful “The Fisherman’s Wife,”
Amy Lowell crafts a poem whose emotive power radiates from an artful
simile:

When I am alone,
The wind in the pine-trees
Is like the shuffling of waves
Upon the wooden sides of a boat.

In four lines, Lowell conjures a person, place, and atmosphere— the lone
speaker surrounded by pine trees blown by the breeze—then layers atop
this scene a simile that brings to life another place and atmosphere. This
palimpsest demands that we reconcile, in meaning and feeling, the figurative
valence with the literal lines. “The Fisherman’s Wife,” like Springsteen’s
“Born in the U.S.A.,” is a call in search of a response from anyone who reads
or hears the words.
In contrast to such subtle and strange layering, rhetorical figures at times
express themselves by rendering meaning as transparent as possible, even
to the point of obscuring the function of the figure itself. Lyrics such as these
aim not to inspire thought through an unexpected or unusual connection,
but to provide unobtrusive words to hold the melody or to demonstrate the
lyricist’s virtuosity in exhausting a simile’s range of applications.
“Hungry Like a Wolf ” certainly qualifies as such a simile, as does Bob
Seger’s “Like a Rock,” a workmanlike example of pop lyricism that employs
simile without any sense of indirection or guile. The chorus is a good illus-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

tration:

Like a rock, I was strong as I could be

Like a rock, nothin ever got to me
Like a rock, I was something to see
Like a rock

Strong, insensate, imposing: These are the transitive qualities the song
takes from rock and lends to the singer. The song announces its conceit in

its very title. The function therefore of the simile is not to surprise, but to
satiate expectation as fully as possible by putting the familiar comparison
to work in a number of ways. The plain meaning of the lyrics redirects at-
tention to other elements of the song. The figure of speech doesn’t tax the
listener’s cognitive capacity, leaving more energy to direct to the grain of
Seger’s voice and the story of his remembered youth.
What are similes doing when they aren’t being clever, puzzling, or pro-
found? If we understand that the traditional function of the simile is, in the
words of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, “to reveal an unex-
pected likeness between two seemingly disparate things,” then what are we to
think in those many instances when the comparisons being made in the lyrics
to pop songs are anything but unexpected? Popular music is festooned with
rhetorical figures—similes and metaphors in particular—that the lyrics leave
unfulfilled, unresolved. Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield” repeats its titu-
lar metaphor six times during the chorus of the song, but little else in the lyric
builds on its meaning. “Love is like a bomb,” Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott an-
nounces in the first lines of “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” How so? Is it danger-
ous? Does it explode? We’ll never know.
A more compelling and more fully realized figurative comparison for love
is the Magnetic Fields’ “Love Is Like a Bottle of Gin.” Though it announces
its simile in the title, it does not explicitly state the figurative comparison in
the song lyric until the final lines. A listener without the benefit of liner
notes, therefore, will arrive inductively at the figurative formulation as it
reveals itself over the course of the song’s six straight verses. The pairing of
love and gin forges an unexpected likeness between disparate things, con-
nected through affinities of action and feeling:

It makes you blind, it does you in

It makes you think you’re pretty tough
It makes you prone to crime and sin
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

It makes you say things off the cuff

Delivered in Stephin Merritt’s deadpan baritone, the arch humor and

knowingness of the lines resound. By the end of the song we are invested in
the comparison as if it were our own, congratulating ourselves on its clever-
ness. Merritt, however, resists the facility of his own figure by taking a strik-
ing turn in the closing lines: “Love is like a bottle of gin / But a bottle of gin is
not like love.” At once, the lyric asserts its figurative terms and denies their

reciprocity. A listener delighted by the conceit of love as intoxicating, unin-

hibited, and free must come to terms with the night-side of the connection:
Sitting alone at a bar getting drunk off cheap gin looks nothing like love.
“Love Is Like a Bottle of Gin” presents love in language both challenging
and invigorating. Love language like this, though, is the exception. The En-
glish language rarely gets lazier than it does when it’s dealing with love.
Whether describing bliss or heartache, love is usually voiced in a conscripted
vocabulary. In aiming to describe love’s irresistible and dangerous appeal,
songs as distanced from one another in time and temperament as the Smiths’
“The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” Janet Jackson’s “That’s the Way Love
Goes,” Kiss’s “Young and Wasted,” and Shawn Mendes’s “Stitches” have ex-
ercised the stock phrase “like a moth to a flame.” What once might have
sounded novel now sounds plain.
In the matter of heartbreak, a common figure of speech is to say that the
loss of love “cuts like a knife.” This is certainly ser viceable, given that the
knife is a unifunctional tool for cutting. We imagine, therefore, that the emo-
tion must cut good and deep. As a simile for the pain of lost love, however, it
fails the test of “unexpected likeness.” In fact, it now amounts to a cliché,
which is to say that its figurative power is all but exhausted. So then why
use the phrase at all? What can it still do for a song if it isn’t contributing to
the figurative power and emotional evocation of the lyric? Perhaps one uses
the familiar figure because it is so close at hand. Perhaps, too, the song-
writer recognizes the virtue of the familiar. Perhaps we should just ask
Bryan Adams.
Adams named an entire album Cuts Like a Knife. The titular song uses
the phrase in the chorus. His explanation for why he and his songwriting
partner settled on the canned phrase is revealing: it was the product of im-
provised sound, of something like scatting, brought into the form of language.
“I think that I’m one of the world’s best mumblers, I can mumble some of the
best lyrics, but putting them together is another story,” Adams recalls. “The
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

best example was when we wrote ‘Cuts Like A Knife,’ which was just liter-
ally a mumble. We looked at each other, rolled the tape back, and it sounded
like ‘cuts like a knife,’ so we started singing that.” It’s unsurprising that
Adams’s mumbling would coalesce into a cliché rather than gibberish or
some unusual expression. It offers not only a familiar phrase, but one upon
which to organize a familiar pop emotion and theme: the response to lost love.
I quote the chorus here with part of a verse that precedes it for context:

I took it all for granted

But how was I to know
That you’d be letting go?

Now it cuts like a knife

But it feels so right
It cuts like a knife
But it feels so right

The story the song tells is familiar: I messed up, now you’re gone and I’m
painfully regretting it. What’s unexpected, however, is what comes after the
simile—“But it feels so right.” It’s a small but significant adjustment that
gives greater specificity to what otherwise is a secondhand emotion. There’s
truth here: pain and regret being both unwanted and desired. “It feels so
right,” a phrase, conventional in its own right, more familiar for other phases
of a love affair, is out of place here in a way that creates dissonance. In es-
sence, Adams rubs two clichés together and generates some lyric heat.
The same phrase crops up in Tom Bahler’s lovelorn ballad “She’s Out of
My Life,” the last song on Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall. On an album of
irresistibly danceable club hits, the song stands out for both its tempo and
its tone. Like Bryan Adams’s “Cuts Like a Knife,” “She’s Out of My Life”
situates itself in that conventional position of the singer at the end of a love
affair. Also like the Adams’s lyric, Jackson’s performance of Bahler’s lyric
evinces emotional ambivalence. “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry / I don’t
know whether to live or die / And it cuts like a knife / She’s out of my life,”
Jackson sings in the first verse. The swelling strings and maudlin melody
make the song’s choice with more decisiveness than does the lyric alone; this
is a crying song. Indeed, Jackson delivers the last lines with a quavering
voice that finally gives way to tears:

And she’s out of my life

She’s out of my life

Damned indecision and cursed pride
Kept my love for her locked deep inside
And it cuts like a knife
She’s out of my life

Jackson’s voice breaks first on “knife,” then nearly shatters as he attempts

to sing the final line—the last word, “life,” comes out like a puff of air. The
fact that the last two lines form a couplet, ending on a perfect rhyme, would

seem to suggest resolution and finality, but the way Jackson performs the
lyrics complicates that conclusion. It’s theatrical, a kind of spectacle that en-
dows the song with a depth of feeling that the lyrics only suggest. In his
memoir, Jackson recalls, “I got too wrapped up in ‘She’s Out of My Life.’ . . .
I cried at the end of a take, because the words suddenly had such a strong
effect on me.” Little about the words themselves would seem to carry so much
feeling; but they are effective vessels for the emotion Jackson brings to them
precisely because they are so conventional, so adoptable, so adaptable.
Often song lyrics extend a concrete figure only to complicate it. On T. Rex’s
“Bang a Gong (Get It On)” we encounter a solid simile in the first line of the
second verse—“Well, you’re built like a car”— only to find it strangely, won-
derfully confounded in the line that follows—“You got a hub cap diamond
star halo”—then brought right back to the concrete in the third line: “ You’re
built like a car— Oh, yeah.” Either way of using simile—presenting an im-
age that announces itself from the outset, or crafting one that confounds and
demands unpacking—is equally the product of the poetic craft. One method
is more familiar from lyric poetry and one from advertising or fable; both at
their best exemplify the effective function of rhetorical figures and forms in
pop lyrics.

SAYING ONE THING, MEANING ANOTHER:

SIMILE AND META PHOR

Similes and metaphors are both figurative comparisons. Though their effects
and shading may differ, they function through the same cognitive process. As
Robert J. Fogelin describes it, following a long tradition of figurative theory
stretching back to Aristotle, “They present a comparison with a transparent
incongruity (oddness) that admits of resolution.” Similes and metaphors re-
quire the mind to solve a puzzle, to span the distance between a subject and
a figurative referent, and, in doing so, to experience the sensation of novelty
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

becoming affinity. Fogelin further distinguishes what he terms metaphors of

wit, which introduce, then resolve, incongruities, and metaphors as models,
which impose “a system of relations from one domain to another.” The former
often, though not always, express themselves in comedy. As a rhetorical cate-
gory, then, similes and metaphors can be illuminating as well as obfuscating,
commonplace, and remarkable. As parts of songs, they can recede into sound
or they can leap out and demand attention that might even detract from the
listening experience.

The basic structure of the simile is this: A is like B, with A being the tenor
(the subject of description—a person, object, state of being, or concept), and
B being the vehicle (the image that lends its qualities to the tenor), to em-
ploy the terms conceived long ago by I. A. Richards. In its simplest expres-
sion, both tenor and vehicle are nouns: “O my Luve’s [tenor] like a red, red
rose [vehicle],” as Robert Burns wrote back in 1794. Or “My love [tenor] is
like Wo [vehicle]” as Mya sang back in 2003. Similes function by inviting us
to find qualities in the referent that are applicable to the subject. In its most
straightforward iteration, then, a simile presents a puzzle for the mind to
solve. “And it seems to me you lived your life like a candle in the wind,” El-
ton John sings in Bernie Taupin’s lyric. The lyric leaves for listeners the task
of articulating the comparison: a candle in the wind is susceptible to being
snuffed out, like a life cut short. We attach to the subject (the “you” of either
Marilyn Monroe or Princess Diana) the referent’s quality of vulnerability
and ephemerality. Though the simile here has become so commonplace as to
register almost as literal expression, it nonetheless amply illustrates the way
that similes often work in song lyrics.
One would be hard pressed to find a simpler set of similes than those in
Katy Perry’s “Firework” (2010), which she composed with the songwriting
Svengali Ester Dean as well as the producers StarGate and Sandy Vee.
“Firework” exemplifies the way that figurative language can hide in plain
sight. The very concept of the song is figurative, as the firework stands in
for the hidden self brought to light, and every section of the song, from verse
to chorus to bridge and back, is structured around similes and metaphors.
When read on the page, the clunkiness of the opening lines exposes itself in
a way that it doesn’t when cloaked in Perry’s climbing melodic arc and styl-
ized phrasing: “Do you ever feel like a plastic bag / Drifting through the wind,
wanting to start again?” It’s so bad it’s almost good. Or try this: “Do you
ever feel already buried deep / Six feet under, scream, but no one seems to
hear a thing?” What a horrifying image. But Perry’s delivery betrays little
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

of the alarm that attends actually conjuring a mental picture of the experi-
ence the lines describe. Instead, we simply feel the low simmer of the music,
leading to the boiling over of the chorus as Perry pushes to the edge of her
vocal range, enacting the explosive spectacle promised in the song’s title. The
figurative language at play in “Firework” is hardly what one remembers from
the song, though it is indispensable to its meaning and feeling. The images
are functional, if at times awkward, imprecise, and just plain batty; none-
theless, they propel the song forward in ways that it’s hard not to admire.

Often figurative comparisons complete their own puzzle, resolving

their incongruities even as they introduce them. On the hair metal band
Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again,” David Coverdale sings “like a drifter, I was
born to walk alone.” In this instance, the simile makes explicit the terms of
its connection, dimming but not extinguishing the other associations the
simile invites—the drifter as aimless, rootless, impoverished. The pleasure
of the figure does not come from the mental stimulation of completing a puz-
zle, but from the vicarious pleasure of seeing someone else, in this case the
lyricist/singer, solve the puzzle for us.
Although, as in “Firework,” similes may be notably clunky, metaphors are
to blame for some of the greatest abuses of pop music. “Indisputably, the ef-
fect of crowing images in a lyric can play havoc with a song, giving it a weird
effect, like glossolalia,” writes Alexander Theroux. An ill-judged use of meta-
phors may make us feel as though the singer is speaking in tongues and
communicating little. Sometimes metaphor can usurp a song’s content and
become an exercise in form rather than working through form to move lis-
teners. In analyzing the function of metaphor in his song “Only Flame in
Town,” Elvis Costello observes that the profusion of metaphor in the lyrics
risks overtaking the recording. “By the middle of the second verse . . . you
start to think, ‘Oh god, that’s a good one,’ ‘Aw, that one’s a bit dodgy!’ ” Costello
argues that he put metaphor to better use in “Indoor Fireworks”: “When you
say, ‘I’ll build a bonfire of my dreams and burn a broken effigy of me and
you,’ the fact that it extends the fire metaphor is completely secondary to the
emotion.” The metaphor serves the song. “Effective metaphor suits the con-
text in which it occurs,” write Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in
their classic study of poetics. “Moreover, an effective metaphor pays its own
way—that is, it justifies itself by making a real contribution to the writer’s
total expression.”
Sometimes we have to dig a little to unearth an effective metaphor.
Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is often disparaged as song lyric even as
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

it is celebrated as recorded song. Kurt Cobain’s words, when they can be

discerned from the noise of the instruments washing over and under them,
are often cryptic and even contradictory. “Just seeing Kurt write the lyrics to
a song five minutes before he first sings them, you just kind of find it a little
bit hard to believe that the song has a lot to say about something,” Nirva-
na’s drummer, Dave Grohl, told Kurt St. Thomas during a 1992 interview
just as Nirvana was cresting to superstardom. “You need syllables to fill up
this space or you need something that rhymes.” Cobain’s journals, however,

tell another story, revealing craft and construction that challenge romantic
notions of lyrics dashed off in minutes. They show him honing his language,
starting with sounds and scraps of image and moving to meaning. “To know
oh no I told a secret word” becomes “to know oh no a dirty word,” which
becomes “Oh no I know a dirty word” on the next page and “Uh oh oh no a
dirty word” on the one after that.
Perhaps the most puzzling lyric section, reproduced verbatim from
the journals, comes at the end of the chorus with this series of seeming
abstractions:

A mulatto. An albino.
A mosquito. My libido.

In this sequence of three implied metaphors following an unstated “I am . . .”

and a final assertion of first-person possession (my libido), Cobain generates
mystery. He does so by choosing words that many of his listeners will com-
prehend only vaguely or mishear entirely, both because of the urgency and
occasional incoherence of his singing and because the words themselves are
unusual, and even more unusual when grouped together. Sure, they all
loosely rhyme with one another. Each has three syllables. The first two have
a natural association (both have to do with skin color); the last two do not
readily connect, either with what comes before or with each other. As a con-
sequence, the mind moves to find some underlying order, something that co-
heres the sequence. In 1960 the writer Archibald MacLeish asked, “But
what meaning can there be in this collision of images which do not collide?”
Whether there’s meaning or not in Nirvana’s collision of images that do not
collide, the automatic search for coherence nonetheless generates energy and
mystery for the song.
Given this energy, it makes sense to attend to the connections and con-
notations that this strange group of words sets off. “Mulatto” and “albino”
call to mind racial identities and skin tones, determined in the first case by
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

the activation of melanin and in the second case by the absence of melanin
in the skin, hair, and eyes. A mosquito sucks blood, feeds on it. And the
sexual libido, particularly of a teen (who might apply a few swipes of Teen
Spirit deodorant in the morning), acts out as a hunger, a necessity to feed
and to suck. Are the connections abstract? Of course they are. But that ab-
straction, even to the point of obscurity, engenders unease that matches the
urgency of Cobain’s singing and the stridency of the music’s driving rhythms
and aching guitars.

Most metaphors in popular music, however, tend more to the explicit than
to the abstract. Consider Bruno Mars’s 2010 hit “Grenade” from his debut
album, Doo-Wops & Hooligans. The chorus, structured around images of self-
sacrifice, enumerates the many ways he “would die for you, baby / But you
won’t do the same.” He would catch a grenade, throw his hand on a blade,
jump in front of a train, and take a bullet through the brain. The mind has
little time to rest on any one image. In an interview with GQ, the journalist
Chris Heath asked Mars to reflect on the effects of his figurative language
in song, from an “extended metaphor that aligns religion and a vagina” to
other potentially blasphemous forays. “If you think it’s blasphemous,” Mars
responds, “then obviously you don’t know that it’s poetry. You can pick apart
all of my songs. A bullet through your brain, man? That’s not politically cor-
rect. . . . You’re not listening to it right if you’re picking it apart like that.
You know? I can’t overthink everything I wrote or worry about that kind of
stuff. Hopefully people should know. There’s no blasphemy. Or insult to any
religion. It’s just fucking poetry, whether you believe me or not.”
“It’s just fucking poetry” is an apt slogan for the poetry of pop— one part
profane, one part profound in its call to take things lightly, to allow for pop’s
sense of play and creative mischief. The phrase is also a reminder of the
everyday nature of pop’s poetics. If it’s just fucking poetry, then it has to be
accessible rather than restrictive, aiming to please rather than seeking to
confound. It’s poetry for the people, focused on emotive impact rather than
solely on the more measured effects of deep contemplation. “Poetry begins
in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, ‘grace’ metaphors, and goes on to the
profoundest thinking that we have,” the poet Robert Frost remarked in 1931.
“Poetry provides,” he continued, “the one permissible way of saying one thing
and meaning another.” Over the past forty years, no other genre of popular
lyric has done more to explore this figurative imperative than the language
of rap.
Rap lyrics are a useful way into the more esoteric varieties and applica-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

tions of figurative language in song lyrics across all genres. Rap revels in
simile and puns and a host of rare figures and forms, some of which haven’t
been in common currency since Cicero. On “One More Chance” Biggie em-
ploys kenning, a trope that exchanges a word or proper name for a compound
poetic phrase, when he boasts that he’s the “mic-ripper, girl-stripper, the
Henny-sipper.” Jean Grae does the same thing on “Hater’s Anthem” when
she dubs herself “the cancer-toker, the Mad Hatter, the Jabberwocky of rap.”
Rap privileges this kind of wordplay for its own sake in a way that other

genres rarely do. In fact, some rap songs find coherence not in narrative or
in the development of theme or emotion, but in displays of wit and rhetorical
mastery. In this regard, rap extends a tradition of poetry as play; public dis-
plays of linguistic invention were common in ancient Greece, not to mention
in many of the oral traditions of the non-Western world.
One such example of this linguistic invention is actually rap’s reinven-
tion of the simile. This reinvention is a consequence both of necessity and of
method: necessity, because rap uses simile so much that broadening the
range of the figure is essential; and method, because rap is often an extem-
porized form that celebrates the aural, and simile is the most readily acces-
sible figure in extemporized language. Simile needs the least forethought
and can stand alone as a phrase. The variations on the conventional simile
found in rap work on the principles of elision, substitution, and expansion.
This greater descriptive range does not mean better lyrics. Rather, it speaks
to a set of formal practices and audience expectations native to the genre. It
is the test that the genre sets for itself in gauging an artist’s virtuosity.
A notable example of the way rap reworks similes is what I call the as-
sociative simile, where the figurative connection falls in the corona of asso-
ciation that surrounds a word rather than directly on the word itself. By
traditional measure, associative similes are imprecise or flawed comparisons,
but if we dilate our understanding of what a simile can do, we open up a
range of expressive possibilities. Associative similes are largely born of the
oral tradition and best understood when heard aloud. Take, for instance, this
phrase from Kanye West: “I’m so appalled, Spalding ball.” The logical connec-
tion here is a result of the assonance that connects the short a in “appalled”
with the short a’s in “Spalding” and “ball.” Semantically, this implied simile
is opaque: “I’m as appalled as a Spalding basketball” is nonsensical. The
sense instead derives from the sound, where the vehicle and the tenor are
connected through assonance. Simply putting this through the simile for-
mula is not enough.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

A striking case of rap’s weirding of figurative language began in 2007

when Big Sean, a then little-known MC on Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. music la-
bel, released a song called “Supa Dupa Lemonade” in which he employed an
unusual rhetorical figure, a kind of truncated simile:

Bank account got me feeling well . . . Fargo

Balling ’til I get a mil’ a check . . . Darko

In these lines and in the ones that follow (“Cause I just black out in the
booth . . . charcoal” is perhaps the simplest) Big Sean pauses where listen-
ers expect a “like” to be. Add the “like” back in and these are punning simi-
les of the kind one regularly finds in rap: “I black out in the booth like
charcoal,” because charcoal is black. “The large amount of money in my bank
account has me feeling well like [Wells] Fargo,” the bank. “I’m balling [put-
ting in work on craft] until I get a million dollars per check like [former pro-
fessional basketball player] Darko [Milicic],” because Milicic likely cashed a
few such checks and because his first name works great for the double mean-
ing. Only the charcoal figure approaches the criteria of a traditional simile,
where the vehicle (charcoal) transfers some quality of its identity to the tenor
(the “I” who’s blacking out in the booth). The other figures are forged first in
sound rather than in sense; as associative similes, they make their figura-
tive connection by landing somewhere in the corona of meaning that sur-
rounds the term rather than connecting directly to the term itself.
Kanye would go on to popular ize Big Sean’s practice, even giving it a
name, “hashtag rap,” for the Twitter hashtags that were just starting to dom-
inate social media. Though this hashtag figure would achieve saturation in
rap during the first decade of the twenty-first century, its reach is much wider
than that. Glancing back across pop lyric history, one finds earlier instances
of the same practice. Def Leppard’s 1987 hit “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” for
instance, contains the following: “You got the peaches, I got the cream / Sweet
to taste . . . saccharine.” Though rap didn’t invent it, the hashtag style would
become a rap fad, cropping up in numerous lyrics by Drake, Lil Wayne, Nicki
Minaj, Ludacris, Juelz Santana, and many others. By 2010, Drake was al-
ready pronouncing the style’s death. “Well, that flow has been killed by so
many rappers. And, I never want to use that flow again in life,” he said.
Hashtag rap’s popularity has faded, though it has since settled into a more
humble but still significant place in rap’s figurative repertoire. Macklemore
put it to use on 2015’s “Downtown,” when he rhymes in the song’s final lines:
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

“ There’s layers to this shit, player . . . tiramisu / Let my coattail drag, but I
ain’t tearing my suit.” A simile here would have been labored; with the
hashtag, it feels off the cuff. He underscores the figure with a playfully vir-
tuosic mosaic rhyme (“tiramisu” / “tearing my suit”). Here hashtag rap offers
a modulation on the traditional punning simile and becomes a way of punc-
tuating a phrase, setting it in sharp relief that would be blunted if the line
included “like” or “as.”

Given the shifting currents of slang and rap’s pop culture points of refer-
ence, similes in rap often have a short shelf life. Because artists regularly
draw figures from the cultural present, the further removed we are from the
moment of composition, the more obscure the figure can become. Rap fos-
ters a sense of spontaneity and immediacy that makes it impactful but also
fleeting. Rap lyrics are no more disposable than lyrics from other genres,
but they often contain language with a certain manufactured obsolescence—
lyrics designed to degrade. Take 1997’s “All about the Benjamins,” in which
Puff Daddy raps “Trying to get my hands on some Grants like Horace.” To
understand the line the listener must realize that President Ulysses S. Grant
is on the fifty-dollar bill and that there was a professional basketball player
named Horace Grant, well known in the 1990s for his championship runs
with Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls though not so readily recognized now
that he is retired.
A similar challenge besets OutKast’s Big Boi when he rhymes on “Two
Dope Boyz (in a Cadillac)” that “like Tony Rich nobody knows why,” a refer-
ence to the largely forgotten R&B act the Tony Rich Project, OutKast’s label-
mate at the time on LaFace Records, and its 1996 Billboard number-two hit
“Nobody Knows.” Such similes, common in rap, have short half-lives; as the
reference ages, it renders the simile essentially unintelligible. Ask Big Boi,
however, and he likely won’t care. He flipped a clever line. It served its pur-
pose as a display of craft and of subtle cross-promotion, and he probably held
no pretentions of sustaining its meaning beyond the moment. One can still
enjoy the song, of course, without getting the reference, but it is a distinc-
tive quality of rap that it often sacrifices such lines on the altar of the now.
One more example of rap’s renovation of simile may be instructive: the
inverted simile. I call it an inverted simile because instead of, as conven-
tional similes do, using an unexpected comparison to characterize a com-
monplace emotion or state of being (say, the way Wordsworth captures the
state of lonely wandering as that of “a cloud / That floats on high o’er vales
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

and hills”), it instead invokes a commonplace comparison to mask an un-

expected revelation. The obvious word pairing conceals a coded figurative
twist. On 2016’s “With Them,” for instance, Young Thug boasts, “I got so
much jewelry, baby, I got so much water this shit like a mini-lake.” The fig-
urative comparison here is banal: something like “I got as much water as a
small lake.” That’s lame enough to get you laughed out of just about any rap
cypher. The spark of interest, though, emanates from the figurative valance of
“water” here, which he hints at with his earlier reference to jewelry. Appre-

ciating the figurative function of the line requires some small work of de-
duction: What is water in a solid state? Ice. Rappers long ago dubbed their
near-flawless VVS diamonds ice. So Young Thug is trying out new slang at
a figurative remove from the old, then putting it to work in a line at once
straightforward and surprising.

METONYMY, SYNECDOCHE, AND OTHER

META PHORIC FIGURES

A number of other rhetorical tropes follow the logic of metaphor: artful ex-
pression through indirection. Metonymy and synecdoche are common in song
lyrics, just as they are in everyday spoken and written communication. Me-
tonymy uses a quality of a thing to describe the thing itself, while synecdo-
che uses a part of something to describe the whole. Metonymy is calling a
businessman a “suit” because businessmen often wear suits. Synecdoche is
calling a theater “the stage” because the stage is a part of the theater. The
taxonomic distinctions are less important than understanding the work these
figures do in language. In the poetry of pop, figures of substitution serve sev-
eral purposes. They add variety and adornment to typical expression, they
engage the listener in discrete interpretive acts, and they add texture to the
song’s diction by contributing to larger patterns in the language. Tropes of
substitution may be obtrusive, when they are cryptic or even incomprehensi-
ble, or they may be incidental, when they go unnoticed.
Most instances of metonymy in song lyrics are similar to those in every-
day conversation, which is to say they are easily metabolized as direct ex-
pression rather than recognized as figurative. Consider the opening lines
from Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song”: “Old pirates, yes, they rob I / Sold I
to the merchant ships.” The meaning is clear: Pirates stole me away and sold
me to slave merchants. The strangeness of pirates selling the animate “I”
to the inanimate “merchant ships” hardly has time to register. Metonymy’s
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

transparency here lets the real strangeness and emotional impact of the line
register fully with the listener: the act of enslaving other human beings that
the song laments.
Often, however, the lyricist employs metonymy for the explicit purpose
of announcing the strangeness of language. The Long Beach rapper O. T.
Genasis scored a viral hit in late 2014 with his drug paean “CoCo,” which
features the following emphatic boast: “Baking soda! I got baking soda!”
That might seem a strange thing to brag about, until you realize that baking

soda is a metonym. Not only is baking soda a staple of the American pantry,
it is also one of the essential ingredients for producing crack cocaine, the
others being distilled water, isopropyl alcohol, and cocaine. For those un-
familiar with the rites of cooking crack, the statement must seem quirky
and absurd. In the context of the song, it is part of a patchwork of subter-
fuge, employing the rhetoric of an underground criminal enterprise for an
aboveground audience’s titillation and entertainment. Though many listen-
ers may understand the metonymic reference, its artful indirection none-
theless generates a certain playful energy. Whether you know what Genasis
means or not, it’s funny to hear him shouting “I got baking soda!” The silli-
ness of the line exercises a necessary leavening influence in a song that, by
virtue of its booming beat and aggressive vocal delivery, might smack too
much of menace.
Another rhetorical figure that practices indirection is euphemism, one of
the most common strategies for handling potentially explicit expression in
pop music. Euphemism resolves the tension between cursing and the restric-
tions against doing so in public through the minced oath. Minced oaths are
a means of linguistic misdirection whereby explicit terms are rendered less
objectionable through erasure, substitution, mispronunciation, or misspell-
ing. Examples abound. Growing up in Salt Lake City in the 1980s, I was
surrounded by children exclaiming “Ah, fudge!” and “For the love of Betsy!”
as if I were living in an episode of the late-1950s sitcom Leave It to Beaver.
Minced oaths underscore the deep magic imbedded in the lost explicit words
and phrases, the power that history and taboo can impart to a handful of
phonemes.
In popular music, minced oaths are widely evident in emended versions
of explicit songs and in artists’ conscious curtailing of language, either out
of personal conviction or commercial calculation. A great example is CeeLo
Green’s surprise 2010 hit “Fuck You,” which built its momentum on YouTube
with a simple and striking video that displayed the song’s lyrics— curse word
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

and all—against a shifting colored background. Only later did the song build
radio airplay, now as the neutered “Forget You.” The song’s power and ap-
peal come from the bold juxtaposition of the unfiltered profanity and the
throwback doo-wop harmonies, rendering the song sweet and satisfying.
Euphemism sometimes builds up around words that are not inherently
taboo, and for motivations that have nothing to do with blunting the offense
of the language. Hip-hop is, unsurprisingly, a hotbed for such expressions,
which become the product of a look-ma-no-hands linguistic playfulness that

prizes novelty and cleverness. Take the Golden Age hip-hop term “5000,”
a way of saying goodbye. It began, simply enough, with the declaration of
“I’m out,” meaning “I’m leaving.” That became “outie,” which sounds like
Audi, which made a car called the Audi 5000, which led to some simply saying
“5000.” The Newark rap group EPMD is perhaps best known for using the
phrase on their series of “Jane” songs from the early 1990s, uttering the words
“Peace, I’m Audi 5000.” The rapper Trinidad James resurrected the slang on
his 2012 song “One More Molly.”
If we go back to the original phrase, “I’m out,” we can trace another strain.
If you said “I’m out” you meant that you were leaving, which meant that you
were about to disappear, which makes you no longer visible like a ghost.
Casper is a ghost (a friendly one, at that), hence “I’m Casper,” as Punchline
rhymes on A Tribe Called Quest’s “Rock Rock Y’All.” Alternatively, Ghost
is the title of a popular 1990 movie starring Patrick Swayze, hence the
phrase “I’m Swayze.” Method Man uses the phrase on his solo hit “Bring
the Pain,” the comic Andy Samberg memorably resurrects it in 2005 on the
Saturday Night Live rap parody “Lazy Sunday,” and Trinidad James, that
connoisseur of vintage rhetorical figures, puts it to use on 2012’s “Female$
Welcomed.” If you said “I’m Audi,” “I’m Casper,” or “I’m Swayze” among hip-
hop heads in the 1990s they would have known exactly what you meant; it
would sound almost like direct speech. If you said the same phrases twenty
years later, as Trinidad James does, then the figures will have recaptured
some of their original strangeness for a generation far removed from Audi
5000s, which stopped being manufactured under that name in 1988; Casper
the Friendly Ghost, whose animated television show is no longer in syndica-
tion; and the hirsute heartthrob Swayze, who died in 2009.
Rap is not the only genre that plays this linguistic game of indirection.
In American popular music, we can trace this practice back at least to the
early decades of the twentieth century, with Tin Pan Alley lyricists and blues
singers whose favored mode was the double entendre, a rhetorical means of
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

securing plausible deniability when saying something naughty.

On November 9, 1938, the Broadway musical Leave It to Me!, featuring
music and lyrics by Cole Porter, premiered at the Imperial Theater. It be-
came a critical and commercial hit, in large part because of Porter’s songs.
The day after the premiere, everyone was talking about Broadway ingénue
Mary Martin’s second-act performance of “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” a
playful number charged with double entendre. The New York Times theater
critic Brooks Atkinson wrote that its “mock innocence makes ‘My Heart

Belongs to Daddy’ the bawdy ballad of the season.” Martin was proclaimed
the new queen of musical comedy, and Porter’s reputation grew even larger.
The premise of the song is simple: A young woman declares her love for
an old millionaire while deflecting the sexual attentions of young suitors.
Porter finds ribald rhymes like these to suit the nearly unrhymable word
“daddy”:

If I invite
A boy, some night,
To dine on my fine finnan haddie,
I just adore
His asking for more,
But my heart belongs to Daddy.

The sex is always there, at a plausibly deniable distance from the words, thus
implicating the listener in making the erotic meaning along with Porter.
Finnan haddie is a cold-smoked Scottish fish, but given the on-stage strip-
tease it would have been difficult for the audience to understand the term
only on its surface. Later in the verse, Porter’s lyrics become less disguised,
moving toward a more overtly sexual statement:

’Cause my Daddy, he treats me so well.

He treats it and treats it,
And then he repeats it,
Yes, Daddy, he treats it so well.

Porter underscores the carnality of the description through a simple shift

in pronouns, from “me” (“he treats me so well”) to “it” (“he treats it so well”).
“My Heart Belongs to Daddy” epitomized the vestigial Victorian sensibili-
ties of late Depression-era American popular culture, drawn toward sex but
demurring when it came to speaking its name.
At the same time, another form of American popular music was thriving.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Delta blues had an equal interest in sex and a similar poetic penchant for
the double entendre, though it embraced the physical geometry of desire far
more explicitly.
Among the migrants who carried Delta blues from the South to the North
was Lucille Bogan, a Mississippi-born singer who made her way to New York
City and started recording vaudeville songs for Okeh Records in the early
1920s. With Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, Bogan would soon be recognized
as one of the Queens of the Blues. What differentiates Bogan from the others,

however, is the explicit language of her lyrics. Where Smith’s greatest hits
include her renditions of “Downhearted Blues,” “The St. Louis Blues,” and
“Careless Love,” all standards, Bogan’s catalog veers toward ribald original
compositions.
Bogan’s most notorious song is the salacious “Shave ’Em Dry,” recorded
on March 5, 1935. Bogan’s lyric is almost dangerously direct, even by today’s
standards:

I got nipples on my titties

Big as the end of my thumb
I got somethin’ between my legs’ll
Make a dead man come
Oh, daddy
Baby, won’t you shave ’em dry?
Want you to grind me, baby
Grind me until I cry

Say, I fucked all night

And all the night before, baby
And I feel just like I wanna
Fuck some more
Oh, great God, daddy
Grind me, honey, and shave me dry
And when you hear me holler, baby
Want you to shave it dry

Dispensing with euphemism, Bogan sings an unabashed anthem of a

woman’s sexual desire. At the center of Bogan’s lyric is double entendre:
“Shave ’em dry” refers on its surface to the act of a man shaving his face
without the benefit of water and shaving cream; when employed as meta-
phor, it means sex without lubrication. On the level of the line, Bogan em-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

ploys a range of other images to intensify her tone of sexual urgency. From
the image of the opening lines (“Big as the end of my thumb”) to the vivid
boast of her sexual potency (“I got somethin’ between my legs’ll / Make a dead
man come”), these lyrics bring to life a voice that is rendered audible by Bo-
gan’s powerful vocal instrument. As the poet Charles Simic observes of Bo-
gan and other artists who court the profane, “ There is poetry in some of that
smut.” Not just poetry—the explicit nature of “Shave ’Em Dry” ’s language
and description attests to Bogan’s surprising linguistic liberation.

Classical Greek rhetoricians would have identified double entendre as the

rhetorical figure known as cacemphaton, or a “scurrilous jest or lewd allu-
sion.” It is a dual-meaning phrase where one meaning is innocent and lit-
eral, and the other is explicit and veiled. So what do we make of something
like “Shave ’Em Dry,” where the double entendre is surrounded by the ex-
plicit expression it is putatively designed to mask? We can resolve this para-
dox of modesty beside immodest expression when we consider that double
entendre is not so much about obscuring but about underscoring through in-
direction. “The sexual double entendres that drove so many blues lyrics did
not hide the blue content from white ears,” observes the musicologist Karl
Hagstrom Miller. “The folk song collector Guy Johnson admitted in 1927, ‘It is
doubtful if any group ever has carried its ordinary vulgarities over into re-
spectable song life so completely and successfully as the American Negro. And
the ease with which the Negro has put this thing over leads one to suspect
that the white man, too, enjoys seeing “the other meaning.” ’ . . . Thinly veiled
lyrics enabled attentive white listeners to imagine themselves in on the joke,
to take part in the social transgression of talking about sex in public.”
Mixing double entendre with explicit language makes the double entendre
show itself as a method of adornment and emphasis rather than concealment.
Double entendre, in other words, does not create a coded communication for a
group of initiates as much as it calls attention to the brash playfulness of the
performer. In crafting a rhetorical figure around the sexual act, the sex in-
variably becomes more palpable than it might have been through clinical or
colloquial description alone. Neither “to have intercourse” (the clinical) nor
“to fuck” (the colloquial) has quite the same impact as “to shave ’em dry.”

THE RHE TORIC OF REPETITION

Rhetorical tropes play games with the meanings of words. Rhetorical schemes
play games with their arrangement. This, of course, is too absolute a dis-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

tinction; tropes sometimes rely on patterned arrangement, as in zeugma, and

schemes often inflect or even transform the meanings of the words they re-
arrange, as in repetition, which frequently results in underscoring differ-
ence. The distinction, however, is worth retaining. Tropes are primarily
invested in the cognitive and the semantic; schemes, in the organizational
and aural. Recognizing the kinds of figures at work is the first step in sort-
ing out why and how they work so well.

The simplest, most direct rhetorical methods apparent in songs are

schemes, and the simplest and most apparent schemes are those of repeti-
tion. Repetition can function on the level of the syllable, as with alliteration,
assonance, and consonance; on the level of the word; and on the level of the
phrase. It can range from the seemingly haphazard repetition of a single
word to the more strictly patterned repetition of words and phrases at par-
ticular places along the line, as with anaphora and epistrophe.
“Helplessly Hoping,” a beautiful song written by Stephen Stills for Crosby,
Stills & Nash, underscores its lilting melody and rich harmonies in its allit-
erative play in the verses: “Helplessly hoping her harlequin hovers nearby”
and “Wordlessly watching, he waits by the window and wonders.” Alliteration
is the organizing principle of the song. This alliteration is not only playful, like
the tongue-twisting “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.” Instead, it
is purposive in its move from adverb to gerund to some specific action. Stills
reinforces the connections among initial consonant sounds by having them
all fall on rhythmically stressed syllables as well: “Wordlessly watching, he
waits by the window and wonders.” What keeps this alliterative and rhyth-
mic effect from becoming gimmicky is the allusive weight of the lyric’s sub-
ject: the challenge of loving another human being.
Repetition’s native domain in pop songs is the chorus, which often serves
as a point of stasis from which the verses depart and then return. The
shifting relation of each verse to the chorus refreshes the repeated language,
staving off monotony and inviting the listener’s reinterpretation of the
now-familiar words. Roberta Flack turned “Killing Me Softly with His Song,”
a song originally recorded by the folk singer Lori Lieberman, into a Grammy-
winning hit in part by recasting the lyrics to feature the chorus. Whereas
Lieberman begins her recording with a verse, Flack’s recording begins with
the chorus—“Strumming my pain with his fingers / Singing my life with his
words / Killing me softly with his song.” This not only drops the listener into
the song in medias res, it also foregrounds the striking language of the ti-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

tle. Flack repeats the chorus after each of the three verses narrating the
singer’s encounter with this seductive performer. After the final verse, Flack
repeats the chorus three times, for a total of six times in the song. What pre-
vents monotony is the way the song’s structure demands that listeners forge
new relations to the repeated words, based on either the new narrative point
of entry inspired by the verse, the new emotive point prompted by the music
and Flack’s singing, or both.

Though the chorus is the natural domain of repetition, one finds instances
in which the chorus changes over the course of the song in ways both big
and small. Sometimes the difference might be the shift of a single word from
the first chorus to the second and to third, as in Jimi Hendrix’s “The Wind
Cries Mary,” which moves in growing urgency from “whispers” to “cries” to
“screams.” Other times, it might be a wholesale reinvention of the language,
as in the famous instance of Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville” where the
shift in the final line of the chorus sketches the arc of the speaker’s dawn-
ing awareness of culpability: from “But I know it’s nobody’s fault” to “But I
think it could be my fault” to “But I know it’s my own damn fault.”
Repetition finds its way outside the chorus as well, often doing the work
of the chorus in songs that defy conventional verse-chorus structures. Joy
Division’s “Insight” rejects a chorus but nonetheless satisfies listeners’ de-
sire for repetition on the levels of rhyme, rhythm, and phrase. Each section
of the song has at least one element of lyric repetition internal to itself and
one that connects it to some other part of the song. For instance, in the third
of the four lyric sections, the group’s singer and songwriter, Ian Curtis, de-
livers the following lines:

Reflects a moment in time

A special moment in time
Yeah, we wasted our time
We didn’t really have time

From “a moment in time” to “a special moment in time” to “our time” and

finally just to “time,” the transmuting of the phrase inspires a sense of bal-
ance and development. That repetition serves the same structural and aes-
thetic purpose as a chorus would have, underscoring the dual impulses of
stasis and transformation. This reimagining of repetition beyond the cho-
rus became a hallmark of Curtis’s compositions for Joy Division. “He played
with the structure of the lyrics but without ever losing what it was about
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

the song that makes it strong,” recalls Joy Division’s bassist, Peter Hook.
“You don’t listen to it and think, Ah, what an interesting lyrical structure.
But it’s all in the song. His love of art was showing here. The way he wanted
to slightly subvert the normal conventions of rock and pop.”
Linguistic repetition is naturally allied with music, which itself almost
always relies on repetition. Repeat a word often enough and it looses itself
from its semantic moorings and becomes just a sound. This cognitive effect,
known as semantic satiation, helps explain why we have a far greater toler-

ance for repetition in song than we do when we encounter it in speech or in

prose. Songwriters must be cognizant, however, of how much repetition their
listeners will endure. When asked to analyze Stevie Nicks’s songwriting, her
bandmate in Fleetwood Mac and onetime romantic partner, Lindsay Buck-
ingham, called attention to her sense for melodic repetition. “She can do re-
petitive phrases, but it’s just how she does it and where she stops doing it, and
where she makes a little changeup and how I seem to be able to move sec-
tions across that, change what’s going on beneath it,” he says. When to stop
repetition or change it up, be it in melody, rhythm, or language, is an expres-
sion of the songwriter’s art.
Repetition might be the defining quality of pop songs, both musically and
lyrically, but there’s a difference between repetition and redundancy. “Re-
dundancy in popular music, which should not be confused with repetition,
is not only one of its most glaring faults but to my mind is almost always
less a problem of haste than haplessness,” writes Alexander Theroux. “It is
invariably the result of some poor dweeb sitting down and trying to ‘fill’ a
line for rhythm the way old linotypists used slugs of lead, and often with
much the same result.” Who’s to say, though, when repetition falls into re-
dundancy? Certainly, we have a higher tolerance for repeated words and
phrases when they change slightly from iteration to iteration. A singer may
alter them in performance, or a word might shift here or there. Not all rep-
etition is created equal.
Find a transcription of just about any pop song and you’ll likely find a
level of repetition that verges on the redundant, excessive, or absurd when
untethered from its performance. A friend of mine posted the concluding
lyrics to the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” on his social media accounts, eighteen iden-
tical lines of “Nah nah nah nah nah nah nah, nah nah nah nah, hey Jude.”
On the page it looks like some kind of Dadaist experiment; on record, it sounds
sensible enough. Staying with the Beatles, one finds numerous instances in
which repetition emerges as a fundamental form of their art. Their first Bill-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

board number-one hit was 1964’s “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” in which they
repeat the title phrase eleven times in two and a half minutes. And that’s just
the most obvious repetition. Perhaps a more sonically and semantically power-
ful instance of repetition comes in the bridge:

And when I touch you I feel happy inside

It’s such a feeling that my love
I can’t hide, I can’t hide, I can’t hide

On a semantic level, the repetition makes no sense; it contributes no new

information. However, that’s not to say that the repetition communicates no
new meaning. To find that meaning, one would do well both to look and to
listen. The repetition here opens up a pathway to the metalinguistic: that
is, to language not as fixed definition but as living meaning in the context
of culture. Metalinguistically, the repetition communicates intensified feel-
ing, an amplification the Beatles underscored by harmonizing that steps up
in pitch with each repetition. By the end they nearly scream the final word.
This song promises on its surface a rather tame kind of love, a grade-school
fantasy. But in the bridge, a new kind of passion builds—first with the some-
what scandalous mention of touching, and then with the strange circumlo-
cution that follows it—“It’s such a feeling [touching you] that my love I can’t
hide”— a glancing euphemism for sexual arousal.
The Beatles employ a similar lyric ploy on “Please Please Me.” One can
certainly hear John Lennon’s lyric as a plea that a girl “choose” him over
another guy. If we expect the same innocence as we listen, we hear “Please
please me like I please you” as a man begging his lover to treat him with
the same kindness and thoughtfulness with which he treats her— please,
please, please! Moving from innocence to experience, though, the double en-
tendre is unmistakable. Sexual inferences here are not much of a semantic
leap, though it’s not one that many of the song’s longing listeners likely took,
at least not on the conscious level. On the level of emotion and excitement,
however, repetition makes meaning all its own.
Repetition’s capacity to create meaning can change how we listen. “This
shift, effected by repetition, away from what is directly captured by words
and toward what is revealed by the structure, prosody, rhythm, and tempo
of the utterance of the words, is essentially a shift toward a musical way of
listening,” writes Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis. “The act of repetition high-
lights that there is more to be understood than what the words literally
convey, drawing attention to these other qualities.” This is not to suggest
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

that behind every lyric repetition lurks some coded meaning left there by
the lyricist for us to find. Often, this new register of meaning does not take
explicit shape but provides a less definite emotive influence or the puzzle-
solving pleasure of finding patterns.
Consider the rhetorical figure of zeugma, by which a word applies in two
or more divergent contexts. Historically, writers have tended to deploy this
figure for comic effect, as when Charles Dickens observes in The Pickwick
Papers that “Miss Bolo . . . went straight home in a flood of tears and a sedan-

chair.” Songwriters often have used the figure without the same comic in-
tentions, though sometimes still with the same comic effect, as when Alanis
Morissette sings with loving conviction, “You held your breath and the door
for me.” It’s hard not to chuckle at that line because it retains the comic
formula of applying the same verb (“held”) in both a figurative (“held your
breath”) and a literal (“held the door”) sense. On Blondie’s “Look Good in
Blue,” Debbie Harry sings, “If it’s all right with you / I could give you some
head and shoulders to lie on.” Harry dials back some of the cringeworthy
crassness of the line in her phrasing, which stitches “head and shoulders”
tightly together rather than accentuating the zeugma by closing the phrase
at “head” before uttering “and shoulders” with a knowing wink. These in-
stances do not seem comic, exactly, only playful and, in the case of Blondie,
consciously coy.
It is unlikely that Bob Dylan had comedy on his mind when he composed
this zeugma in “Queen Jane Approximately”: “Now when all the clowns that
you have commissioned / Have died in battle or in vain.” Dylan’s lyric comes off
as clever, not comic. The tone is wistful and a little bit admiring, even in his
pain. As with Morissette’s somewhat clumsy lines, Dylan’s lyric employs a
verb in both literal (“died in battle”) and figurative (“died in vain”) senses. The
difference, however, rests in the emotive intensity of the image and its imme-
diate juxtaposition; with grander stakes comes graver meaning.
In his compelling short article “In Praise of the Rolling Stones and Their
Zeugmoids,” the language writer and lexicographer Ben Zimmer points out
the subtle but striking modifications of the zeugma in several lyrics by the
Rolling Stones. Citing the Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky, Zimmer offers
the term “zeugmoid” to describe a rhetorical figure in which the use of the
verb in two instances is explicit rather than simply implied. On “Honky Tonk
Women,” for instance, Mick Jagger sings, “She blew my nose and then she
blew my mind.” It would seem that we have the literal use of the verb (“blew
my nose”) as well as the figurative (“blew my mind”). On closer inspection
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

the first instance also appears to be figurative: “Blew my nose” is not meant
to suggest that his lover offered him a Kleenex, but that she passed him a
mirror with a rolled-up bill and a few generous rails. Jagger also undercuts
the Dickensian comedy of the figure by actually expressing the phrase in full
the second time around, mellowing some of the absurdity. When zeugma in-
vites our minds to fill in the missing part of the phrase, that little bit of
extra cognitive effort sets the literal and the figurative expressions apart
from one another in a way that each phrase discretely expressed does not.

So when Jagger sings it, he sounds cool, maybe a little offhand and mildly
boastful, not funny.
Perhaps the most well-turned instance of a zeugmoid might be from “I
Can’t Make You Love Me,” composed by the country songwriters Mike Reid
and Allen Shamblin. Over the years the song has been covered by Prince,
George Michael, Bon Iver, Adele, and many others, but the definitive ver-
sion remains the first, the 1991 recording by the blues rock legend Bonnie
Raitt. The lyric takes the form of a lament, a distillation of the emotion felt
when love only remains on one side. The opening couplet shows the power of
measured repetition, the apotheosis of zeugma in pop: “Turn down the lights,
turn down the bed / Turn down these voices inside my head.” Here we have
three distinct uses of a common phrase, three variations that unfurl in natu-
ral, unforced communication of isolation and longing. The couplet begins
with two literal uses— extinguish the lights and pull back the covers of the
bed—then opens into the figurative— dampen the voices of regret in the mind
of the speaker/singer. “ ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me’ is no picnic,” Raitt told
NPR Weekend Edition’s Scott Simon. “I love that song; so does the audience.
So it’s almost a sacred moment when you share that, that depth of pain with
your audience. Because they get really quiet, and I have to summon . . . some
other place in order to honor that space.” Those opening lines help raise the
song to the level of ritual, a ritual born in part of repetition.
Structured repetition carries rhetorical force through its calibration of
sound and meaning. Anadiplosis is a rhetorical scheme whereby the last
word or phrase from one line (or one sentence or one syntactical unit) is re-
peated at the beginning of the next. The most cited example of this doesn’t
come from Shakespeare, but from Star Wars, in Yoda’s lines: “Fear leads to
anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” Though this is clearly a
figurative expression based on the arrangement of words rather than on the
transformation of their meanings, it exercises influence on thought through
its clear, forceful, and memorable sequencing of emotional states. This is not
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

a subtle figure; like zeugma, it calls attention to its artificiality as part of its
purpose. In doing so, it also leaves some trace of the mind that fashioned it.
In song lyrics, anadiplosis may hardly register, or it may be so overbearing
and overdetermined that it obscures both meaning and feeling in the song.
In the former category is Foo Fighters’ “In Your Honor,” where the two
verses each begin with anadiplosis: “Can you hear me, hear me screaming?”
and “Can you feel me, feel me breathing?” The repetition of the phrase adds
emphasis without departing entirely from the register of everyday speech.

Underscoring this mirror-image repetition is the chorus, which employs the

allied rhetorical schemes of antimetabole, by which words are repeated in
successive clauses, in reverse grammatical order (“Mine is yours and yours
is mine”) and of antithesis, by which words or ideas are juxtaposed, often in
parallel structure (“I would die tonight / For you to feel alive”). The overall
effect of the lyric is equipoise, underscored by the repetition in the simple
melodic line, the repeated guitar figure, and the general tone of sonic stasis.
In the latter category, where anadiplosis creates an ostentatious extreme,
is “Glad You Came” from the British boy band the Wanted. The refrain is
structured entirely on anadiplosis:

Turn the lights out now

Now I’ll take you by the hand
Hand you another drink
Drink it if you can
Can you spend a little time?
Time is slipping away
Away from us so stay
Stay with me I can make
Make you glad you came

These lines read like the spawn of a classical rhetorician and, well, someone
who writes disposable pop songs for British boy bands. Though well executed,
the lyric comes across as overdetermined. In sacrificing most end rhymes in
the name of this exotic rhetorical pattern, the song withholds the comfort-
ing expectation and fulfillment that patterned rhyme enacts. In performance,
the effect is like stuttering. The recording of the song rounds out some of
the sharp edges of the form, though it still announces itself as artificial—
and slightly stalkerish given what the singer is asking of the young woman.
In the American context, the concept of repetition with a difference is at
the center of musical culture. From blues to jazz to rock to rap, artists have
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

forged musical structures and linguistic forms that strike a balance between
expectation and surprise. Of course, that balance can tip too far in one di-
rection or another. There’s an art to knowing how much variation the ear
will want to entertain. On the Traveling Wilburys’ 1989 song “End of the
Line,” George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, and Roy Orbison take turns singing ver-
sions of the chorus while Tom Petty sings the verses. Each turn of the chorus
has four lines beginning with the same phrase, an exercise in anaphora:
“Well, it’s all right . . .” The repetition here underscores the chugging boxcar

rhythm, creating a sense of forward motion even as the song circles back
on itself. One wonders, though, if a fifth line opening in the same fashion
might have pushed the repetition too far, diminishing its propulsive effect.
Some of the most effective and affecting instances of repetition in song
lyrics are counterbalanced by difference. The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ naked
song of addiction, “ Under the Bridge,” builds to an emotional climax under-
girded by the play of repetition and difference:

Under the bridge downtown

Is where I drew some blood
Under the bridge downtown
I could not get enough
Under the bridge downtown
Forgot about my love
Under the bridge downtown
I gave my life away

Haunting choral voices perform the bridge, with lead singer and song-
writer Anthony Kiedis accenting the lines that follow the repeated phrase
“ Under the bridge downtown.” Recalling the composition of the song, during
a time of deep addiction, Kiedis writes in his memoir that he “started
free-styling some poetry in my car and putting the words to a melody and
sang all the way down the freeway. When I got home, I got out my notebook
and wrote the whole thing down in a song structure, even though it was
meant to be a poem to deal with my own anguish.” The vestiges of the poetic
remain, in the anthropomorphized city, in the tone of confessional address,
and in the closing lyric passage with the near-Biblical repetition calling at-
tention to the interstices. What stands out, both in lyric and performance,
is the vulnerability and pain. When the song begins, Kiedis’s voice is close to
the microphone, a note of whispered intimacy powerfully manifested in the
sound and feel of the recording. In the close, even claustrophobic sonic space
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

the song creates, the repetitions in the lyrics are inescapable; they leave no
choice but to engage with the song’s emotion, or to turn it off.
Epistrophe, the repetition of a word or phrase at the end of successive
lines, is less common than anaphora in pop music, perhaps out of the im-
perative for rhyme variety at the ends of lines. Nonetheless, one finds in-
stances of its use. John Mellencamp’s “Small Town” uses the title phrase as
effective epistrophe, balanced with enough variation to refresh the lyric and
keep it from slipping into monotony:

Well, I was born in a small town

And I live in a small town
Probably die in a small town
Oh, those small communities

All my friends are so small town

My parents live in the same small town
My job is so small town
Provides little opportunity

Though the phrase “small communities” feels a bit forced, its cross-lyric
connection in multisyllabic slant rhyme with “opportunity” and Mellencamp’s
huffy delivery save it. The rhyme creates a point of interest and of useful
divergence from the pleasurable repetition of “small town.” Further staving
off redundancy is the melodic variety that subtly shifts the emphasis in each
successive return to the repeated phrase. In the second section, two of the
instances of “small town” (the first and third lines) are used not as geographic
location but as a way of naming an attitude or worldview. The second line,
too, introduces novelty by slightly nudging the rhythm of the line, augment-
ing the phrase as “same small town” and charging it with syllabic stress.
Though repetitive, the lyric is never redundant.
Often song lyrics display more than just one scheme of repetition. A great
example of this is the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love,” which begins with
the harmonizing repetition of the word “love,” then leads into anaphora
(“Nothing you can . . .”), then shifting to the chorus, which entwines two rep-
etition schemes:

All you need is love

All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

After repeating the first line three times, they repeat the last word (“love”)
in a higher key, then use it as the first word of the last line, which is itself a
rhetorical inversion of the repeated phrase. The effect is chiasmus, a play-
ful self-reflexivity. But they’re far from done. After running through the
cycle once again, the song ends with the phrase “Love is all you need” re-
peated call-and-response fashion between solo voice and chorus for nearly a
minute—an interminable time in a three-and-a-half-minute song. Whether
it’s the psychedelic mood, the Summer of Love vibe, the cheeky “She loves

you yeah, yeah, yeah” lyric allusion that crops up just when things are on the
verge of becoming too predictable, or the accrued credit for genius the Beatles
had built up by this point, or whether it’s the mantric quality of the music it-
self, somehow this excessive repetition is not just endurable but pleasurable.
The phrase becomes a collection of words, then syllables, then phonemes,
then finally a kind of music of its own, deracinated from its denotation, but
comfortably, beautifully at home.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

III
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Voice
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Bradley, Adam. The Poetry of Pop, Yale University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fdu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4815350.
Created from fdu-ebooks on 2025-02-09 22:08:59.
R
od Stewart has a weird voice. An early reviewer characterized it
as “hoarse and insistent,” which seems about right. Whether sing-
ing a pop ballad, an up-tempo dance tune, or a standard of the
American songbook, Stewart’s voice makes the familiar unfamil-
iar. The commonplace and the classic alike are deranged in the root sense of
the word— causing disarray or disorder—by the force and character of his
voice.
No one can really try to sing like Rod Stewart, at least not without re-
sorting to parody. There’s something indeterminate about his voice— a cer-
tain androgyny and a quality of sound that suggests it’s close to fraying. It
seems to bear the evidence of damage, perhaps a physical manifestation of
a psychic pain. But here it is, after decades of singing, sounding pretty much
the same as it always has.
Hear Stewart’s voice on a 1930s torch song from his Great American Song-
book series, then hear it belting out the hook to the rapper A$AP Rocky’s
2015 banger “Everyday.” On “Everyday,” Stewart’s vocals sound so fresh that
one could be forgiven for not realizing that they are actually sampled from
his 1972 recording on Python Lee Jackson’s “In a Broken Dream.” Stewart’s
sampled voice serves as a potent aural seasoning, used sparingly and in
conjunction with other vocal flavors— A$AP himself, and the R&B singer
Miguel, who delivers his own sweetened version of Stewart’s hook, “Every
day I spend my time / Drinking wine, feeling fine.” Stewart’s voice is the cool-
est thing on a cool song.
In Stewart’s solo work, one necessarily consumes his voice in large quan-
tities, with resulting dyspepsia for some. In small doses and large, what
draws audiences to his performance is that there simply isn’t another voice
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

that sounds quite like his, simply not another singer who interprets and
delivers a song the way that he does. “I was blessed with distinctiveness,”
Stewart explains in his memoir. “The voice had its own character, and it was
a character—as I knew from taking it onstage so much—that spoke directly
to people.” This last point is key: the distinctiveness, the weirdness, some-
how speaks to people more directly and intensely than a conventionally beau-
tiful voice might speak to them.

Pop music demands a voice, whether singing well or ill, or perhaps not
singing at all but speaking or chanting or rapping to a beat. Since the advent
of the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1958 only thirteen instrumental songs have
reached the number-one spot, the last Jan Hammer’s “Miami Vice Theme” in
1985. This predominance of the voice in pop music speaks to listeners’ lust
for language, as well as to the longing for human connection that the voice
promises.
Singing is not speech. Singing requires heightened attention to pronun-
ciation, phrasing, rhythm, pitch, timbre, breath control, and any number of
other minute calibrations of vocal expression. Speaking shares a good many
of these habits, but the singing voice’s defining difference is that it is pri-
marily driven from without rather than from within.
A singer needs a song.
In this regard, singing is a subordinate art. A voice in song needs lyrics,
melody, and music to define the parameters of its expression. “Melodies form
a marriage with the words,” country legend Waylon Jennings observes.
“ They’ll tell you where they want to go, and you can always change them. . . .
Your melody goes where the words take you. I depend on a lyric to give me
a melody, and a good lyric will pull the melody out of you.” Singing, there-
fore, is also an act of invention. More often than not we hear the singer, not
the song.
Many pop song lyrics function primarily as a vehicle for voice, with the
voice acting as the lead melodic and percussive instrument whose value rests
in sound more than in sense. In fact, the sound often is sense; it communi-
cates musical and emotional meaning. The discernible tone and cadence of a
singing or rapping voice, combined with a few easily remembered words and
phrases, are the stuff of a great deal of pop music. This is particularly the
case in dance music, where the lyric must often simply stay out of the way of
the groove. The biggest hit of 2013 was Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky,” a superb
piece of pop with an indelible, though certainly not mind-expanding, lyric:
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

She’s up all night to sun

I’m up all night to get some
We’re up all night for good fun
We’re up all night to get lucky

The words here work like drum fills, the repeated u vowel-sound acting
as a bodily bass drum. End rhyme in the first three lines establishes a

pattern that the fourth line disrupts. In a compelling sonic departure, the
disyllabic “lucky” follows the sequence of single syllables: “sun,” “some,” and
“fun.” Repetition is key, with the phrase “up all night” recurring across all
four lines, gaining emphasis and amplification with each return.
The meaning of the lyrics to “Get Lucky” is readily apparent and not par-
ticularly compelling on its own, but the sound is something else. Pharrell
Williams, who sings lead, suggested as much when he told Rolling Stone that
after doing his first take, Daft Punk told him to “sing it again, again, again.”
“Then I did four or five more takes,” he recalls; “they picked what they liked,
then I sang each of those parts over and over.” Singers usually do multiple
takes, yet the obsessive attention to the subtleties of Williams’s delivery sug-
gests Daft Punk’s conscious awareness of his voice working as an instru-
ment, not as a singer delivering a singular interpretation of a lyric.
The mythic ideal of the singer going into the recording booth and deliver-
ing an indelible performance is rarely the reality of contemporary recording
practice. Most of today’s pop vocal recordings are a producer and a sound
engineer’s composite of several or even dozens of different takes stitched
together, sometimes syllable by syllable, into a seamless composite master
track. In an extreme example, Christina Aguilera’s 2006 track “Here to Stay”
was “comped from a hundred different takes,” according to the song’s sound
engineer (and co-writer) Ben Allen. “She nailed every single one,” he recalls,
“but she wants to comp it until she’s in love with it. There’s nothing less valid
about that.” Voice—in whole, in parts, or in the new wholes that the parts
make— offers an occasion to explore the confluence of language and sound,
music and meaning.
Even more than rhyme, rhythm, or figurative language, voice exposes the
limitations of a lyric-driven critical perspective. There is no effective nota-
tion to capture vocal performance on the page. Voice demands an account of
song attentive to performance, to words in motion rather than at rest. None-
theless, for the study of singing there is still value in suspending the lyric
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

on the page and creating the fallacy of a fixed form. The text provides a base-
line from which to consider just how voice charges language: We can gauge
the difference between words and music temporarily at rest and those same
words and music in dynamic motion.
The most common form of words in motion, of course, is speech. Speech
opens up boundless variations of tone and texture, of pace and pronunciation,
that make written language inscrutable by comparison. Singing further en-

riches language by elevating common speech to the pattern of ritual, with

rhythm, pitch, tone, timbre, and the other qualities of voice leaving language
at once familiar and strange. When words become sound, then song, they
acquire the capacity to make meaning and undo meaning, to communicate
feelings, and to evoke responses that the words left alone on the page don’t
suggest.
For the singer, the challenge begins with something simple on its face,
but complex in practice. How do you pronounce words when singing a par-
ticular series of notes? A singing voice might dilate the vowels in a lyric line
to dozens of times their usual duration. Pitches shift elastically, beyond the
bounds of a word’s conventional pronunciation. On “Sweet Child o’ Mine,”
for instance, Axl Rose sings the following lines: “Her hair reminds me of a
warm, safe place where as a child I’d hide / And pray for the thunder and the
rain to quietly pass me by.” On the page, the missed rhyme (hide/by) rings
out; the assonance of the i-sound only accentuates this imperfection. In per-
formance, though, Rose introduces a small melodic embellishment to each
word—hi-eee-iiide and bi-eee-eye—that joins them in euphony.
For the listener, the challenge of encountering language in song is this:
How do you understand words expressed in performance as compared to how
you understand them when read alone, voiced only in your head? Hearing
voices means coming in contact with others, either directly or at a distance.
Even disembodied voices, the ones talking through cellphones or singing
through speakers, are endowed with bone and muscle and skin and features,
if only of our mind’s devising. We ascribe so much to a singing voice without
conscious awareness that, right or wrong, we hear gender, age, race, and even
place.
This chapter concerns what happens to song lyrics once singers breathe
life into them in recorded performance. It considers voice in popular music
as an instrument, an extension of the body, and an intimation of identity.
In previous chapters, our attention has been directed to the language of
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

lyr ics on the page: the patterns of rhythm and rhyme, and structures of figu-
rative language that become clearer when temporarily suspended in print.
The critical approach here will be just the opposite—to take songs as more
or less settled documents, and see what happens when voices enchant them,
derange them, or otherwise inhabit them through performance.
No fewer than half a dozen fields of knowledge can lay claim to under-
standing voice. Biologists attend to the physical process whereby human

beings generate sounds from the larynx, using a complex choreography of

muscle, tendon, palate, tongue, and tissue. Linguists classify the many ways
that voices shape human expression, marking differences of pronunciation,
accent, place, and time. Musicologists consider the voice in motion in song,
describing the aesthetics and ornamentations and ritualized phrasings that
extend human expression beyond mere communication to art. Literary schol-
ars explore how voices manifest themselves in written texts, understand-
ing voice as a metaphor for character and affect. Voice, of course, is all of
these things, sometimes all at once, and in this chapter I draw on many
of these approaches to tell the story of how voice creates, inhabits, and trans-
forms song.
The history of pop music since the advent of rock and roll is the history
of the voice’s primacy over the lyric. Song lyrics are often seen as disposable
syllables in the service of singing. When lyrics are the subject of close atten-
tion, it is often for the purposes of ridicule, scorn, or censure. Even in peri-
ods in which the lyric has been elevated above the record—the era, for
instance, of singer-songwriter troubadours of the 1960s and 1970s—it was
always a countercultural impulse to the general understanding of song lyrics
as pragmatic and disposable language, words with utility. The most common
critique of transcribed lyrics is that they’re living only half a life. They’ve been
robbed of their vitality, their sonic character. All of this can be true. But
there’s also a small, special knowledge that songs reveal only to those who at-
tend to their language temporarily removed from their performance. Under-
standing exactly what a voice does in song can usefully begin with the song in
silence, alone as lyric on the page.
The long-standing tradition of celebrating the voice over the lyric unnec-
essarily obscures the language of song. However, elevating lyrics above their
performance is equally distorting. Rather than creating a canon of pop lyr-
ics so that Steven Tyler can sit with Shakespeare, we might instead culti-
vate a more careful and nuanced analysis of the many ways that lyric and
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

voice relate to one another. This relationship is far more complicated and
far richer than simply a matter of the voice dominating the lyric. Sometimes
voices do, indeed, obscure language; sometimes they enshrine it. Sometimes
any words really will do, and sometimes songs require the right words in
the right order for the right singer. Sometimes the most important creative
act, the most important composition, occurs after the lyric is already written.
These matters are conditioned by genre, by individual artists’ sensibilities,
and by particular songs over time.

THE BODY AS INSTRUMENT

Above all, the voice is physical. The voice is produced by the orchestration of
the lungs, the vocal folds, the larynx, and the vagus nerve. The National Cen-
ter for Voice and Speech, based at the University of Utah, explains it this
way: “The respiratory system (lungs, diaphragm, and abdominal muscles),
laryngeal mechanism (vocal folds, laryngeal cartilages, muscles and nerves)
and the supraglottic tract (the spaces above the vocal folds, including the
back of your throat, mouth, nasal passages and sinus cavities) all work to
produce” the sound of the voice. The sounds the voice makes, from a whis-
per to a scream and every thing in between, are products of this same pro-
cess. Singing demands far more from the constitutive elements than normal
speech, engaging the supraglottic tract to achieve greater resonance, calling
on the respiratory system to reach greater volume.
The first quality that a listener encounters in a voice is its timbre. Tim-
bre, as the neurologist Oliver Sacks explains it, “is the par ticular quality
or acoustic richness of a sound produced by an instrument or a voice, inde-
pendent of its pitch or loudness. . . . The timbre of a sound is influenced by
all sorts of factors, including the frequencies of harmonics or overtones and
the onset, rise, and decay of acoustic waveforms.” Timbre is the primary
means by which we distinguish a woman’s voice from a man’s voice, or
Justin Bieber’s voice from Barry White’s voice. It is also the way we dis-
tinguish the same note as played on a trombone as opposed to on a flute or
a piano.
From one angle, the voice is the most common instrument in all recorded
music. From another, the voice is the body rendered audible. “The emission
of song is, in and of itself, the acoustic exhibition of embodiment,” argues
the musicologist Marco Beghelli. “It is not a sound that comes from a me-
chanical instrument; rather, it is produced by the very body of the singer,
the corporeal flux that emerges from the most hidden cavities, and which
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

determines its particular ‘grain’ . . . not a generic timbre, codified in advance

by technical instruments, but rather a peculiar, elusive, highly individual-
ized, acoustic image of a specific embodiment.” Voice is action, orchestrating
the body to express sound and meaning. “The voice is our most primordial
and valuable instrument,” observes the music writer Amanda Petrusich,
“and we respond to it more fully, in both spiritual and physiological ways,
than almost any other organic sound.” The voice holds a privileged place as
an instrument both of body and of spirit.

When Roland Barthes famously theorized about the “grain of the voice,”
his attention was directed at the way that speech, in the form of song, is made
flesh. He exalts those voices that bear in language the vestiges of their physi-
cal making, a grounding and gravity of that language in the body of the singer.
“The ‘grain’ of the voice is not—or is not merely—its timbre; the significance it
opens cannot better be defined, indeed, than by the very friction between the
music and something else, which something else is the particular language
(and nowise the message),” Barthes writes. For Barthes, language asserts its
importance to the character of singing in the shape of consonants and vowels
as performed rather than in denotation. “The song must speak, must write,”
he continues. “The ‘grain,’ ” he concludes, “is the body in the voice as it
sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs.”
The pleasure generated by the voice is categorically different from the
pleasure of instrumental sound. “In the vocal exercise, lungs, throat, mouth,
tongue, and ears all take pleasure,” writes the theorist Adriana Cavarero.
“This happens, especially in the child, but also again in the adult.” “When I
sing,” Grace Jones explains, “I have to be aware from second to second—of
the breathing, the note that has just gone, the note that is coming.” One can
hear this physical dynamic even on the studio recordings of many singers.
Listen, for instance, to Celine Dion and one is always aware of her lungs fill-
ing with air or expelling it. Dion’s performance is meant to overwhelm her
audience, something she underscores by the fact that it appears even to be
overwhelming her as she sings.
If its fallibility is any measure, then the voice is certainly an extension of
the body. The voice can break and it can wear; it can also be strengthened
and trained. “Singing is such an organic process: no amps, no instruments,
just flesh and muscle and psyche,” explains rocker Pat Benatar. The voice is
a frail instrument, subject to scarring, rupture, and attrition over time. Like
any musical instrument, it functions through vibration at different frequen-
cies to create sound, but the voice is unique in its embodiment of the per-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

former. As a consequence, voice inhabits the same territory of sublimity and

imperfection that marks all things human.
Although the voice is an instrument, unlike a guitar or a saxophone, it is
entirely a product of the body. Live performance requires that you actually
hear yourself performing rather than relying simply on the placement of fin-
gers on strings and frets, or on black and white keys. Juliana Hatfield
remarks on this challenge of voice in live performance with loud guitars,
bass, and drums drowning her out. “My voice wasn’t a naturally loud instru-

ment and often the ancient, grime-encrusted vocal monitors in front of my

feet didn’t have the power to boost my voice above the din of the drums and
amps,” she writes. “Earplugs made my voice louder in my head, while block-
ing out some of the harshness of the other noises.” Part of these singers’
descriptions of their craft sounds as if they are speaking of an instrument;
part, of their bodies. The voice is both.
The connection between voice and musical instrument is important to jazz
music, where instrumentalists often learn the lyrics to the songs they are
playing—particularly ballads—so as better to communicate clear emotion
in their performance. Musical notes supply only sound; much of the mean-
ing and the feeling resides in the language and the story in the lyrics. Saxo-
phonists like Lester Young and trumpet players like Miles Davis talk about
singing through their instruments, their horns becoming modulators for
their singing voice. This practical analogy works the other way as well, with
jazz singers drawing inspiration from instrumentalists in the ways that they
approach a song. Quincy Jones observes that both Sarah Vaughn and Ella
Fitzgerald “thought like a horn and sang like a horn. Lyrics were almost sec-
ondary to both of them.” In reflecting on the cultural milieu of 1960s New
York, Bob Dylan recalls listening to John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Thelo-
nious Monk and integrating certain aspects of their performance styles into
his singing. “What they had that I picked up on in my singing—I can hardly
even call myself a singer—was a sense of phrasing and dynamics,” he says.
Billie Holiday, however, resisted the common assertion that her craft as
a singer could be conflated with that of her musical accompanists. “A singer
is not like a saxophone,” Holiday writes in her autobiography, Lady Sings
the Blues.

If you don’t sound right, you can’t go out and get some new reeds,
split them just right. A singer is only a voice, and a voice is completely
dependent on the body God gave you. When you walk out there and
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

open your mouth, you never know what’s going to happen. I’m not
supposed to get a toothache, I’m not supposed to get nervous; I can’t
throw up or get sick to my stomach; I’m not supposed to get the flu
or have a sore throat. I’m supposed to go out there and look pretty
and sing good and smile and I’d just better. Why? Because I’m Billie
Holiday and I’ve been in trouble.

Finally, language is what distinguishes the voice from other musical in-
struments. The singing voice expresses itself through words, and even when

it is scatting nonsense syllables, those syllables bend toward linguistic ex-

pression. No matter how voicelike the tone of Wynton Marsalis’s muted trum-
pet on his haunting “The Seductress,” we never ascribe speech to it. No
matter how trumpet-like the tone of Ella Fitzgerald scatting on “One Note
Samba,” we always understand it as saying something meaningful, even if
that meaning is just beyond our grasp. Nonetheless, to borrow the theorist
Mladen Dolar’s phrase, singing can be “bad communication.” As Dolar un-
derstands it, singing “brings the voice energetically to the forefront, on pur-
pose, at the expense of meaning.” Just because singing announces itself as
meaning doesn’t make that meaning clear.
Bad communication or not, the singing voice never stops communicating,
even when singing moves beyond semantic expression. Most of us can con-
jure the urgency and energy of Kurt Cobain’s voice singing “Smells Like Teen
Spirit,” but only obsessives and literature professors know all the lyrics. De-
pending on how you listen, the lyrics can be either essential or beside the
point. “Onstage it was amazing to see how much emotional power came from
the depths of his body— a gravelly stream of vocal sound,” Kim Gordon of
Sonic Youth recalls of hearing Cobain sing. “It wasn’t screaming, or shriek-
ing, or even punk vitriol, although that’s what it sounded like the most. There
were also quiet parts, low, moan-ish, when you’d half believe Kurt’s voice was
hoarse, and then he’d throw himself on the drum set, which in his anger and
frustration he seemed to want to annihilate.”
Pop in general— and rock in particular—has made a habit of consciously
subverting the classical ideal of a consistency of beauty in tone. In its place,
observes the musicologist Walter Everett, “many rock vocalists reach out to
their audience largely through the physicality of their singing, the degree to
which the sounds of their voice suggest in the listener, at least unconsciously,
just what their oral cavity is experiencing.” The voice under stress, the voice
in pain or in extreme emotional states, has become an increasingly preva-
lent feature of contemporary pop music.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Often in music seemingly raw and untrained expressions are conse-

quences of craft. Some vocalists are known for their signature ad libs; think
of the soul/rap continuum of male artists that runs from Sam Cooke (“Whoa-
oh- oh!”) to James Brown (“Yeow!”) to Michael Jackson (“Uh!”) to Biggie
Smalls (“Uhhh!”) to Rick Ross (“Ugh!”) to Pusha T (“Yuugh!”). “A lot of
people don’t understand about the hollering I do,” Brown wrote in his memoir.
“A man once came up to me in a hotel lobby and said, ‘So you’re James

Brown. You make a million dollars, and all you do is scream and holler.’ ‘Yes,’
I said, very quiet, ‘but I scream and holler on key.’ ”
It seems wrong to call these vocal styles untrained given how much labor
can go into the appearance of spontaneity and struggle. Nonetheless, the vo-
calists who came to define the latter half of the twentieth century in popu-
lar music and inspire the styles that predominate today cultivated a conscious
nonchalance and DIY vocal aesthetic. Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin define one
stylistic mode. On “Song for Bob Dylan,” David Bowie aptly described Dylan
as having “a voice like sand and glue.” Even pop divas boasting a four-octave
range like Whitney Houston, Christina Aguilera, and Ariana Grande were
not so much trained in the conservatory as they were in the church or in
the recording booth or on Nickelodeon.
Judgments about voice are almost always colored by context—the dictates
of a particular genre, or the aesthetics of an audience. It is foolish to propose
some universal principle for measuring a great voice; it’s equally erroneous to
accept the cop-out that all judgments about voice are subjective. The aesthetic
measure of voice may be contextual, but it’s certainly not solely subjective. In
fact, measurable qualities of voice provide starting points for evaluating vocal
quality. From there, one mounts arguments using the less quantifiable but
nonetheless imperative elements that a gifted voice can conjure.

SINGING AS SONGWRITING

Early in his career, the pioneering label executive Clive Davis vowed “to sign
more artists who had performing and vocal skills but just didn’t write, to do
A&R in the most fundamental meaning of the term: matching artists with
repertoire, getting back to that nearly lost, but exciting and fulfilling, part of
the record-making process.” When he made this decision in 1974, he was
going against the new normal of the album-oriented rock era, when singer-
songwriters were the ideal. Davis’s move marked an atavistic turn to artists
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

who make many songs their own without having made the song itself. Over
his long career, Davis signed many singers who gained fame singing other
people’s songs, from Taylor Dayne to Luther Vandross to Whitney Houston
to Kelly Clarkson. Their singing, too, is a kind of songwriting.
Singing in pop is a generative practice. The voice does not merely repro-
duce a series of notes and words, it embodies a lyric and re-creates it through
departures from the lyric as written that reveal the unexpected in the songs

just as they are. A great voice is a claim to ownership all its own. Without
abrogating the rights of others, it asserts a primary position in the public’s
imagination. Though the radical poet and teacher Abel Meeropol wrote
“Strange Fruit”— first as a poem published in the Marxist publication New
Masses, and then as a song lyric—no one could reasonably dispute that it is
anything other than a Billie Holiday song. As the literary critic Emily Lordi
observes in her study of black women singers, Black Resonance, “authorship
also resides in inventive execution.” Holiday and other commanding singers
are creative agents, rewriting the songs they sing through tones and inflec-
tions, even through the intake of breath.
Claiming that singing is songwriting acknowledges that much of what we
value in the language and the sound of musical recordings is a product of
vocalists’ interpretive choices. My goal is not to confer some legitimizing au-
thority on singers by calling them writers; rather, it is to underscore the
authority and influence their voices carry, even in matters like lyric compo-
sition. Regardless of the extent of their generative acts of voice, however,
singers are not writers— except, of course, when they are writers, taking a
hand in the creation of language on the page and its rebirth as recorded
sound.
Some people are uncomfortable with the idea of singers as songwriters in
those instances when the singers don’t actually compose word or melody.
There is greater authenticity or emotive power, many believe, when perform-
ers sing their own songs. “I’d say material is 80 percent of a singer’s career,”
observes the country singer Loretta Lynn. “You can have a great voice, but
you’d also better have a new song that fits your style. And the best way is to
write the songs yourself.” Tom Petty puts it even more succinctly: “If you’re
gonna sing the song, it’s good to write the words yourself, so you can believe
it and get behind it.” Lynn’s and Petty’s statements reflect a substantial
belief that true singers are also writers.
It comes down to this: Does the singer serve the song, or does the song
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

serve the singer? “We judge pre-rock singing by how perfectly the lyric is
served. That’s the standard Frank Sinatra exemplifies,” writes the novelist
Jonathan Lethem. “We judge popular vocals since 1956 by what the singer
unearths that the song itself never quite could.” Lethem is being polemical
and schematic here, but his claim is instructive. The former understanding
of singers in service of the song presents vocalists as craftspeople; the latter
understanding of singers as those who find something deep and heretofore
hidden in the song presents vocalists as artists.

This division privileges the lyric above all. However, in his landmark
study of the blues, Stomping the Blues, the novelist and essayist Albert
Murray makes the impor tant observation that for blues listeners and per-
formers the lyrics themselves were often of secondary importance. We can
extend Murray’s claims to an entire tradition of popular music that would
follow the blues—from rock to R&B and beyond:

The truth is that when a singer likes the tune he is likely to proceed
as if any words will do. Moreover much goes to show that only a
very few of the millions of devoted admirers of Ma Rainey, Bessie
Smith, Jimmy Rushing, and Big Joe Turner, for instance, can actu-
ally understand more than half the words of their lyrics as sung, not
to mention the idiomatic imagery and references. Perhaps many re-
spond to what they wish to think is being said rather than to the
statement the composer wrote, but even so the chances are that
most of their goose pimples and all of their finger snapping and foot
tapping are produced by the sound far more often than by the mean-
ings of the words.

For much of the history of pop music it does seem as if “any words would
do.” Some of the great moments in pop vocal performance happen when the
singer bends or even breaks the bonds between language and meaning. The
blues stand as the wellspring of a tradition of vocal practice in the United
States that privileges feeling over form and that uses sound to clarify sense.
Writing to Murray in a 1957 letter, Ralph Ellison extolled the blues singer’s
capacity to meet or even to exceed the expressive range of poetry. “Bessie
Smith singing a good blues may deal with experience as profoundly as [T. S.]
Eliot, with the eloquence of the Eliotic poetry being expressed in her voice
and phrasing,” Ellison wrote. “Human anguish is human anguish, love love.”
Ellison did not intend poetry as metaphor here, but rather as a matter of
practice—the formal exercise of the singer’s craft and its capacity to achieve
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

expressive eloquence and directness. “The blues bears witness to the strange-
ness of each individual’s fate,” writes the poet Charles Simic. “It begins word-
lessly in a moan, a stamp of the foot, a sigh, a hum, and then seeks words for
that something or other that has no name in any language and for which all
poetry and music seek an approximation.” Like the blues, the language of
much popular lyric is a record of this search for feeling— sometimes apparent
in sounds seeking sense, sometimes in more ordered language, but always
expressed through the voice.

Great singers, and even poor singers, engage in work analogous to poetic
composition. They co-create the lyric. Their emphasis and inflection, their
tonal shading, their orientation to the beat all account for a critical act of
composition that deranges and transforms the lyric as written. In an 1871
letter to his publisher, then sixteen-year-old poet Arthur Rimbaud boldly pro-
claimed that “the Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational
derangement of all the senses.” So many singers follow the same practice,
studiously deranging their senses, and through their senses, the song. “As a
singer you impose your melodies,” explains Mick Jagger, “and I would im-
pose my melodies over Keith [Richards]’s chord structures. So even though
I wasn’t a player, I would help shape the melody, ’cause I was singing it.” Lyr-
ics drive the topline melody in most pop songs, and the singer gives voice to
the lyr ics. The difference between lyr ics on the page and lyrics in perfor-
mance is one between lyrics at rest and lyrics in motion.
Singers compose in rehearsal and on the fly. The ways that they change
the songs they sing are obvious to the ear, rarely apparent to the eye. Frank
Sinatra and Billie Holiday weren’t songwriters; they never composed a thing.
But no one could seriously suggest that they didn’t shape the songs they sang.
“So enormously powerful were Sinatra’s interpretations of songs that even
now, looking at the sheet music, I find it impossible to disassociate the printed
notes from my memory of his singing,” writes Alec Wilder in his classic study,
American Popular Song. As interpreters rather than composers, Sinatra,
Holiday, and other great singers performed a creative act every bit as signifi-
cant as that of the lyricist.
Indeed, one could expand the matter of authorship beyond songwriters
and singers to producers, engineers, and the host of other individuals who
contribute to the production of a musical recording. The Beatles had George
Martin. Bob Dylan had Daniel Lanois. Radiohead has Nigel Godrich. Man-
agers, producers, businesspeople, and creative minds are part of pop’s voice.
“The multiple authorship that characterizes popular music production goes
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

a great deal further than the collectivity of band composition,” argues the
musicologist Nicholas Cook; “it extends to the highly segmented process in
which the roles of song-writers, arrangers, and artists are complemented by
those of sound engineers, producers, and A&R personnel.” Producers can cel-
ebrate or bury the voice depending on the choices they make in the mix. For
his part, the producer Dave Stewart sees his task as enshrining the voice
and its particular capacity for emotive expression. “ People want to hear and
feel the emotion in the human voice, and for me that’s the most important

thing to get right,” he observes. “ There came a point in music when you could
have forty-eight tracks, then seventy-two tracks or so, and just create a giant
wall of music. . . . I believed in following the voice on its journey.” Under the
influence of producers and other individuals with the power to shape the
music, authorship in pop music is complicated, attesting to the exigencies of
both art and commerce.
For the purposes of the poetry of pop, it is useful to remember that the
titular author—the songwriter cum poet—is far from the only hand involved
in making the music. It falls to us as active listeners to attend to the mul-
tiple means by which a song is composed, recontextualized, and reimagined.
Nor should songs be conflated with their recordings, or with instances of
their live performance. “Songs are more abstract entities than their record-
ings and they are not produced technologically any more than are poems;
they can be recorded, arranged and performed in multiple ways and yet be
the same song,” writes the philosopher John Andrew Fisher. A song, in other
words, lives many lives, constituting a multitude of distinct aesthetic mani-
festations. These divergent iterations are expressed most palpably through
the exercise of a great singing voice.

THE PHONEBOOK TEST

It’s often said that Elvis Presley could sing the phonebook and leave the
audience enraptured. So could Frank Sinatra, Etta James, Luther Vandross,
B. B. King, Kurt Cobain, Donna Summer, Johnny Cash, and a host of others.
The idea behind this— call it the Phonebook Test—is that some singers are
so lavishly gifted or so charismatic that they can take lifeless lyrics and make
them unforgettable. Of course, conferring the phonebook mantle on a singer
is a subjective judgment, phrased as hyperbole. Nonetheless, the saying per-
sists as a way of enshrining certain voices over and above the language of
the lyrics they sing. Great voices trump language, the argument goes, though
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

not everyone agrees. “ People often say that a great singer can sing the phone
book and people would buy it,” writes Clive Davis in his memoir. “To me,
that’s completely wrong. The better the singer, the more critical it is that
the songs are challenging enough to showcase his or her talents at their
absolute best.”
Sometimes bad lyrics happen to good singers. Sometimes bad lyrics even
happen to good songs. It’s no special feat to pick out song lyrics that are silly,
saccharine, or cringeworthy. Rather than deriding these lyrics, why not use

them as the starting point for a richer line of inquiry? Specifically, why not
try to figure out what transpires to render these lyrics tolerable, and even
memorable and meaningful, when delivered by a great voice in performance?
Aretha Franklin is a prime candidate for the Phonebook Test and for Da-
vis’s counter-theory. One imagines that she would be able to pass any vocal
test you sent her way. “No one has been able to ‘keep up’ with her,” observes
the English critic Barney Hoskyns. “Her lines tend to be clean and straight
rather than arabesque or melismatic, and what stands out more than any-
thing are the sudden, high, almost indignant phrases you hear. . . . The
mercurial intelligence of her timing, her compression of phrases within the
minutest gaps, is astonishing, and yet it is this intelligence which—running
rings round us as it does— can so often lose us.”
Give Franklin a silly song, the argument goes, and her interpretive vocal
genius will save it. And, indeed, Franklin, like many other vaunted vocalists,
at times seems to put her talent willfully to the test. Over the course of her
long career, she has recorded many classic songs, from “Rock Steady” and
“ You’re All I Need to Get By” to “Respect.” Franklin’s catalog also includes
songs that, save for her vocal performance, are defiantly forgettable. In 1985
Franklin released Who’s Zoomin’ Who?, her thirty-first studio album. Its lead
single was “Freeway of Love,” a propulsive pop number accentuated by a Clar-
ence Clemons sax solo. “The strongest cut on the album,” Franklin wrote of
the song in her memoir, “was between my voice and an absolutely upbeat and
hot track hooked up by [producer] Narada [Michael Walden].” Even a singer
of Franklin’s incomparable gifts seems hard-pressed selling the song’s open-
ing lyric: “Knew you’d be a vision in white / How’d you get your pants so
tight?”
One response to these bad lyrics might be to diminish the importance of
the words in the song entirely. Ignore the tight white pants! However, an-
other way to think about silly pop lyr ics is to consider what it takes for
lyr ics to call attention to themselves in most pop songs. Music creates a
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

linguistic space in which language that might come across as excessive in

everyday speech can become comfortable in performance. If someone came
up to you and shouted “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da, life goes on, Oh / La-la-la-la life
goes on,” you’d think she was nuts. But if you passed the same person sing-
ing the words instead, you likely wouldn’t give a second glance. It takes
something special for a lyric to call attention to itself as language.
Often excesses are deliberate, designed to account for the context of their
delivery. Lyrics are strange or silly or sonically extreme so as better to pierce

our consciousness. Silly lyrics, after all, are often the most fun to sing. Think
of the fun people had in stretching out the “ooo” when singing “I’ve got the
moves like Jagger” with Adam Levine. Words that might come across as
meaningless on the page can be deeply affecting when given voice and melody.
Song lyrics are asked to accomplish a range of tasks. Sometimes they are
primarily intended to carry a melody; other times they wish to call atten-
tion to themselves; and other times they work to highlight an attitude, an
emotion, or a story. Each of these aims requires a different set of aesthetic
tools. Take the lyric from “Freeway of Love” quoted earlier. The lines by
themselves are a little silly, but the work those lines do in the song is sub-
lime. They underscore the power of a forty-three-year-old black woman sing-
ing about desire and turning the tables on a culture that often objectifies
and catcalls women for what they wear. Franklin’s playful objectification of
the male in her gaze underscores the song’s celebration of freedom, both am-
orous and otherwise.
Pulling the music away from a lyric and laughing at the lyric for being
banal or bland is about the same as pulling the sugar out before making a
batch of cookies and then complaining that the cookies just aren’t sweet
enough. Without the key ingredient, the recipe’s bound to fail. And just as too
little of something will ruin the mix, too much will do the same. Make the
lyrics too mellifluous or too ponderous and the final product can sometimes
prove worse for the effort. It makes sense to view lyrics at work in vocal per-
formance, in the context of their silent service to other aesthetic aims.

THE VOICE AT WORK: SPEECH, RAP, AND SONG

The voice does three things with song lyrics: It sings them, it raps them, and
it speaks them. We know these when we hear them. However, there are no
bright-line distinctions separating them. The three partake of common prac-
tices; they blend into one another, with artists often marrying multiple modes
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

to make music with their mouths. Consequently, by analyzing how vocal art-
ists use song, rap, and speech we gain a clearer understanding of how they
achieve their emotive and semantic effects. What makes a particular vocal
performance so affecting, or so maudlin? Why do people associate rap with
aggression and falsetto singing with romance? Do certain styles of vocal per-
formance lend themselves to particular expressive and thematic ends?
Speech and song involve different hemispheres of the brain; speech is
left-brain dominant, and song is right-brain dominant. However, speech and

song are also defined by extrinsic perception. Studies have demonstrated

that certain spoken phrases, when repeated multiple times, will take on the
quality of song for listeners. These speech-to-song illusions are an impor-
tant part of the story of voice because they attest to the liminal spaces across
vocal expression. Most of us, though, upon hearing a lyric, decide instanta-
neously whether it is spoken, rapped, or sung. This judgment involves mul-
tivalent calculations that rely on our experience with language and take
place on a level beyond conscious awareness.
Some singers play with these assumptions to fashion expressions that call
attention to themselves. Even entire genres may favor modes of performance
that evade ready categorization. “In singing styles, such as folk and pop,
where the intelligibility of the words and their expression can be particu-
larly important, a more flexible approach to voice production is needed than
can be achieved in classical singing styles,” argues Alan H. D. Watson, an
anatomist and neuroscientist specializing in musical performance physiol-
ogy. “This depends on a technique that is more akin to speech and which
would make it difficult to sing at high volume.” Frank Sinatra, for instance,
sometimes approaches direct speech in his conversational singing style.
“ There was a tenderness to his voice, a purity and ease of phrasing,” recalls
Willie Nelson of first hearing Sinatra on the radio. “When he sang the popu-
lar songs of the day, I marveled at the natural way he told the story.” What
Nelson hears as natural is in large part Sinatra’s proximity to speech in his
singing.
When multiple vocal registers express themselves singly in a song, the
results can be both a pleasing listening experience and a study in the range
and capacity of voice. Method Man and Mary J. Blige’s “I’ll Be There for
You / You’re All I Need” begins with Method Man speaking in a barely deci-
pherable mumble, which gives way to Blige singing ad libs and the chorus
(drawn from Marvin Gaye’s “ You’re All I Need”), before opening up to Method
Man’s rapped verse. The song’s appeal relies on the equipoise between the
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

sharp edges of Method Man’s rapped syllables and the suppleness of Blige’s
church-inflected melodies, all framed by snatches of direct speech.
Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen,” a breakout hit of 2015, underscores the simi-
larities among speech, rap, and song while ultimately proving their singu-
larities. Speech bookends the song, with Fetty Wap calling out his crew name
(“1738!”) in the beginning and Fetty Wap’s business associate, Nitt Da Gritt,
making loud proclamations (“You hear my boy . . . soundin’ like a zillion
bucks!”) at the end. In between, the recording blurs the boundaries between

singing and rapping so much that it confuses categories. The fact that so
many listeners experience the song as either singing or rapping testifies
to the ways Fetty Wap effectively conflates the two. Wikipedia, for instance,
categorizes the song as “hip hop” and “trap,” both rap descriptors. By contrast,
the music website Pigeons & Planes ran an article titled “Fetty Wap Is Not
a Rapper.” The writer, Justin Charity, states that “Trap Queen” features “no
rap at all.”
Though too absolute, Charity’s article offers a useful corrective; “Trap
Queen” includes an instrumental track that one associates with rap, though
Fetty Wap’s vocal style on most of the recording behaves as singing. In the
opening verse he bends the lyrics into a discernible melodic shape, extending
the vowels at the ends of lines in a manner characteristic of singing, even as
he end-stops his lines like a rapper. The podcast Switched On Pop points out
that Fetty Wap repeats a C-major triad throughout much of the song, making
micro-adjustments to his melodic and rhythmic patterns along the way while
staying faithful to the overall melodic contour. If this sounds something less
than singing to some ears, it might be because no sustained melody ever
emerges, only this patterned repetition of the same melodic fragment.
By the time the chorus to “Trap Queen” arrives, however, Fetty Wap is
certainly singing. Over major chord harmony, Fetty Wap sings a minor chord
melody that is downright expressive when compared to the truncated
melodic line of the first verse. When he returns for the second verse, he is
rapping—chopping the end words rather than extending them as he does in
singing, underscoring the finality of the end rhyme. Listen to the first verse
against the second without the chorus in between and the difference is obvious:
Fetty Wap is singing on the first verse and rapping on the second. Gone with
the second verse is the lilting embellishment on the rhyme words at the end
of lines and the extenuation of vowel sounds. More important, gone are the
tonal shifts that shape the melody. In their place is the characteristic rhyth-
mic approach to language commonly associated with rap.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Speaking, rapping, and singing are discrete but interrelated expressions

of voice. But what does one do with the spaces in between? When executed
crisply and with purpose, shifts among the registers of voice in song provide
sonic interest and help to underscore different motives of meaning and emo-
tion. “A technique heard frequently since Hoppy Jones of the Ink Spots
made it effective in the 1930s,” explains Walter Everett, “is for a singer to
drop the vocalizing and shift to the spoken word for an introspective later
verse or bridge, as if speaking from the heart, reaching the audience with

inner thoughts in a more direct way than an ‘artificial’ melody is able to do.”
Moving to the spoken word temporarily untethers the song’s vocal utterance
from the music, a union instantiated in singing. In moving from song to
speech and back to song on numbers like “My Prayer” and “If I Didn’t Care,”
the Ink Spots craft moments of sonic and emotive difference, achieving effects
that song or speech alone could not. Though their “talking choruses” sound
quaint today, they provided a model upon which later artists would craft more
subtle effects using vocal contrast.
Decades after the Ink Spots, the rapper and singer Drake began cultivat-
ing his transitions from rap to song and back to rap. Dionne Osborne, Drake’s
vocal coach, reveals how she encouraged him to move more purposefully
within and between his vocal modes. “I mean, singing is just exaggerated
speech. You’re sustaining the tones; you’re holding the notes longer,” she ex-
plains. “So I tried to get him to do that more with rap, connecting his flow. It’s
like writing in cursive. The technical term is legato. It’s a better use for the
air when you’re singing and makes for a better sound overall.” Drake’s ap-
proach, both to singing and to rapping, is now far more attentive to match-
ing his vocal pitch to the instrumentals. He has come to appreciate the voice
as instrument.
Performance close to speech generally endows a lyric with a more direct
appeal to language. It also inspires a discombobulating experience of the
everyday and the strange when matched with the artful techniques of song.
Though some consider Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Tele-
vised” a harbinger of rap, it more closely approximates the cadenced speech
of preaching or political oratory, with its absence of rhythmic regularity and
timbral shape. Scott-Heron’s lyrics behave more like prose than like the
rhythmically patterned poetry of rap. Though jazz-inflected music plays in
the background as Scott-Heron vocalizes, his lyrics are not delivered in time
to a beat as we would expect of rap. Scott-Heron is exhorting, he’s preach-
ing, he’s “rapping” in the colloquial sense of street-corner banter, but he isn’t
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

rapping as we know it today. The clarity of a vocal performance like “The

Revolution Will Not Be Televised” underscores its emphatic political and so-
cial critique in a vocal style akin to speech. But its small differences from
speech— Scott-Heron’s irregular patterns of inflection against the texture
of the song’s jazz accompaniment—make his message memorable.
Moving from a crossover between rap and speech to a crossover between
rap and singing, some artists graft elements of rap cadence to music that
otherwise settles comfortably into familiar generic tropes. Anthony Kiedis

of the Red Hot Chili Peppers developed a vocal style that transposes certain
rap techniques to a new generic and sonic context in punk rock. In the early
1980s Kiedis saw Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five in concert and
was particularly taken with the rap style of Melle Mel, who essentially
drafted the blueprint for rapping to a beat. “It was mind-blowing,” Kiedis
recalls. “I subconsciously vowed I would somehow create that type of energy
to entertain others. I didn’t have a clue how to write a song or sing, but I
thought I could probably figure out how to tell a story in rhythm.” This con-
ception of vocal performance as telling a story in rhythm provided Kiedis
with both an expression of style and a means of disguising his own vocal
limitations. “When [Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s] ‘The Mes-
sage’ became the hottest thing that summer,” Kiedis reveals in his memoir,
“it started dawning on me that you don’t have to be Al Green or have an
incredible Freddie Mercury voice to have a place in the world of music. Rhym-
ing and developing a character were another way to do it.”
The vocal style Kiedis practices on songs like “Give It Away” and “Can’t
Stop” is not quite singing, not quite rapping, but something in between. The
similarities to rap extend to the structures of the songs themselves. As in
most rap songs, the verses on “Can’t Stop” are sixteen bars in length. The
song is dominated by rhymed couplets, often of multisyllabic pairs (shindig /
win big, for instance, and penetration/generation). The most arresting
moments on “Can’t Stop” come in the transitional passages from verse to
chorus, where Kiedis shifts from his stylized rap delivery to his natural sing-
ing voice. These transitions call attention to Kiedis’s two distinct vocal
practices. Equally important are the qualities that cohere the performance.
The choruses are decidedly sung and follow a rhythmic logic that undergirds
the languorous, lilting melody.
Kiedis’s cadence on the verses is unmistakably inspired by rap, but his
effusive, singsong delivery shows that rapping can approach a kind of sing-
ing. Indeed, the song relies on listeners’ recognition of Kiedis’s vocalizing as
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

something other than rap. No self-respecting rapper in 2002, in the era of

Eminem, would ever be caught kicking such an old school flow. However, it
works for the Chili Peppers both because of their decidedly rock ’n’ roll repu-
tation and because of the defiant confidence with which Kiedis unifies the
recording’s disparate parts. When Kiedis moves from the sung chorus of
“Can’t Stop” back to its rapped verse, the shift charges the song with the
immediacy and insistence of the rhythm. Kiedis told Spin magazine that
the song is one of the few examples in the Chili Peppers’ catalog in which he

wrote lyrics to a rhythm pattern rather than devising the rhythm pattern
from the lyrics. The performance, both rhythmically and expressively, cap-
tures the spirit of the effusive rapping styles of old-school rap artists like
Melle Mel and Kool Moe Dee even as it presents itself as something new,
something in between.
For all their possible connections, though, speaking is not rapping and rap-
ping is not singing. Each inhabits a distinct point along an expressive contin-
uum. The differences among them manifest themselves in pitch, tone, rhythm,
and pronunciation. Rap shares with speech its indefinite pitch, whereas sing-
ing relies on a patterning of definite pitch along a scale to comprise melody.
When Jay Z raps “99 Problems,” there’s simply too much variation in his vocal
delivery to assign definite pitches to his words. As a consequence, his flow
emulates the conversational quality of speech even as other features of his
vocal per formance, such as end rhyme or patterns of vocal stress, depart
sharply from conventional speech practices. By contrast, when Sam Smith
sings “Stay with Me,” his voice journeys up and down the scale from defi-
nite pitch to definite pitch, creating the melody. Few of the distinguishing
qualities of speech remain.
This isn’t to suggest that nothing is going on when it comes to the pitch
of the rapping voice; pitch is an essential feature of pronunciation, and rap-
pers often order pitches in ways that conventional speech does not even if
they don’t precisely sing. This becomes apparent when rap vocals are trans-
ported to a new sonic context. “When I first tried to synch up one of my fa-
vorite rapper’s a cappellas with my own music,” explains the composer Chilly
Gonzales, “I was unpleasantly surprised at the results: sometimes the (hid-
den) pitch choice of the rapper clashed in a bad way with the chords in my
song. That’s when I realized that rap isn’t talking at all; it just plays on the
illusion of conversational, confessional intimacy.”
All raps carry “hidden pitch” with more or less reliability. Though never
hitting a diatonic key, Lil Wayne hovers between the frequency space of E
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

and F for the entirety of the first verse of his 2008 hit “A Milli.” His voice
retains a certain intervallic integrity even as it eludes the certainty of a
given pitch. By patterning the frequency and timbre of his performance in
such a restrictive pitch space, however, Lil Wayne sacrifices the conversa-
tional quality that Gonzales ascribes to rap. Instead, the first verse of “A
Milli” sounds like chant, like ritual. As Lil Wayne moves into the second and
third verse, his performance looses itself from its pitch restriction and the
vocal performance takes on a more effusive and conversational quality, even

engaging in the pitch-shifting modulation that underscores the line “what’s

a goon to a goblin.”
Rap differs from speech in its clear, if hidden, pitch; rap is also unlike
singing in that its pitch is not generally a defining quality of its sound. Rap-
ping relies on patterns of frequency that do not privilege pitch precision but
instead suggest broader melodic shapes and tendencies. A rapped lyric can
maintain integrity with the shape of its pitch without precisely hitting tar-
geted frequencies. For the listener, perhaps the underlying difference be-
tween singing and rapping is that the former depends on implicit identification
of pitch and the latter on more liberal outlines of melodic space.
Tone also helps differentiate speech from song. Vocal tones are roughly di-
vided between two registers: the head voice and the chest voice. The head voice
resonates through the upper sinus cavities, producing the light and bright
vocal tone we associate with soprano and falsetto singing. The chest voice is
more deeply resonant, resulting in the richer and thicker sounds that accord
with tenor and contralto singing as well as with speech. For most singers the
head voice is a voice under pressure; the chest voice, the voice at relative ease.
Both can be effective and affecting means of vocal expression in song, but the
chest voice more closely approximates the physical dynamics of speech.
In analyzing the distinctive power of Aretha Franklin’s voice, Emily Lordi
observes that “Franklin’s singing stays unusually close to speech registers—
closer than singers with a less extensive chest voice range, who must shift
into their head voices to reach the notes she reaches, and certainly closer
than soprano and falsetto singers, who work primarily in their upper range.
Her contralto singing thus produces a curious form of what we might call
audio-sympathy: we are at home speaking in this range, but very few people
can sing in it (well or otherwise).” When Franklin sings in her chest voice,
our comfort with it derives in part from her vocal tone’s proximity to speech.
By contrast, her forays into her upper-register head voice mark her singing
as removed from everyday utterance. So the head voice distinguishes itself as
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

the domain of song, whereas the chest voice is the territory in which speech,
rap, and song most often meet.
As for rhythm, casual speech does not usually follow recognizable pat-
terns of rhythmic stress, although it does rely on rhythm and even melody
in keeping with the context of spoken expression. Rap’s flow depends on
rhythmic patterning. Singing does as well, albeit in a looser manner. Rap
requires a continuous flow; speech does not. And singing enlists rhythm
primarily in ser vice of melody. “Song has repetition built into it—of

rhythms, melodic motifs— and this repetition gives song an element of pre-
dictability that speech lacks,” Daniel J. Levitin writes. By contrast, speech
is heterometric, with variability and idiosyncrasy defining its rhythmic
contours. Certainly speech is capable of crafting moments of rhythmic
patterning—in Sunday sermons, for instance, or in political oratory—but we
ascribe musicality to those speech acts, differentiating them from everyday
speech, marking them somehow as ritual.
Finally, speech, rap, and song follow divergent practices when it comes to
pronouncing words. Just because you can utter a given word or sentence in
speech does not mean you can do the same when singing or rapping. Pro-
nouncing words in song is a craft. “I would listen and breathe from my dia-
phragm,” recalls Melissa Etheridge of her apprenticeship as a singer, “and I
became aware of how to pronounce words while singing.” The defining differ-
ence between pronouncing words in speech and in song is the phrasing of
vowels. “When you sing,” explains the songwriter Gene Lees, “it is the vowels
that carry the tone, and, basically, the pitch. The consonants are produced
not by the vocal cords but by the mouth. The tongue, teeth, nose, velum, lips,
and what is called the alveolar ridge—that’s the ridge behind your upper front
teeth that you keep touching with the tip of the tongue when you say tut-tut-
tut—merely articulate the vowels. When you sustain a note, it is the vowel
that you hold.” One of the most remarkable examples of a singer enchanting
a single word in a song is what Whitney Houston does with the word “free”
in her classic 1991 rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” before Super
Bowl XXV. In a short essay published in the New Yorker in 2016, the writer
Cinque Henderson describes the lyric moment as follows:

As Houston’s voice approached the high note on the word “ free,” she
slowed for suspense and for air, then rang the E-flat above middle C
like a bell. With the extra room [her longtime bandleader and ar-
ranger Rickey] Minor had given her, she held on to the note for three
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

counts (the traditional score affords “ free” only a single count, but
[Marvin] Gaye had also lengthened it, whether Houston explicitly re-
membered that or not). And then, in the split-second relay circuit of
choices that we know as instinct, Houston leapt off the back of that
E and sent her voice vaulting even higher, dragging out the word
“ free” with a two-note flourish she invented in the recording booth,
just as the measure was about to close. It had the sensation of a
frighteningly tight line being pulled even tighter.

Because it ends in a vowel, Houston could hold the word “free” for three
counts in a way that she couldn’t, for instance, hold its synonyms “indepen-
dent” or “sovereign.” Singing dilates vowels in a way that speech and rap
rarely do. A singing voice might expand the vowels in a lyric line to many
times their usual duration. This is such a familiar quality of singing that
the casual listener never stops to realize how prevalent and foundational the
practice of dilating vowel sounds is. Think about the Five Stairsteps sing-
ing “Oooooh-ooooh chi-i-ild, things are gonna get e-e-asie-e-er / Oooooh-ooooh
chi-i-ild, things’ll get bri-i-ighte-er.”
Vowels serve a particular function at the ends of musical phrases where
one traditionally finds end rhyme. Most consonants truncate a phrase—you
can’t sustain the word “trapped” or the word “cut”—but vowel sounds allow
the melodic charge of pitch and tone, and the play of qualities like melisma.
Therefore, song lyrics underscore the vital distinction between closed rhymes
and open rhymes. “It is a mark of skill in a lyricist when he uses a lot of
open rhymes on long notes at the ends of musical phrases,” writes Gene Lees,
advocating a staunch position that few contemporary songwriters assidu-
ously hold. On the chorus of “Cupid,” Sam Cooke plays with open-ended
rhymes, alternating between sustaining the vowel sounds and introducing
a curlicue of melisma. I’ve mapped the different ways he sings the first two
lines in his first two passes through the chorus:

Cupid, draw back your boooow

And let your arrow go-oh

Cupid, draw back your bow-oh

And let your arrow go-oh

The change in the first line to melisma in keeping with the second is a
subtle difference, underscoring the song’s development and the singer’s build-
ing emotional insistence. This kind of extenuation of syllables would be
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

strange to hear in rap, and stranger still in speech. It’s necessary, beautiful,
and comforting in song.
In rap, vowels dilate to a limited extent, but essentially approximate
the duration of vowel sounds in speech. The result is more words per bar, and
more words in general, than in singing. Consonants, with their inherent per-
cussive capacities, are equally if not more highly prized in rap than are vow-
els. Rap’s denser expressive space emphasizes direct communication in a way
that singing does not, although moderated by stylized effects like repetition

and syncopation. “My raps don’t have melodies,” Jay Z boasts on “D.O.A.
(Death of Auto-Tune),” his 2009 open letter in rhyme to all the rappers
trying to be singers. What we hear as a more singerly style in rap— say, 50
Cent on “Many Men” from 2003 or Young Thug on “Constantly Hating”
from 2015—is mostly predicated on the MC’s pointed fluctuations in vocal
pitch rather than on dilation of vowel sounds common to singing.
Listen to Arrested Development’s “Tennessee” from 1992, perhaps the
most important song in rap’s melodic flow tradition, and what you’ll hear is
the rapper Speech shaping makeshift melodies through unexpected modu-
lations in pitch. “I just wanted to come up with something unique, and I had
just started to discover rhyming and putting it into more of a melodic style,”
Speech recalls. “I had never heard it in hip-hop, really, especially for the
whole song. . . . I saw a whole new opportunity to add more emotion to what
I was saying when I started to put more melody to it, and so ‘Tennessee’ was
one of the first songs that I did that.” Few rappers, though, make such pitch
modulations the defining feature of their flows. And fewer still regularly em-
ploy the vowel dilation common to singing. A famous exception was 2Pac,
whose flow drew as much from African American oratorical traditions, both
sacred and secular, as it did from singing. On “Dear Mama,” for instance,
he extenuates vowels to draw out their emotive potential: “And even as a
crack fieeeeend, mama / You always was a black queeeeeen, mama.” He ex-
ploits the elasticity of the vowels, emphasizing both the musicality and the
slant rhyme in “fiend” and “queen” in a way that underscores the pain and
poignancy in the couplet. For all of 2Pac’s importance to rap’s tradition,
though, this central feature of his flow has not been widely adopted.
Instrumental context also helps condition the mode of vocal performance.
There’s a reason why most rap is in 4/4 time. Common measure fashions a
sonic bed upon which the MC can deliver lyrics. The same often holds for
singers. Listen to Patti Smith and one hears a kind of performative freedom
made possible through the instrumentation. The musicologist Allan F. Moore
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

observes that the music on her classic album Horses is “a ‘bed of sound’ upon
which Smith performs and in which the words are free to lose the markers
of lyric, rhyme and syllabic consistency, in favour of a looser relation more
akin to prose forms: less poem as analogy, then, and more short story, novel,
letter, confession, manifesto. Even some of the basic rules of lyric can be bro-
ken.” When basic rules of lyric and performance are broken, new possibili-
ties emerge, often in the interstices between speech, rap, and singing. The

challenge of vocal performance is compounded, of course, when two or more

voices come together in song.

SINGING TOGETHER

Whether it is rhythm and blues quartets and quintets defining a sound that
would soon be characterized—and caricatured—as doo-wop, the spooky tim-
bre of the Louvin Brothers, the contrapuntal interplay of Simon & Garfunkel,
the unearthly precision of the Everly Brothers, the weird and immaculate
sound of the Beach Boys, the pan-gender splendor of Peter, Paul & Mary,
the sounds of these and dozens of other groups constitute new voices unto
themselves.
Voices singing in harmony become their own individuated vocal finger-
print, every bit as recognizable as a great solo voice. “Certain pairings of
singers are essentially two instruments pulling together to create one reso-
nance,” the critic Ben Ratliff observes. But how does this union of sound and
sensibility come about? The answer lies as much in intuition as it does in
the science of singing. The group harmony one encounters in genres as far-
flung as street-corner vocal quartets and bluegrass gatherings fashions a
thick sonic texture balanced at its extremes by a rich, resonant bass and a
piercing falsetto. There’s magic in this particular combination, one whose
power may be difficult to put into words, though the evidence is sometimes
apparent to the eye as much as to the ear. In one remarkable example of this
literalization of vocal harmony’s power, Alphonso Feemster of the Washing-
ton, D.C.–based Four Bars of Rhythm, a vocal quartet that recorded from
the mid-1950s through the 1960s, recalls the following:

One night we were rehearsing with the Four Bars and we were in my
mother’s kitchen. . . . So we was rehearsing on a song, and so we hit
this harmony note and my mother had some china on the shelf and
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

it shattered. And it amazed me. I said, “We must of been right on.” . . .
But she didn’t mind, you know, ’cause she knew what we were doing.
We just sang, and harmony began to take hold of me. ’Cause it was
so beautiful; you’re really singing it right, you know.

Singing it right—right enough to break your mama’s good china—is a con-

dition to which many groups aspire. Graham Nash recalls the moment that
he first harmonized with David Crosby and Stephen Stills as a near-spiritual

awakening. At a Laurel Canyon party, Nash overheard Stills and Crosby

harmonizing together and decided he would join in. “As Stephen launched
into the intro again,” Nash recalls, “I casually made my way over, standing
to his left, and when they hit the opening line—I’m there. I had my breath
down, the phrasing, the tuning. I put my harmony above Stephen, and off
we sailed. You are livvvv-ing a reality / I left years ago and it quite nearly
killed me. In the lonnnng run . . . What a sound! We were locked in, tight as
a drum. Flawless three-part harmony. It sounded so soft and beautiful, so
incredible that a minute or so into the song we collapsed in laughter.” The
joy they must have felt this first time singing together is still audible in
the studio recording of “You Don’t Have to Cry,” which would appear on the
trio’s self-titled 1969 debut. “Something magical had happened, and we all
knew it,” Nash concludes. “When you sing with two or three people and you
get it right—when the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts—
every thing kind of lifts a couple feet off the ground. The three of us were
levitating, all right. The vibe was so high, it was hard to touch down.”
Eventually, they did touch down. Time and excess stole something from
each singer, most notably from David Crosby, who struggled for years with
a drug addiction that ravaged his vocal instrument. Recalling a reunion tour
years later, Nash sadly reports that Crosby’s “voice was rough, husky; our
harmonies were strained. I couldn’t vibe him out, I couldn’t anticipate him
anymore. The communication between us had stopped.” Their group’s har-
mony, which once had been an easy, evanescent thing, had disappeared as
quickly and as mysteriously as it first emerged.
Not all voices singing the same song are singing together. Some groups
aspire to a conscious discord or even ugliness, a jangling tension born
of voices singing in antagonistic cooperation. In her 2015 memoir, Carrie
Brownstein recalls the singing style she cultivated with Corin Tucker in
their group Sleater-Kinney. “It was a conversation we were having: she had
her perspective and I had mine,” Brownstein explains. “We would get to the
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

chorus, and intuitively you’d think this is the time for us to all sing together,
that there should be a cohesion, but instead we would split apart. It was al-
most an anti-chorus. We weren’t trying to form a solidarity with anyone but
ourselves. Could you sing along to Sleater-Kinney? . . . As a listener you have
to decide what to follow in the song, which vocal, which guitar.”
Listening across Sleater-Kinney’s discography, one experiences the dis-
tance and tension between the lead vocals not as a flaw but as a beguiling,
unsettling aesthetic force. “We didn’t want to sing harmonies,” Brownstein

recalls. “Our songs weren’t pretty, nor was our style of singing. It sounded
scarier to not sing together, rarely allowing the listener to settle into the
music. Everything inside the songs was constantly on the verge of breaking
apart— Corin’s voice, the narrative, the guitars, so few moments provided any
respite at all.” Threatening disintegration while somehow retaining sonic in-
tegrity, Brownstein’s and Tucker’s voices stake out a space in sound at a far
distance from the close vocal harmonies of Crosby, Stills & Nash. That dis-
tance, however, is at least as much the product of an affirmative aesthetic
choice as it is one of accident. Sometimes a little ugliness can be beautiful, too.
If two or three voices singing together makes for such drama, imagine the
chaos and clangor that could result from a few dozen celebrity voices all sing-
ing on a seven-minute song.
It is perhaps pop’s greatest experiment in voice: Gather nearly four dozen
of the most prominent singers in popular music from across all genres to per-
form a single song for a charitable cause. The song was 1985’s “We Are the
World,” recorded by a pickup choir of stars that would go by the name of USA
for Africa. “We Are the World,” written by Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson,
produced and conducted by Quincy Jones, and performed by Bob Dylan, Wil-
lie Nelson, Cyndi Lauper, Bruce Springsteen, Steve Perry, Ray Charles, Ste-
vie Wonder, and others among the who’s who of 1980s pop music, set a new
standard for celebrity philanthropy. The song raised $60 million for African
famine relief and was instrumental in leveraging an additional $800 million
in aid from the U.S. government. By that measure alone it was a resounding
success.
“We Are the World” also proved to be a commercial success as a single,
reaching number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and selling an esti-
mated 20 million copies around the globe. Another enduring legacy of the
song is what it reveals about the nature of voice in popular music. The very
act of coordinating so many stars and so many styles is a marvel. Together,
the producers and performers took what was potentially another maudlin
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

pop song and rescued it by the integrity of their cause, and also by the un-
expectedness and occasional weirdness of the recorded song.
The music and lyrics are serviceable: earnest verses cast in a simple but
affecting melody, a rousing and singable chorus, in some ways timeless
though still time-bound, with synthesized horns and tinkling keys. At times,
the lyrics veer toward cliché (“life, the greatest gift of all,” “love is all we
need”), but the performance renders them emotionally effective and, at times,
even evocative. The song consists of only two verses, a chorus, and a bridge,

but it packs in twenty-one vocal solos, not to mention harmonies and ad libs.
This distinctive blend of vocal styles enacts the fact that pop music is a
capacious form that encompasses a diversity of styles and rejects the idea of
limitation. The song simultaneously represents the sublimation of the star
culture and its apotheosis; its success relies on a balance of familiarity
and surprise, point and counterpoint. “We Are the World” uses voice in all
its permutations: as heroic solo instrument, as harmonizing duo and trio, as
improvisational tool, and as chorus.
In working with such a disparate group of voices, the producers employed
several strategies. Jones recalls in his memoir that he made it a point to
record the choral parts first. “I worried,” he notes, “that if they had already
sung their solo parts they might just leave or something like that.” In the
final version of the song, the choir doesn’t arrive until the end, near the six-
minute mark. It’s a rich sound, albeit hardly distinguishable from any other
group of competent singers under steady direction.
The next strategy the producers employed was to create solo moments for
as many singers as possible, and to make those moments play to each sing-
er’s vocal strengths. Coproducer Tom Bahler gathered copies of all of the art-
ists’ records and listened to find the range that would best suit each of
them. In the recorded arrangement of voices, one hears the producers’ craft
as much as that of the individual singers. Indeed, the most striking thing
about the song more than three decades after its release is the often incon-
gruous juxtapositions of voices and styles. One hears the playfulness, hu-
mor, and ingenuity at work in shading the song’s emotive tones through
particular voices in harmony and tension. “The truth is, everyone was given
special treatment,” recalls Kenny Rogers. “Thanks to the vocal arrangers . . .
the parts were given out not on the basis of how big of a star you were but
according to who sounded best on each particular part of the song. I didn’t
hear one person complain about what they were singing or when they sang.”
Some of the voices working together are natural, as when Michael Jackson
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

and Diana Ross share the first chorus. Who would imagine, though, that
Paul Simon and Stevie Wonder would be so suited to harmonize together?
Without Wonder, Simon’s voice here is staid and small. Without Simon’s,
Wonder’s is overwrought.
The two songwriters feature prominently. Richie sings the song’s open-
ing line, and Jackson sings the bridge as well as the first part of the chorus
solo before Ross joins him. Jackson and Ross’s rendition of the chorus is re-
strained, true to the song’s melody as composed. It has the continuity of two

kindred voices, singing alone and in harmony. By the time the chorus comes
around again, however, it has been atomized into lyric fragments that high-
light the distinctive styles of the singers. Springsteen comes into the chorus
growling, followed by Kenny Loggins’s keening tenor; then Journey’s Steve
Perry emotes, and the chorus ends with Daryl Hall singing the song like
it’s “Method of Modern Love.”
As Stephen Holden observed in the New York Times, “The vocal solos on
‘We Are the World’ have been artfully interwoven to emphasize the individ-
uality of each singer. . . . Recorded against a solemn mantric drone that re-
calls the mood of George Harrison’s ‘My Sweet Lord,’ the voices are layered
in a way so as to create a sense of continuous surprise and emotional buildup.”
“We Are the World” is a study in voice, a virtuosic feat of performance and
production that somehow keeps in tenuous balance a patchwork collection
of styles.
When one considers the diversity of pop voices assembled for “We Are the
World,” it is possible to discern patterns, though certainly not a model of the
perfect pop voice. Great voices are not always a matter of technical excel-
lence and flawless execution. Sometimes they are the product of tone or tim-
bral quality, a signature vibrato, rubato, or something that under other
circumstances might be seen as a flaw. “Even today my voice is hard to cat-
egorize,” Ray Charles observed. “You can’t call it a tenor ’cause it ain’t high
enough; you can’t call it a baritone ’cause it ain’t low enough. If there’s such
a thing as a true lead singer, that’s me.”
In 1963 the impresario rock producer Phil Spector was in search of a
voice. His production style, which would come to be known as the Wall of
Sound, relied on layering sonic textures— different timbres and shadings
of instrument and voice. Over the course of his career, he put that Wall of
Sound to work with gifted singers, from Bill Medley’s baritone on the Righ-
teous Brothers’ “ You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” to Tina Turner’s harnessed
power on “River Deep, Mountain High.” But it might well have been the less
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

obviously remarkable voice of Veronica Bennett, soon to become Ronnie Spec-

tor, that would help Spector reach his sonic apogee. In 1964 Presenting the
Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica included a two-minute-and-forty-
second piece of pop perfection called “Be My Baby.” In her memoir, Ronnie
Spector relates the moment of vocal discovery in compelling detail:

He knew from the first second he heard me that my voice was ex-
actly what he needed to fill in the center of this enormous sound. Phil

had been trying to construct this giant wall of sound ever since he
got started in the record business, and when he heard me, he knew
my voice was the final brick. I was always surprised at how much Phil
used me when he had singers like Fanita James and Darlene Love
around. When I’d hear them singing with those great big gospel
voices, I’d start to wonder what was so special about my little voice.
But I have to give Phil credit. He loved the way I sang, and he knew
exactly what to do with my voice. He knew my range. He knew my
pitch. He even knew which words sounded best coming out of my
mouth. He knew that “Be My Baby” was a perfect song for me, so he
constructed the whole record around my voice from the ground up.

Ronnie Spector’s “little voice” cuts through the sonic atmosphere of the re-
cording, adding clarity to what might otherwise slip into fuzziness. Her voice
inhabits the sizable space of the song’s sonic middle. The chorus of anony-
mous background singers seems at an almost unfathomable distance from
Ronnie Spector’s lead. In her voice sensuality and vulnerability commingle
with a tensile strength. And just when you start to figure things out, the song
is over.
Listening across the contemporary pop landscape and pop music’s past,
one can discern broad patterns in the voices that predominate. In addition
to the virtuosos, pop audiences seem to be drawn to voices at the extremes.
“I’ve spent my life listening to singers and realizing which ones could sing
really well and are still lousy,” writes Steven Tyler. “It has nothing to do
with perfect pitch or music lessons. Thousands of people sing great, with
well-trained voices. The ones that have character in their voices are rare.
Fucked-up voices with a ton of character—that’s my idea of a great voice.”
The human voice at the far end of its register; the vocal instrument under
stress; vocal chords vibrating in an unconventional way; voices modulated
through technology; voices joining together in harmony or dissonance: These
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

are just some of the ways that pop music has taken voices to the extremes.
High voices like the dizzying whistle-tone reach of Mariah Carey, low voices
like the basso profundo depths of Barry White or Johnny Cash, screeching
voices like AC/DC’s Brian Johnson or Guns N’ Roses’ Axl Rose, the feline
strangeness of Eartha Kitt. These voices, as different as they are, share a
common distance from pop’s norm. Every generation has its vocal standards,
voices that are appealing though not necessarily distinctive. But the signa-
ture voices of any era are usually the weird ones.

WEIRD VOICES

Consider the case of Joanna Newsom, the indie-folk singer and harpist whose
voice prompts such strong visceral responses that it would seem more is at
stake than her singing. In 2010 Vanity Fair published an article provoca-
tively titled “The Virile Man’s Guide to Liking Joanna Newsom.” The arti-
cle was staged as a debate between the journalist Bill Bradley, who thinks
that Newsom sings “like a teething infant,” and the design-magazine edi-
tor, “manly man,” and avowed Newsom fan Andrew Wagner. Though Wag-
ner is putatively there to defend Newsom’s voice and music—and to give other
men license to listen—the article soon devolves into a series of sardonic jibes
against Newsom from both sides. “What’s with that voice?” Bradley asks.
“I’ve heard the voice described as everything from a ‘dying cat’ to a ‘prepu-
bescent teen whining about the mall,’ ” Wagner responds. “Both seem apt
descriptors. . . . But it is different. It is unique. And in my book, that’s worth
something.” Finally, Wagner’s defense of Newsom is that she’s weird, and
that weird sounds interesting. It’s hard to imagine a similar article, play-
fully intended or not, being written about a male singer— say, the equally
strange Tom Waits. This par ticular brand of dismissal and derision is
reserved for women’s voices whose “shrillness” and “caterwauling” provide no
easy defense.
Listening to others listening to Newsom’s voice, one encounters an unre-
solvable tension: To some ears her voice is precious and affected, to others it
is mystical and ethereal. Her voice is in part conditioned by her song craft,
its stylized registers of diction, its imbedded rhythms and rhymes drawn
from as far back as medieval times. Her voice is also an audible record of a
body in pain and recovery, bearing scars of the injury that prompted her
2009 surgery to remove vocal nodules threatening to silence her singing
for good. Her voice is equally an instrument in evolution, the product of
conscious craft and cultivated control that one can hear in progress from
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

her earliest recordings to now. Newsom herself is perhaps her own best critic.
“When I listen back to those first EP’s, I’m like, well, that voice does sound
fucking crazy,” she remarks. “ There is no way around it. But I know exactly
what space I was in. I was so sure that I didn’t know how to sing that I was
just going balls out. I was like: I am going to sing my heart out, as crazy as
it sounds, and I’m not going to care because there’s no hope of sounding any-
thing like what people consider beautiful. I sure as hell wasn’t affecting
anything. I mean, the institution of singing is inherently an affectation!”

Maybe the best way to write about Newsom’s voice is not to describe its
sound at all, but rather to chart its history and record its effects on us.
Try writing about Newsom’s voice without using adjectives and adverbs.
Try writing about it without comparing it to another sound or another singer
only to resort to using adjectives and adverbs again to mark the difference.
What happens when we confront Newsom’s voice on its own terms? On
“The Book of Right-On” from Newsom’s 2004 full-length debut, The Milk-
Eyed Mender, Newsom’s voice pushes to the forefront of the song, separating
itself from the minimalist accompaniment of her plucked harp strings. New-
som’s enunciation leaves no avenue for listeners to evade the lyrics’ strange-
ness and indeterminacy: “I killed my dinner with karate / Kick ’em in the
face, taste the body.” What’s weird about these lines isn’t so much the voice
as what the voice elects to utter. Elsewhere, Newsom’s singing plays along
with her playful language. She luxuriates in alliteration with a rapper’s
sense of wordplay: “My fighting fame is fabled / And fortune finds me fit and
able.” In rhyme, Newsom’s voice subverts the simplicity of a par ticular
pairing; “And you do say that you do pray” becomes “And you do say, oh-oh,
that you do puh-ray.” This voice is in control of itself and also in control of
the singer’s song craft. Like it or not, it’s a voice one can’t help but hear.
Weird voices are born, as in the case of Rod Stewart or Newsom, whose
voice has launched a thousand think pieces and Reddit rants. They may also
be consciously cultivated, as with singers who stretch their upper register
into falsetto (like Prince) or those who harmonize with others to produce a
voice that is both theirs and someone else’s (like the Mamas and the Papas).
Weird voices may also be produced, as is the case with artists who use talk
boxes, vocoders, Auto-Tune, and other production tools to make their voices
sound strange (like T-Pain and Daft Punk and Peter Frampton and even Neil
Young, who used the vocoder liberally on his 1982 album, Trans). In many
of these cases, both the natural and cultured varieties of weird voices achieve
a capacity for expression that matches or exceeds that of some of the most
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

gifted singers alive.

This expressive capacity was not always able to reach listeners. When the
voices of professional singers first started entering homes through the phono-
graph and the radio, singers were bombastic shouters. They had to be. Record-
ing technology forced singers to shout to have their voice clearly heard. Add
to that the vocal training many of these singers had in vaudeville or on
Broadway, and it stands to reason that projection and amplification would
be the defining qualities of the voice. With the advent of more-sensitive re-

cording technology, it became possible for singers to modulate. The result

was that one could hear on record a greater sense of dynamics in a perfor-
mance, a greater emotionality, and often a greater intimacy. “Performers
adapted to this new technology,” explains David Byrne in his book How
Music Works. “The microphones that recorded singers changed the way they
sang and the way their instruments were played. . . . Chet Baker even sang
in a whisper, as did João Gilberto, and millions followed. To a listener, these
guys are whispering like a lover, right into your ear, getting completely in-
side your head. Music had never been experienced that way before. Needless
to say, without microphones this intimacy wouldn’t have been heard at all.”
In modern production, the choice of microphone is no small matter, with art-
ists and sound engineers favoring particular models and compressors to
achieve desired vocal effects.
With the modernization of the recording studio, the distance between the
voice in live performance and the recorded voice began to grow. Techniques
like overdubbing, multitracking, and punching in enabled artists to duet
with themselves, construct a vocal recording that the demands of human
breath would not allow in live performance, or stitch a song together from
dozens of different takes. The singer-songwriter Shawn Colvin recalls her
early studio sessions in which she would work with her producer to assemble
a vocal from multiple micro-sonic parts. “I would sometimes comp the vocal,
not line by line, not even word by word, but syllable by syllable,” she reveals.
“ Today I would rather chew tinfoil than go to that trouble. If you really can
sing, there isn’t the need for that kind of microscopic attention, but back
then, forget it. I was a total control freak about the singing.”
Some see this kind of recording studio work as a bit too Frankenstein’s
monster. “Recording technology had advanced to the point where studio
trickery could enhance a mediocre voice,” writes country star Shania Twain.
“Just multitracking the lead vocal can lend heft to an otherwise thin set of
pipes. An even bigger breakthrough, if you want to call it that, has been the
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

advent of Auto-Tune, an audio pitch corrector that absolves artists of hav-

ing to sing on key. Too sharp? Too flat? No problem! If you ask me, it seems
a bit like cheating.”
Cheating or not, studio technology can craft a powerful performance that
could not be achieved otherwise. Sam Smith’s “Stay with Me” seems straight-
forward enough; we hear a remarkable lead singer, and a gospel choir com-
ing in on the chorus. The choir, however, is comprised entirely of Smith’s own
voice layered over itself. The soul singer D’Angelo’s self-harmonizing achieves

a sublime state that can’t quite be replicated in concert. Sasha Frere- Jones,
reviewing D’Angelo’s 2014 album, Black Messiah, in the New Yorker, ob-
served in a potent parenthetical: “(D’Angelo harmonizing with himself is
one of the most acute pleasures available.)”
Self-harmonizing is often born of necessity, be it practical or aesthetic.
John Fogerty recalls that during the 1968 recording session for Creedence
Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary,” he couldn’t get the band to harmonize the
way he wanted on the chorus. “The ‘Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ on the river’ has to
explode. You don’t just go ‘Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’: it’s ‘RRRROllin’, RRRROllin’,
RRRROllin’.’ You’re slurring up to the note real quick, and your vocal energy
happens all at once. You have to explode,” he recalls. After multiple takes, the
band just couldn’t achieve that explosive harmonic effect, so Fogerty sent the
rest of the guys out to get a bite to eat while he overdubbed all the vocal
parts himself. Listening to the original studio recording now, it’s hard to
imagine the chorus sounding otherwise. The self-harmonizing adds texture
to Fogerty’s unmistakable voice, the sandpaper sweetness of his tone and
timbre. And it does explode. Because the vocal tones we hear are made of
the same elemental stuff, we experience the harmonizing less as a coming
together than as a bursting apart— a beautiful atomization of a singular
voice.
Modern recording technology supports the idea that recordings can
achieve perfection. For instance, Auto-Tune’s developers touted its capacity
to bring voices closer to a generic ideal. Pitch correction would eliminate
flaws, revealing the true nature of the performance and its emotional expres-
sion. Though this makes good sense from a technical perspective, it misun-
derstands the impetus of art. It wasn’t long before creative producers and
artists put Auto-Tune to work in a way that its developers never intended,
using it to bend the voice toward stylized imperfection. As is now well known,
the producers of Cher’s 1998 career-reviving hit “Believe” used Auto-Tune
with the threshold turned to zero to produce a vocal quality that captures the
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

mechanized appeal of the vocoder without denaturing the voice as completely

as vocoders do. The warbling, digitized extremes of the voice blend with the
more familiar register of the natural voice to birth a hybridized sound. Over
the next several years, this conscious misuse of Auto-Tune could be heard
on a few tracks here and there, mostly in the realm of the emerging genre of
electronic dance music.
Auto-Tune would find its greatest expositor in a rapper turned singer from
Tallahassee, Florida. T-Pain is a capable singer, something he displayed dur-

ing an unassisted vocal performance at the NPR Tiny Desk Concert in

2012 and in an impressive rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” before
a Dodgers game in 2015. But his true calling is in understanding how to
use the technical loophole of Auto-Tune as an instrument for the voice.
Whereas many would simply apply the Auto-Tune settings after the singer
had recorded the song, T-Pain’s innovation was in actually singing directly
in Auto-Tune, wresting yet more artistic autonomy from the whims of the
pitch correction software. Singing in Auto-Tune allowed T-Pain more pre-
cise control of his voice. The resulting sound lent unexpected poignancy to
subject matter as seemingly vapid as being in love with a stripper or flirting
with a bartender who “made us drinks, to drink / We drunk ’em, got drunk.”
As a technique for vocal manipulation, Auto-Tune is only as good as the
artist using it. Jay Z’s “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)” called out those pretend-
ers, but did little to detract later adopters. The most eager of these emerged
from so-called urban music, which is to say black music. But it is instructive
to consider also what happens when Auto-Tune takes root, if fleetingly, in
other genres. Imogen Heap, a vaunted experimentalist, makes use of it, as
does Justin Vernon of Bon Iver on a song called “Woods,” which would inspire
Kanye West’s “Lost in the World.” On 808s & Heartbreak West embraced
Auto-Tune in part because he knew that he was not a professional singer, and
in part because he knew that he could manipulate the digital tools to make
his voice deeply affecting. Though Kanye’s efforts through Auto-Tune in-
spired some of his worst reviews upon the album’s release, the album has
since settled into a place of critical esteem because the weirding of his voice
helped him to achieve musical and emotive effects that his natural voice
could never achieve on its own.
On 2013’s Yeezus Kanye returns to Auto-Tune for one of the album’s fin-
est tracks, “Blood on the Leaves.” Writing for The Talkhouse, Lou Reed calls
attention to the vocal play at work on the recording: “The juxtaposition of
vocal tones on ‘Blood on the Leaves’ is incredible—that pitched-up sample
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

of Nina Simone singing ‘Strange Fruit’ doing a call-and-response with

Kanye’s very relaxed Autotuned voice. That is fascinating, aurally, nothing
short of spectacular. And holy shit, it’s so gorgeous rhythmically, where some-
times the vocal parts are matched and sometimes they clash.” Kanye uses
Auto-Tune again on 2016’s The Life of Pablo, scattering it throughout the
album as a kind of sonic seasoning.
Perhaps the apotheosis of Auto-Tune, though, has come through the work
of the Atlanta-based rapper Future. Future’s approach to the technology

departs from that of both Kanye and T-Pain in that he does not use it pri-
marily to enhance specific melodic shapes in singing. “I don’t think Future
gets the technology very well. I don’t think he understands how it actually
works,” T-Pain said during a 2013 interview. “I think he’s thinking that you
just turn it on, and then it just happens.” Indeed, one hears a certain level-
ing of affect in most of Future’s work, a laconic sound akin to the state of
mind brought on by the codeine, Ativan, and Xanax that Future so often
references in his lyrics. Whereas T-Pain and Kanye both use Auto-Tune as
a tool for singing, Future uses it decidedly as a tool for rapping. He uses it,
in other words, to underscore his voice as an instrument of percussion, using
the warbling effects brought on by his Auto-Tune manipulation to fashion
moments of striking emotional vulnerability—not in spite of the robotic
nature of his voice but because of it. “ Future’s voice is often likened to an
android, but his music is too messy and bloody and soulful for that,” writes
the scholar and critic Jack Hamilton. Instead, Hamilton continues, Future
“take[s] the post-human and make[s] it human.”
This humanizing quality is audible throughout Future’s masterful third
studio album, 2015’s DS2. On the final verse of “Fuck Up Some Commas,”
for instance, Future delivers a barrage of stuttered syllables that settle into
longer phrases of greater semantic sense in subsequent bars. The section of
the song highlights Future’s divergence from T-Pain and others whose ap-
proach to Auto-Tune relies on its capacity to adorn extended vocal passages
of melisma and other shifts in tone that allow the technology to work in the
spaces between the notes—the greater the distance, the more striking the
effect. By contrast, Future collapses that distance and instead generally con-
fines his voice to a tight tonal space, punctuated sparingly but affectingly
by vocal leaps that ensure his listener is always aware that a cry or moan
can sometimes cut through the haze.
Modified voices often leverage their strangeness to achieve striking emo-
tional effects. Consider Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, which in-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

cludes the song “Game of Love.” The lead vocal is so compressed and modified
that one might think that it would be an inapposite vessel for communicating
profound feeling. Do robots have feelings too? In fact, the aridity of the vocal
clarifies the emotional meaning of the song, pushing the high notes of pain
past the normal register of the human voice and making the song’s feeling
legible. The computerized voice finds an unexpected and direct point of entry
into a romantic situation and a romantic lyric that might have come across as
clichéd if delivered by even the most sublime natural voice.

This same capacity for emotional connection is apparent in Roger

Troutman’s work as Zapp & Roger. “Computer Love” demonstrates that
there is something powerful in juxtaposing the soulful natural voice of a
singer in the raw with the augmented tones and superhuman vocal range
that the vocoder can conjure. Working back and forth, an otherwise paint-
by-numbers lyric becomes something irresistible, sexy, quirky, and strange.
“In the beginning there was feedback: the machines speaking on their own,
answering their supposed masters with shrieks of misalliance,” writes Lester
Bangs in his essay on the German electronic music innovators Kraftwerk,
the first group to popularize the vocoder. “Gradually the humans learned to
control the feedback, or thought they did, and the next step was the intro-
duction of more highly refined forms of distortion and artificial sound, in
the form of the synthesizer, which the human beings sought also to control,”
Bangs continues. “In the music of Kraftwerk, and bands like them present
and to come, we see at last the fitting culmination of this revolution, as the
machines not merely overpower and play the human beings but absorb them,
until the scientist and his technology, having developed a higher conscious-
ness of its own, are one and the same.” These vocal effects can serve a range of
aims. “We used computer-altered vocals more and more,” recalls George
Clinton of Parliament’s trailblazing forays into sonic manipulation of voice,
“throwing in shit that no one else was doing in pop records. At one point you
can hear me, in a squeaky voice, call someone a fat motherfucker.”
Voices are sometimes rendered weird by circumstance, too. Because voice
is body, it is physically vulnerable. Whether ravaged by drink and drugs,
strained through overuse or improper technique, or eroded by age or injury,
pop voices testify to the enduring power of imperfect vocal instruments. The
soul legend Curtis Mayfield once admitted that he had a “soft, little voice.” At
its peak in the 1970s, Mayfield’s voice was a cool and controlled instrument,
capable of capturing great intimacy and subtle power. On “Pusherman” he
edges his natural tenor into a falsetto register that communicates the sly and
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

even sinister seduction of the character he is portraying.

Now hear his voice a quarter century later, as he recorded his final album,
1997’s New World Order, lying flat, the only position that allowed his lungs
enough breath to sing after he was rendered paraplegic by a 1990 stage ac-
cident. Imagine Mayfield, a gifted guitarist whose voice and instrument
would often entwine, rendered incapable of playing and reduced to parsing
out lyrics in labored fragments. Writing on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet
blog, the poet and critic Fred Moten observed that “Curtis Mayfield recorded

New World Order flat on his back, phrase by phrase, crumb by crumb, sing-
ing in the absence of his voice, his guitar, which was in his hands, which he
couldn’t move. You have to know all that to really understand how deep cer-
tain shit is: ‘Now is always the right time / To put something positive in your
mind’ or ‘If there’s ever something bad you don’t wanna see / Just keep on
walkin’ and let it be.’ ” Mayfield’s voice on these late recordings carries only
some of the resonance and clarity of his 1960s and 1970s classics like “ People
Get Ready” and “Move On Up.” The high falsetto is gone. Instead, one hears
his aspirations reaching past the limits of his vocal instrument, creating
beauty in limitation.
Ozzy Osbourne suffered his own crisis of voice, brought on not by acci-
dent but by overindulgence; as he plainly put it, “the coke was fucking up
my voice, good and proper.” In a mock-medical account from his memoir, he
describes the physical effects his cocaine use had on his vocal instrument.

When you’re taking heavy-duty amounts of cocaine, this white gunk

starts to trickle down the back of your throat, and you find yourself
doing that phlegm-clearing thing all the time—like a sniff, but deeper
and gunkier. And that puts a lot of stress on that little titty thing that
hangs down at the back of your throat—the epiglottis, or the “clack,”
as I’ve always called it. Anyway, I was taking so much coke that I was
clearing away the phlegm every couple of minutes, until eventually I
tore my clack in half. I was lying in bed at the time in the Sunset Mar-
quis hotel, and I just felt it flop down inside the back of my throat. It
was horrific. Then the fucking thing swelled up to the size of a golf
ball. I thought: Right, this is it—I’m gonna die now.

Ozzy’s voice healed, though his physician did have to cut out his “clack.”
As different as they are, Mayfield’s and Osbourne’s respective vocal chal-
lenges, brought on by crises of the body, attest to the resilience and capacity
of voices under pressure, voices that find a way to continue even if they never
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

quite recover.

HEARING RACE, HEARING GENDER

Voices communicate a great deal about singers—or, perhaps more precisely,

listeners impute a great deal about singers based on their voices. We make
assumptions about gender, race, age, and place of origin on little more than
the evidence of a few bars. “ There is no voice without a body,” writes Mladen

Dolar, “but yet again this relation is full of pitfalls: it seems that the voice
pertains to the wrong body, or doesn’t fit the body at all, or disjoints the body
from which it emanates.” What’s more compelling than assigning race, there-
fore, is examining the pitfalls: the moments of confusion and complexity
surrounding voice and the body from which it derives and the ways that voice
generally outstrips our analytical capacities to categorize it, generating mo-
ments of surprise, reversal, and discovery.
I play a game in my undergraduate courses that I call Black, White, or
Prince? The premise is simple: I play half a dozen snippets of songs and have
students vote by show of hands whether the person singing is black, white, or,
well, Prince. I might start by playing thirty seconds from a well-known artist
for whom coding a racial identity will be easy—say, Taylor Swift singing
“Blank Space.” If I’m in a devious mood, I might select a well-known artist
whose racial identity and the racialized assumptions about the style of their
singing differ—say, Adele at her most melismatic and soul-inspired. In both
cases, almost all the students will vote for white, but they’ll be voting on their
familiarity with the artist’s image, not by the evidence of their ears.
Then the challenge really begins. I’ll dig deeper into the pop songbook to
decrease the chance that the students will be familiar with the singers and
the songs. I might play the Ink Spots, with their clipped articulation and
close harmonies that don’t accord with stereotypically black performance
practices. Or I might play the white soul singer Bobby Caldwell’s classic
“What You Won’t Do for Love” followed by a song by Charley Pride, the great
African American country singer. The students soon see that racial catego-
rization of singing voices has more to do with expectations of genre than it
does with the actual identities of the singers. The exercise culminates in a
discussion of Prince, who refutes essentialist theories of race through his
chameleonic musical style as well as through his proudly black yet multira-
cial self.
The exercise is, of course, reductive; it consciously traffics in stereotype.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

It is, in other words, problematic with a purpose: to mirror our culture’s lim-
ited vocabulary of racialized labels so as to show how they fail to account
for the reality of racial diversity, multiracial identity, and the mutability of
voice. (I could imagine doing another such exercise focused on the illegibil-
ity of gender in voice— call it Male, Female, or Prince?) I want my students
to draw on their assumptions about genre and the racialization of voice.
Ultimately, though, I want them to acknowledge and to interrogate those
assumptions.

The inspiration for my exercise comes from “blindfold” tests for instru-
mental jazz music. Starting in the 1950s the jazz music critic Leonard
Feather wrote a column for Down Beat Magazine in which he conducted
blindfold tests with famous musicians. The trumpeter Roy Eldridge, an Af-
rican American, defiantly asserted that he could always distinguish a black
musician from a white one—and these were instrumentalists, not vocalists.
Feather dropped the needle onto the record without revealing anything about
the tune and asked Eldridge a simple question: “Is the artist black or white?”
More than half the time, Eldridge was wrong. Most of us want legibility when
it comes to the race and gender of the voice we hear. Uncertainty is unnerv-
ing. When it comes to voice, though, race and gender are often far from clear.
In this moment when society at large is finally beginning to catch up to
the reality that race is a social construct with little grounding in biology,
one must nonetheless guard against the false assumption that race should
not remain a part of our social and cultural discourse. When it comes to the
everyday experience of most Americans, race is a very real thing tethered
to phenotypic markers as well as to cultural styles and practices. It is also
grounded in voice. “The historical concept that black people sang one way
and white people sang in a fundamentally different way emerged out of the
shift from minstrel authenticity to folkloric authenticity that defined the mu-
sical color line. The sonic evidence suggests a much more complicated story,”
writes Karl Hagstrom Miller in Segregating Sound.
This more-complicated story takes us back and forth across the color line,
and to the many spaces in between. It underscores Ralph Ellison’s claim that
in the United States the melting pot has already melted when it comes to
culture: “It is here,” Ellison writes, “on the level of culture, that the diverse
elements of our various backgrounds, our heterogeneous pasts, have indeed
come together, ‘melted’ and undergone metamorphosis. It is here, if we would
but recognize it, that elements of the many available tastes, traditions, ways
of life, and values that make up the total culture have been ceaselessly
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

appropriated and made their own— consciously, unselfconsciously, or impe-

rialistically—by groups and individuals to whose own backgrounds and
traditions they are historically alien.” Notwithstanding the purity or impu-
rity of the motivation, the cultural impulse to adapt and to appropriate is
inherent to the American cultural milieu.
Singing voices make the matter of adaptation and appropriation audible.
When Creedence Clearwater Revival emerged on the music scene in the
1960s, most listeners assumed they were a southern group and, though not

black, certainly influenced by African American music. The group’s name,

their lyric themes, most explicitly rendered in songs like “Born on the Bayou,”
and their downhome musical style all evoke the South. Most of all, though, it
was John Fogerty’s voice that signaled something about region and, perhaps,
also something about race. As it turned out, Fogerty and his band—which
included his brother, Tom, along with Stu Cook and Doug Clifford—were
California boys.
In his memoir Fogerty traces his southern vocal sound and lyric themes
not to his direct experience but to an affinity of sound and style. “ People
would listen to my songs and ask, ‘Where does this come from?’ I had trou-
ble explaining that,” Fogerty writes. “I hadn’t been to Mississippi when I
wrote ‘Proud Mary,’ nor had I been to Louisiana when I wrote ‘Born on the
Bayou.’ Somehow it all just seemed familiar to me. Still does.” Certainly, Fo-
gerty was listening to southern artists, particularly black blues artists. He
was reading southern Gothic fiction. The southern landscape offered a more
evocative space for his imagination than did the surroundings of his central
California birthplace. It’s one thing for an individual artist to seek out this
freedom of imaginative movement, this expressive range found in voice. It’s
quite another, though, for an audience to experience that voice as authentic—
even more authentically characteristic of a place and a people than the
people who actually reside in the place itself. Fogerty’s goal was something
more particular and more humble than attempting to be something he was
not; Fogerty’s goal was expressive freedom. Its by-product in audience percep-
tion, though, is where complications occur.
The fact that Fogerty was appropriating the sound of a region more than
a race might explain why he avoided some of the controversy that has sur-
rounded white artists affecting black sounds. The conscious crafting of Ste-
ven Tyler’s voice over the course of Aerosmith’s early albums offers a useful
model for considering the racial appropriation that some hear at play in many
artists today. Tyler found his voice somewhere between Aerosmith’s first and
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

third albums. By then, they had already recorded one of the band’s best-
known songs, “Dream On.” But something strange and inexplicable hap-
pened around 1973 or 1974. The Steven Tyler we now know was born. Of
course, someone named “Steven Tyler” is credited as the lead singer on Aero-
smith’s first three albums, but it wasn’t Steven Tyler. It couldn’t be. The
voice is too pretty, too perfect, and at the same time too plain. It has little of
the rasp and growl and howl and break that are the defining qualities of the
voice we would come to know on “Walk This Way” and “Love in an Elevator.”

“Yes, I changed my voice when we did the final vocals,” Tyler reveals,
thinking back on his early recordings. “I didn’t like my voice, the way it
sounded. I was insecure, but nobody told me not to do it. I thought I didn’t
sound right on tape. To me, it sounded like a neutered or castrato voice and
I wanted to sound a little bit black because I was from Yonkers and back
then James Brown and Sly Stone were the only ones saying anything in
music, so I put that shit on. . . . I used this voice for ‘One Way Street’ and all
of that stuff except ‘Dream On.’ ‘Dream On’ is the real me.”
The band’s guitarist, Joe Perry, reflects on those early sessions and on
Tyler’s vocal affect. “His insecurity was forcing him into a different persona.
He overdid it and, compared to his natural singing voice, his voice on the rec-
ord sounded affected.” Tyler would finally admit as much; he was affecting—
or trying to affect (I don’t really hear it)—blackness in his voice. According
to Tyler, “I used an exaggerated black-speak voice on all the tracks except
‘Dream On.’ I thought it was really cool. The only problem was, nobody
knew it was me. ‘Ah say-ng lak dis’ because I didn’t like my voice and it was
early on and I wanted to put on a little. To this day, some people still come
up to me and ask, ‘Who’s that singin’ on the first album?’ I was into James
Brown and Sly Stone and just wanted to sound more R&B.”
Such racial masking comes into play with other vocal artists. Does Iggy
Azalea sound like a black American woman from the South or does she sound
like the white Australian woman she is awkwardly affecting the tone and
cadence of certain black American women, from the South and the North,
who have rapped before her? What matters more—the fact that she’s making
her voice something other than it is or the fact that she’s bad at rapping? “I
just want her to stop doing that crazy voice,” the Brooklyn-based MC Jean
Grae told Playboy in 2015. “I have no problem saying this: I feel like it’s really
fucking offensive. I’m offended. Is that what I’m supposed to sound like?
What are you doing? I call it ‘verbal blackface.’ ”
For her part, Iggy Azalea defended her right to self-fashioning. “I think
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

it’s really important we all feel free to explore or feel passionate about what-
ever u wish. Be as complex and multidimensional and interesting as you pos-
sibly can,” she tweeted in early 2015 in response to criticisms about her
“verbal blackface” from two other black women artists, the rapper Eve and
the R&B singer Jill Scott. Azalea was even more to the point speaking to
Complex two years earlier. “I don’t think the voice makes me fake,” she said.
“It makes me an artist. Voice is my medium. I should have creative rein to
do whatever the fuck I want with it.”

Most of the debates about Iggy Azalea have centered on the subject of cul-
tural appropriation. But what about the question of cultural impersonation?
In his defining essay on cultural masking, “Authenticity, or The Lessons of
Little Tree,” Henry Louis Gates Jr. observes that rendering race and culture
in art is always a learned practice, an exercise of craft rather than a simple
expression of self. “So it is not just a matter of the outsider boning up while the
genuine article just writes what he or she knows. . . . The distasteful truth is
that like it or not, all writers are ‘cultural impersonators,’ ” Gates writes. This
holds even more powerfully in singers, where listeners encounter performers
in the physical instrument of the singing voice, the stylistic markers of musi-
cal genre, and the content of the lyrics. The mastery of vocal style is always
an act of artifice; it’s only a matter of how great a distance singers must
bridge and how effective their impersonations are in achieving the style.
When Justin Timberlake left the boy band *NSYNC to go solo, he chose to
make R&B. The Timberlake of the frosted tips and choreographed group
dance steps seemed ill fitted for a new identity as a modern-day soul man.
His Memphis roots, his early introduction to the music of soul singers like Al
Green, and his mastery of soul forms tell a more complex truth. Of course,
we notice that he is white—and that matters. What matters as well is the
humility and respect with which he engages with a historically black genre.
Timberlake collaborated closely with the hip-hop and R&B production duo
the Neptunes on his 2002 solo debut, Justified, then with Timbaland on
2006’s FutureSex/LoveSounds and 2013’s The 20/20 Experience. All three
albums were very much of their moments, drawing heavily from the popu-
lar currents of black American music, and distinctly Timberlake in their
savvy self-awareness and sly humor. One doesn’t so much get the sense that
he’s a white man trying to sing black as much as he is a white man finding
his own way to celebrate the legacy of black music.
Timberlake’s whiteness takes on another significance, though, when his
music is packaged and sold for profit. How much of his albums’ massive
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

success could be accounted for by the fact that he was giving white listeners
the music and style they wanted without asking them to cross the color line?
African American critics sounded the alarm in 2013 when, for the first time
in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 chart, not a single black lead artist
reached the number-one spot. During this time, however, many voices that
might be coded as black, through style or texture, enjoyed commercial suc-
cess. Could it be, as Marc Lamont Hill claimed, that “white people are the
only ones selling black music”?

A more measured response might question economic practices that

reward white “impersonators” of black voices. “ There’s a sonic preference
for blackness— the sounds of blackness— but there’s a visual preference
for whiteness in our culture, and a human preference for whiteness,” argues
Princeton professor Imani Perry. “So there’s always going to be an advantage
for white artists who are able to occupy the spaces of black sound. I think
that’s something that goes to audiences, but also to record companies, which
recognize how deeply racist or racially preferentialist our society is and are
trying to make money exploiting that. So for me what becomes incumbent
upon the artist is acknowledgement . . . but also increasing opportunities
for those whose cultural forms they borrow or are influenced by.” Following
Perry’s formulation, the businesses that profit from the tastes of audiences
that long for black sound without black people are primarily responsible for
the inequities in our musical culture. At the same time, it is also contingent
upon those white artists who benefit from the disparities to cultivate con-
sciousness and create opportunities for black artists whom the system does
not reward.
How is Timberlake supposed to acknowledge his debt other than by doing
what he does: by making music that wears its influences with pride, by em-
ploying talented black artists and producers, and by taking the traditions
seriously enough to excel at them? One quickly runs up against the absur-
dity, as well as the impossibility, of enforcing racialized boundaries of
voice. Consider Prince again, the pint-sized powerhouse with a complex ra-
cial lineage. Though he is far-ranging in his styles and his fusions of genres,
he is generally associated with black music. Enforcing racial orthodoxy in our
reception of voice demands a dangerous purity, one that the realities of pop
performance vociferously resist. Much of this extends, as well, to matters of
gender.
It’s the fourth season of NBC’s popular singing contest, The Voice, and a
young African American singer takes the stage during the blind auditions
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

to perform a song made famous by Whitney Houston. Several aspiring divas

have done the same over the course of the show’s run. In this case the singer
is a man. The contestant begins to sing “Saving All My Love for You” in a
crystal-clear falsetto. Only the studio audience and the viewing public can
see the young man as he sings. The judges’ backs are turned so that they
will evaluate the artist on voice alone. Their chairs will spin around only if
they push their buttons to invite the singer onto their teams.

Perhaps because, as a television viewer, I see this voice come out of the
male singer’s body, the vocal register, although high, seems unmistakably
masculine to me. The judges, however, seem perplexed, not turning their
chairs though the voice is thrilling, nearly flawless. Finally, the only woman
on the judging panel, the Colombian pop star Shakira, turns her chair and
evinces no surprise to find that it is a man singing in falsetto. The song
comes to a close with the other judges exchanging glances, hands hovering
over their buzzers, but never turning their chairs. What kept them from
buzzing in? It surely wasn’t the quality of performance; far inferior singers
had already been selected. It must have been the difficulty the male judges
had envisioning a singer to match the androgyny in the vocal timbre and
tone of the voice.
After the singer is finished, all the chairs turn toward him and the three
male judges—Adam Levine, Usher, and Blake Shelton— appear genuinely
shocked to discover that the singer is a young man. “I wish I knew you were
a guy!” Levine implores. Then, affecting a deep baritone, Usher says, “You
should at least have thrown in a ‘This is for you, girl!’ ” After the singer
leaves the stage, Usher, still shaking his head, says to Shakira: “You’ll be
able to do things with him that defy gravity because of how high he can go.
And women go crazy for a guy with a falsetto.”
We could spend a long time unpacking the inborn and acculturated bi-
ases and expectations wrapped up in this brief exchange. But to focus on
the voice, what’s impor tant is this: Male falsetto has never been as simple
as guys trying to sound like girls. Indeed, a male singing falsetto rarely
sounds like a woman at all. As Walter Everett puts it, “Falsetto itself rep-
resents another manner of tonal inconsistency, as it strips away the lower
tones from a vocal product, leaving only the highest remnants. Somewhat
like a flute because it’s almost a pure tone with few harmonics— and never
attaining that head-tone ring produced by the perfectly focused lock of
overtones sought by the operatic singer— the very high and exceedingly
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

light falsetto voice is created by the complete relaxation of one of the two
main sets of voice-related muscles.” Falsetto relies on taking something
away from the voice (the richness of overtones), and giving something back
(the effort and strain that it enacts, even if the voice comes easy to the
singer).
Falsetto embodies a sense of play with the possibilities of the human voice.
It’s doing something unexpected. Falsetto can communicate queerness, as

with the disco singer Sylvester, or a certain swaggering heterosexuality, as

with Al Green, or something else entirely, as with Prince. There’s a power,
too, that comes with a voice singing just beyond its comfortable capacity,
reaching in a way that reveals the labor involved. Sometimes a singer with
a limited vocal range can achieve emotive effects by virtue of the agon that
a weak voice communicates when reaching beyond its limits. “In the kines-
thetic sensorium,” writes Timothy E. Scheurer in his study of American mu-
sical performance, “the high-pitched note for which the jazz trumpeter or
bluegrass singer has exchanged his soul moves us toward a point at the cen-
ter of experience, a point without dimensions and therefore out of time that
organizes attention and sharply resolves the will.” Voices pushing at the
boundaries of their range bring them closer to us, closer to our own drive-
time efforts. Falsetto therefore shows the fallibility of the voice, a fallibility
that’s always there, even with great voices.
Of course, not all falsetto is created equal. Mick Jagger’s straining shouts
at the end of “Sympathy for the Devil” are far removed from Prince’s per-
fectly controlled falsetto tone throughout “If I Was Your Girlfriend.” Jagger
is pushing beyond his range, and the tensions and imperfections one hears
in his voice are a conscious stylization befitting the close of a song sung in
the voice of Satan. All the music around him is fraying as his voice frays,
giving way to chaos and confusion. By contrast, Prince’s voiced seduction is
limpid, effortless. One can imagine him singing like this forever.
The voice at play across the spectrum of gendered sounds is a source
of fascination. Janet Jackson’s “Love Will Never Do (Without You),” for in-
stance, was an act of vocal reinvention. As she had done seven years earlier
with Control, Jackson was looking to reboot her career and redefine herself
as an artist. In 1987, that meant differentiating herself from her family and
from the transcendent sound of her far more famous older brother Michael.
With “Love Will Never Do (Without You),” Janet embraced her sexuality and
strength. Along with the Herb Ritz– directed video, which showed her cavort-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

ing on the beach with then-unknown Djimon Honsu and Antonio Sabado Jr.,
the sound, grounded in image, called attention to her curves and the sensual-
ity of her movement.
“Love Will Never Do” is most striking, though, for its play with voice. It
is essentially a duet between Jackson and herself. She sings the first verse
an octave lower than her natural singing voice, then raises her voice an oc-
tave to the upper register that we are more accustomed to hearing on songs
like “The Pleasure Principle” and, later, “Escapade.”

What’s striking about this performance is that it demonstrates a sonic

range for which Jackson is not known. The verse acts as a kind of sonic drag,
with Jackson approximating the sound of male tenor crooners of the moment
like Ralph Tresvant, Bobby Brown, or even her brother Michael. As a young
fan, I was fooled, thinking that the first voice was a man. It reminds me of
what Stevie Wonder does on “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” when Jim
Gilstrap sings the first two lines of the song, Lani Groves sings the next two
lines, then Wonder takes over for the remainder of the song, bending gender
and embracing vocal androgyny. It is as if we are hearing the disaggrega-
tion and the reaggregation of the parts of Wonder’s voice—the high, the low,
the wonder of it all.

THE ENDS OF VOICE

Voices moan and scream and cry and laugh and emit any number of sounds
that do not follow a clear semantic logic and can’t be readily described as
speaking, rapping, or singing. These, too, are expressions of the voice, and
even when not using words the voice bends toward meaning. “What singles
out the voice against the vast ocean of sounds and noises, what defines the
voice as special among the infinite array of acoustic phenomena, is its inner
relationship with meaning,” writes Mladen Dolar. “The voice is something
which points toward meaning, it is as if there is an arrow in it which raises
the expectation of meaning, the voice is an opening toward meaning.” In
song, this connection is amplified. “In human song the voice carries speech,”
Adriana Cavarero explains. “Even when it renders speech incomprehensi-
ble or breaks down its syllabic texture, the voice still carries speech and
recognizes in it its essential destination.” Whereas in speech the voice
serves essentially as a conduit for meaning, the voice in song calls attention
to the voice itself, the voice as sound beyond sense even as it acts in the ser-
vice of sense.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Pop music has long been a fertile territory for the scream, the moan, the
ad-libbed utterance. “When I heard Janis Joplin at first I thought she was
screaming, and then I realized that she was emoting, using her voice in a
different way than anyone had. I started to zero in on where those melodies
were coming from,” observes the singer-songwriter LP, whose compositions
for Rihanna and Christina Aguilera balance mainstream appeal with her
distinctive sensibilities. Screams can communicate meaning powerfully, par-
ticularly on the level of feeling.

This communicability of language in song can be put to the test. One

afternoon in the spring of 2015, I was teaching my graduate seminar on the
poetics of American song lyrics. A trio of students was presenting that day on
the subject of voice in song. The group began by playing Diamanda Galas’s
arresting and unnerving 1988 live rendition of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”
They played the three-minute song without introduction or comment. Galas’s
series of searing extended tones—part song, part scream—render the words
and melody nearly unrecognizable. Played at high volume in a closed semi-
nar room on the top floor of the campus library, the performance seemed out
of place, even forbidden. Watching the faces of the other students circled
around the seminar table, I could see nervous smiles, shock, repulsion, and
even anger. When the song came to a close and the group opened discussion,
hands flew in the air to express discombobulation.
“Why? What is this?” one student asked.
“This is so annoying,” another said.
After hearing the comments, the presenters filled in the song’s context,
explaining that it was part of a performance Galas gave to commemorate
the death of her brother from AIDS; that she was performing a song freighted
with meaning in the context of another suffering group, the African Ameri-
can slaves from whom the song originates, to communicate a present-day
suffering; that Galas is a vocal performance artist whose work often pushes
against the perceived constraints of song and sound, language and form. I
could see that some students were gaining at least an intellectual apprecia-
tion for the song, but most remained defiant in their feelings of distaste.
What was Galas doing? Why would she imagine that an audience would
want to hear this?
Galas’s rendition of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” is the perfect place to
close our reassessment of the voice as sound, even beyond sense. For Galas,
the discomfort her voice causes is just the point. “When I sing a note, I need
to know where it is in my skull, my sternum and my diaphragm,” she ex-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

plains. “My performance is catharsis.” In the case of this performance, the

words are there, though shrouded in sonic and semantic distortion. Galas
underscores Cavarero’s assertion that the singing voice, no matter how dis-
torted, recognizes speech as its essential destination.
One need not go to the avant-garde to find instances of vocal expression
that distends the expected shape of communication. Such expressions exist
across the musical spectrum and often find a place comfortably on the Bill-
board charts. At the height of their popularity in the 1980s, the rock band

Heart, fronted by sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson, scored their biggest hit
with the multiplatinum-selling single “Alone.” “Alone” is the quintessential
1980s power ballad, written by the songwriting duo of Tom Kelly and Billy
Steinberg, who were responsible for other era-defining ballads like Cyndi
Lauper’s “True Colors” and the Bangles’ “Eternal Flame.”
“Alone” is a platform for heightened emotion, and Ann Wilson gets every-
thing one can imagine out of the words, from her plaintive rendering of “How
can I get you alone?” to her controlled delivery of the opening lines of the first
verse. The song is a study in vocal and emotional dynamics, punctuated not
in words but in an ad-libbed scream. Ann Wilson recalls that when recording
the vocal, her producer, Ron Nevison, “asked me to delay a moment before
singing the chorus after the second verse, and to ad-lib. I wasn’t sure what
to sing, so I let out a scream. It ended up being exactly the primal emotion the
song needed to make it rock. I’d been singing Led Zeppelin songs for years,
and now I had my own Robert Plant moment on record.” The scream lasts
four seconds, breaking out of the sonic atmosphere of the drums and sliding
easily into the clearly enunciated language of the chorus. It is voice as in-
strument and body, as sense and feeling. The sound is strange, uncomfort-
able, and utterly familiar to anyone who’s experienced lost love.
Diamanda Galas and Ann Wilson are separated by vast distances of style
and aesthetic, but they are unified in their use of the voice to stretch and
even to break its bonds with language in the service of emotion. “For some,”
Grace Slick muses, song is “the purest form of expression, for others a brief
passing delight, but it exists like no other art form in every culture, in all
languages, giving voice to anyone who wants to sing. And when we sing to-
gether, everyone becomes perfect for a while. But only for a while.”
The end of voice might be this: the loss of voice, or rather relinquishing
voice’s primary motive of semantic expression in favor of its primordial com-
munication of feeling that has no need for speech.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Style
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Bradley, Adam. The Poetry of Pop, Yale University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fdu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4815350.
Created from fdu-ebooks on 2025-02-09 22:08:59.
O
ne evening in the summer of 1965, James Brown, the future
Godfather of Soul, dropped by Arthur Smith’s studio in Char-
lotte, North Carolina, on his way to a show. He had one hour to
record and one song to sing, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” A
crash of horns, a lilting guitar riff, a bubbling bass line, and the thirty-two-
year-old Brown’s raspy vocals came together to define the sound that Brown
would continue perfecting for more than forty years. “My music—and most
music— changed with ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,’ ” Brown wrote years
later, and it’s hard to say he’s wrong. Call it soul. Call it funk. Call it the birth
of one of the dominant styles of American popular music.
Something else marks this moment, a detail known only to the few in the
room during the session until it was finally made public in 1991 with the
release of Brown’s career retrospective boxed set, Star Time. While record-
ing the song’s single take, just before the opening horn hit, Brown hollers
out these four words: “This is a hit!”
Brown was right. “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” ruled the R&B charts
for eight consecutive weeks, and it reached number eight on the Billboard
Hot 100, alongside Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe” and Petula Clark’s
“Downtown.” The song, Brown’s first top-ten pop hit, endures; Rolling Stone
magazine ranks it number 72 on its 2004 list of the 500 greatest songs of all
time, and it maintains its place in the pop cultural firmament through hip-
hop samples, from Kool Moe Dee’s “How Ya Like Me Now” to Tyga’s “Make It
Work,” and even through an appearance on The Simpsons. “His dances, his
language, his music, his style, his pioneering funk, his manner of speaking
are stamped into the American consciousness,” the novelist and musician
James McBride writes of Brown. Though Brown was certainly famous before
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

“Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” the song helped make him legend.
But how did Brown know it would hit? Though a successful performer on
the segregated chitlin’ circuit, Brown had no record of mainstream popular
success at that point upon which to base such certainty. Was it something
about the rhythm, the syncopated play of voice, horns, guitar, bass, and
drums? “I was hearing everything, even the guitars, like they were drums,”
Brown reveals. “On playbacks, when I saw the speakers jumping, vibrating
a certain way, I knew that was it: deliverance.” Perhaps Brown’s prescience

was simply a lucky accident of his famously outsized ego. Maybe every time
in his mind, if not out of his mouth, he’d vow that he was about to record a
hit. Or maybe it had to do with that mysterious quality that encompasses
lyrics, music, image, and more: the matter of style.
Style is an individual’s artistic fingerprint, comprised of certain habits of
performance, composition, or both. Style can describe anything from a per-
former’s tonal quality, such as Beyoncé’s vibrato or the “voice” of Eddie Van
Halen’s guitar, to patterns of performance nearly synonymous with genre,
such as the “style” of prog rock or of trap music. “Style, of course, is every-
thing in popular music. One wants to be in style, but one also wants to be a
little ahead of the style. Ideally, one wants to create one’s own style,” observed
Mike Stoller, the songwriter who, with his partner Jerry Lieber, helped de-
fine the style of early rock and roll by writing songs for Elvis and many
others. As Stoller’s description suggests, style involves both imitation and
individuation, both process and product.
Stripped to its essence, style is the patterning of forms that come to define
an artist, genre, or time period. Repeated elements forge an identifiable style
that others can emulate, if not always replicate. Apprentice artists rely on
style’s legibility to master their craft and, ultimately, to forge their own identi-
ties. Appropriation and adaptation also lead to new styles, although occasion-
ally at the expense of the original artists. In the hypercompetitive marketplace
of culture, squabbles over stylistic ownership are frequent and fierce.
In the realm of craft, style is more straightforward. With sound, style in-
cludes vocal effects like falsetto or group harmony, production practices like
multitracking or Auto-Tune, and myriad other elements. With lyric, style
includes diction, distinctive rhyme patterns, the frequency of enjambment,
the nature of imagery, and so on. Add the paramusical elements of style that
affect an audience’s reception of an artist— styles of dress, lifestyle, and
image— and you get a sense of how multivalent style can be.
Elsewhere I’ve written that style is the sum of rules and creativity. I still
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

believe this holds true, though I would add that style in pop music is never
simply the result of the artist’s hermetic creative process. Style is a social
category as well as an aesthetic category. It is conditioned and often compli-
cated by commerce and audience. As a consequence, style is a fluid designa-
tion that means different things at different times to different people and
may mean different things at any one time as well.
Style is the primary means through which listeners experience the poet-
ics of pop. Rarely do we listen for an isolated rhythm pattern, a particular

instance of rhyme, a single simile, or even the voice alone. We experience all
of these elements in aggregate, as an experience in sound. Style gives that
experience a name and helps navigate the vast array of recorded music to
help you find other sounds that may appeal to you as well. Studying style,
therefore, is also studying those networks of connection that reside beyond
any one song or any one listener, but instead define communities.

STYLE, GENRE, AND FORMAT

Style is not genre, though people often use the terms interchangeably. Genre
defines a space of the given; style goes over and above the given to distin-
guish individual talents and sensibilities. “Genre” is a term of codification;
it is a functional generalization. Though no one term can apply equally across
a host of recordings, genre helps make some semblance of order out of the
chaos. In contrast, “style” aspires to specificity. Even when style makes broad
claims, it tethers them to small insights and small patterns that cohere the
elements of a broad category.
“Style is a replication of patterning, whether in human behavior or in the
artifacts produced by human behavior, that results from a series of choices
made within some set of constraints,” explains the composer and philosopher
Leonard B. Meyer in his oft-cited formulation from “ Toward a Theory of
Style.” Thinking of patterning within constraint driven by conscious choice is
a good way of understanding how artists forge pop-musical styles. “A musical
style is a finite array of interdependent melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, timbral,
textural, and formal relationships and processes,” explains the anthropologist
Steven Feld. “When these are internalized as learned habits, listeners (in-
cluding performers and composers) are able to perceive and understand a com-
position in the style as an intricate network of implicative relationships, or to
experience the work as a complex of felt probabilities.” Style, therefore, is also
relational; it is not a fixed point but is always renegotiating its connection
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

to new stylistic interventions.

Genre is defined by a number of qualities: sonic, visual, social, and com-
mercial. These include but are not limited to the approach to vocalizing, the
type and quality of instrumentation, recording and production practices, the
audience’s identity and expectations, and the relation a genre builds with
other genres and with the broader field of popular music. Bluegrass is a
genre: When one hears the word one assumes a particular kind of instru-

mentation (fiddle, banjo, guitar, and mandolin), certain conventions of voice

(a distinctive regional accent and prominent vocal harmonies), and a certain
place in the vinyl stacks of the record store. Bluegrass as a genre also in-
cludes individual style: Bill Monroe’s keening tenor shares the genre with
Alison Krauss’ sweet soprano. For the musicologist Fabian Holt, genre is “a
constellation of styles connected by a sense of tradition.” This definition fuses
the individual sensibilities of artists in a historicized collective of both art-
ists and listeners, distinguishing it from shifting market-based codifications.
Finally, genre is an ahistoric reordering of the story of popular music, a
way of arranging and often sanitizing the mixed and mixed-up history of
music. In the United States, things are particularly complicated. “American
popular music, born out of slavery and the African diaspora, out of minstrelsy
and racial appropriation, was recoded in the twentieth century, outside of
pop itself, as a set of genres with noble lineages and a mostly clean slate,”
writes Eric Weisbard. Collapsing the genres back together might be messy,
but would also be truer to the history of sonic culture. Again, one is reminded
of what Ralph Ellison once observed, that when it comes to culture in Amer-
ica “the melting pot has already melted.”
The concept of musical genre is bound up with race in another way as well.
Most scholars and other critically thinking people understand that genre,
like race, is a fiction, an imposition on the freewheeling nature of individual
styles and sounds. At the same time, as with the term “race,” the term “genre”
is still the common currency of everyday speech. We talk of country and rock
and R&B and rap and pop as if they are clearly codified, rather than open
and fluid categories. Genre is a fiction, but it is a functional fiction, one
that we are not likely to relinquish anytime soon. In fact, genre categories
are rapidly expanding. iTunes identifies roughly twenty genres, or twenty-
six if one counts the other categories iTunes includes under genre, like
“New Artists” and “Essentials.” Spotify identifies thirty-two “genres and
moods,” and their full genre list includes 1,371 entries, from 2-step to zydeco.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

By the time this book is published, they’ll have likely expanded beyond
that.
Any analysis of style and genre in pop music must concern itself with
concepts beyond the limits of the song itself. “Genre is always collective, mu-
sically and socially (a person can have his or her own style, but not genre),”
Holt observes. “Conventions and expectations are established through acts of
repetition performed by a group of people, and the process of genre formation

is in turn often accompanied by the formation of new social collectivities.”

Genre is relational, both a means of social cohesion and a language of
commerce. Even the idea of style, individuated and personal, is never iso-
lated. But as we consider style and genre in the poetry of pop, it is useful tem-
porarily to isolate them from social connections, from what Holt terms “the
totality of social space.” The goal is not to pretend that these matters don’t
exist, but to understand better how style and genre imprint themselves in
lyric and sound. With that in mind, and accepting the caveat that any piece
of music is likely to diverge from the neat definitions imposed on it, it is use-
ful to begin by exploring certain identifiable styles that map roughly onto
genre.
Sensing that terms like style and genre are founded on Jell-O, the radio
industry— still a powerful commercial force in this era of music streaming—
developed the language of format. A format, according to the sociologist
Gabriel Rossman, is “radio’s version of what organizational theory calls a core
strategy. Formats structure radio station behavior in every way. Formats
determine a demographic and psychographic target audience.” As radio for-
mats have proliferated, they have also become more clearly subdivided. “A
radio field structured by format may be particularly inhospitable to music
that breaks with extant genre conventions,” writes Rossman.
Formats are nonetheless permeable, their integrity far from sacrosanct.
On a particular week in early 2014, for instance, John Legend’s “All of Me”
was in heavy rotation across six different radio formats, from “Urban” to
“Adult Contemporary.” This kind of cross-format creep is often the case with
big pop hits. Reflecting on her format-defying music, Shania Twain writes
the following: “The fact that the album was categorized in pop, pop rock, and
country pop was my dream: to be an international recording artist, recog-
nized as an artist not of any specific genre, but just appreciated as an artist
by all lovers of music. To not be confined meant more to me than the chart
numbers, sales figures, and awards.”
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Radio programmers might talk about formats. The rest of us tend to talk
about music. My friend Aaron, a father of two in his thirties, was surprised
in a parking lot when he heard the familiar strains of Guns N’ Roses’ 1987
hit “Welcome to the Jungle” booming out of a teenager’s car. The teen parked
next to Aaron, who was unbuckling his two children from their car seats.
“What do you call this type of music?” Aaron asked him, curious to find out
how the kid would classify the same music that was booming out of Aaron’s
car when he was a teen. “Classic rock, I guess,” the teen said, as he was walk-

ing away. Then he turned back and looked at Aaron with a pointed gaze.
“But also my music.”
Learning that Guns N’ Roses is now classic rock probably came as a shock
to Aaron. There’s something even more revealing in the story: how readily
the teenager took ownership over music recorded before he was born. “My
music” is the most variegated conception of genre, but also probably the most
practical. “Everyone has a taste biography, a narrative of shifting prefer-
ences,” writes Carl Wilson. Most of us cobble together an eclectic blend of
sounds that may have little in common except the fact that we like them.
This was the principle behind iTunes’ early 2000s innovation of the shuffle
function, which allowed listeners to experience an automated mix of music
drawn from their own iTunes libraries. The results, always unexpected,
could be incongruous and, at times, inspired. That eclecticism runs counter
to the governing philosophy behind more recent curatorial innovations,
which are intended to tailor song selections to our par ticular tastes and to
eliminate the rough transitions shuffle gave us. From the sophisticated
algorithms behind Pandora to less personalized engines that attempt to match
music to our moods, recent innovations in music technology follow a philos-
ophy of similarity rather than surprise.
Neither random shuffle nor curated selection quite captures the experi-
ence common to music listeners for most of the twentieth century: buying,
borrowing, or bootlegging. At times I wax nostalgic for the days when I was
subject to other people’s tastes, be it in the limited number of recordings my
friends and I owned and shared or in the soft tyranny of commercial radio
and music television programming.
When I was in college in the 1990s I often struck up friendships with the
following question: What kind of music do you like? The same question was
often asked of me. I understood it as an invitation, but also a gentle interro-
gation. Certain responses would be a welcome sign; others, a warning. Many
of my relationships, both filial and romantic, started here. Most often, the
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

answer would come back as some version of this: “I listen to everything but
country.” Sometimes, too, it would be “I listen to every thing but rap,” though
the people with whom I was speaking were usually too polite or too calcu-
lating to say that to a young black man with a big pair of headphones
draped around his neck, the sounds of Biggie or 2Pac or A Tribe Called
Quest seeping out.
What kind of music do you like? It’s a question with big implications. Da-
vid Byrne reminds us that music “can make us physically well, or horribly

ill. It does so many things to us that one can’t simply say, as many do, ‘Oh,
I love all kinds of music.’ Really? But some forms of music are diametrically
opposed to one another! You can’t love them all. Not all the time, anyway.” I
don’t ask the question anymore, maybe because I know that the responses I
get often have little to do with music. They have far more to do with image. It’s
no coincidence that the two forms of music people most often say they avoid—
country and rap—are also the most seemingly segregated musical genres
when it comes to race. In the introduction to Hidden in the Mix, the first col-
lection of scholarly essays to address the African American presence in coun-
try music, the gender studies scholar Diane Pecknold argues that the public
perception of country music as a white American idiom not only overlooks the
music’s African American roots, but equally, the black performers and listen-
ers who have always been a part of the music. Similarly, recall that rap
was born out of a multicultural context of black and Latino youth, as well as
recent immigrants from the Caribbean meeting and making music in the
South Bronx.
Genre often hinges on race, in part because race is a visible marker of
difference, unlike region or class. “One reason race has remained so central
to genre definitions is that racial crossover destabilizes the very concept of
genre, reliant as it often is on homological conceptions of audience cultures,”
argues Pecknold. The fiction of genre is founded on the presupposition of
homogenous communities, even though most of us listen well beyond any
generic bounds. Genre and format are unreliable markers of taste. Clarity
of a listening community comes at the cost of mismeasuring the individuals
who comprise it.
Music platforms at the beginning of the twenty-first century have ardently
pursued the goal of identifying what listeners want to hear and when they
want to hear it. The technology aimed at discerning this shares something
with efforts by online retailers (most prominently Amazon.com) to develop
predictive software designed to increase sales. Amazon’s methods center on
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

gathering data on consumer purchasing patterns, but musical tastes resist

this model. Music taps more directly into human emotion, which is hard to
predict; music is also a more multivectored product. A song presents a tougher
challenge than a laundry detergent or a big-screen television when it comes
to categorizing like with like. A predictive model for music must account for
the complexity of the art form and also for the human beings wishing to re-
late to that art. What’s needed is a science of style.

THE SCIENCE OF STYLE

Tim Westergren and Will Glaser set out to define just such a science of style
for music. With the Music Genome Project and its commercial arm, Pandora
Radio, they undertook a grand experiment of isolating the constitutive parts
of every song ever written with the end goal of curating music suited to in-
dividual tastes. “We try to break down every dimension of a song to its most
basic building blocks—like melody, harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, vo-
cal performance,” Westergren explained to the Wall Street Journal in 2010.
A panel of trained listeners (Pandora’s website calls them “musicologists,”
but elsewhere explains that the requirement is a four-year college degree in
music, not a doctorate) evaluates each song using several hundred criteria.
Songs are classified into one of five generic categories, each with an atten-
dant number of “genes” necessary to define the song with clarity. Pop/rock
songs have 150 genes, rap songs have 350, jazz songs have approximately 400,
and world and classical music have between 300 and 450.
The goal is to make fine distinctions about songs, offering an inductive
definition of style based on objective qualities and informed subjective judg-
ments. “[The classifications] essentially cover all of the granular details of
melody, harmony, rhythm, form, compositional qualities and lyrics,” Wester-
gren explained in an early interview about the project in 2006. “I think of it
as the primary colors, the distinct elements [that make up a song]. For ex-
ample, there are over 30 attributes that describe the voice alone; how much
vibrato, range, ornamentation, tone, performance. The sound of any voice,
whether it’s a Tuvan throat singer or Mariah Carey, we have a basic collec-
tion of primary colors that can describe it in one big continuum.”
Spending just a half hour on Pandora is proof enough that style and genre
do not always overlap. “It’s a new kind of radio,” Pandora’s website touts, “sta-
tions that play only music you like.” One afternoon I decided to put this
proclamation to the test. I typed in “Beck,” the artist that Westergren ad-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

mitted in 2010 posed the greatest challenge for their model. “His musical
vocabulary is outside the musical expression. It’s different. We don’t quite
have the elements to capture it. We don’t do a very good job with him,”
Westergren told a reporter. Perhaps they had solved the Beck conundrum
in the years since.
After I entered Beck’s name, the following note popped up as Pandora be-
gan to play Beck’s breakthrough hit, “Loser”: “To start things off, we’ll play

a song that exemplifies the musical style of Beck which features electric rock
instrumentation, a subtle use of vocal harmony, repetitive melodic phrasing,
demanding instrumental part writing and major key tonality.” From that
sentence alone, it’s clear just why Beck presents such a challenge to Pandora.
Stylistically, Beck is a nomad. Indeed, much of his music could broadly
be described as involving demanding “electric rock instrumentation” and
“subtle vocal harmony,” often featuring Beck harmonizing with himself.
That hardly accounts for his Grammy-winning acoustic offerings, 2014’s
Morning Phase and its stylistic predecessor, 2002’s Sea Change; or his
Prince-inspired sounds on Midnite Vultures (1999). There is no way for Pan-
dora to know which Beck I had in mind.
With the second song, it became clear how Pandora would resolve the
multigeneric challenge of an eclectic artist like Beck; it would simply choose
one Beck and go with it. “From here on out,” the next message informed me,
“we’ll be exploring other songs and artists that have musical qualities simi-
lar to Beck. This track, ‘Short Skirt / Long Jacket (Live)’ by Cake, has similar
basic rock song structures, a subtle use of vocal harmony, major key tonality,
mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation and electric guitar riffs.” What’s
instructive here, both for the functional practice of Pandora and for under-
standing the concept of genre, is the way that this second interpretation of
my single input of “Beck” differs from the first. The first thing Pandora did
when I asked for Beck was to give me a song by Beck himself, a song rep-
resenting a single point in his stylistic field. The second thing it did was
to define a new musical category mapped onto and across traditional cat-
egories, the category of “Beck.” Pandora constituted this category by com-
bining the stable qualities of Beck’s style as well as the more mutable
qualities. The songs that followed were by groups that shared significant
things with Beck, though not always the same significant things as the
song before or after them: the Black Keys’ “Everlasting Light,” Big Data’s
“Dangerous,” Beck’s “Deadweight” (a dif ferent Beck from “Loser”), the
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

White Stripes’ “ We’re Going to Be Friends,” and Foster the People’s “Pumped
Up Kicks.” Using conventional terms of genre, these artists might variously
be tagged as indie rock or garage rock or electronic, or lumped together as
“alternative.” Thinking of them in relation to Beck, however, makes them
legible on the level of style in a way that the definitions of genre or format
never allow.
In my listening session I did not make any additional interventions,
though Pandora encourages users to refine their category by voting up or

down on a given track. My goal was to gain an impressionistic understand-

ing of how a service like Pandora, as well as the Music Genome Project that
powers it, brings together the science and the art of style. The results, pro-
visional and imperfect, are nonetheless illuminating. Style lives not only
in an artist or in a particular song, but in a system of varied relations, some
strong, some weak, and all defining the space where the concepts of genre
and individual style alone aren’t enough.
Perhaps the signal innovation in the science of style in popular music over
the past two decades has been the rise of data analytics. A data-driven
approach now dominates the ways sales are counted, the ways tastes are
forged, and the ways popular music is made and promoted. This transforma-
tion is evident in the Billboard Hot 100 chart, which went from tabulating
sales figures from record-store owners and number of spins from radio sta-
tions through the first thirty years of the charts, to using point-of-sale data
and Nielsen reports in the early 1990s, to streaming and downloading data in
the early 2000s. This more-sensitive data reveals that listeners are drawn to
the same songs, the same sounds. Writing in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson
reveals that the top 1 percent of artists now account for 77 percent of all
revenue. “As labels have gotten more adept at recognizing what’s selling,
they’ve been quicker than ever to invest in copycats,” Thompson writes.
“ People I spoke with in the music industry told me they worried that the reli-
ance on data was leading to a ‘clustering’ of styles and genres, promoting a
dispiriting sameness in pop music.” Yet despite the commercial clustering ap-
parent in major label releases, this is also a time of widening dissemination of
musical styles. Just as the science of style is working to craft individual sound-
scapes for everyone, it is also defining an increasingly homogenous common
ground of pop.
Familiar sounds and clearly identifiable styles aren’t necessarily a bad
thing. Pop music has always had its consolidators—those who refine the ele-
ments of an existing style— and its innovators—those who depart from
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

existing styles to define new sonic and lyric territories. In writing the history
of popular music, we tend to emphasize the innovators, privileging those
moments when styles shifted rather than when they settled into clear forms.
Both types of artists are essential to the proper function of pop and to a rich
understanding of style. The consolidators, after all, do more to define the
sharp edges of a style in a given moment. Consolidators define the territory
in which most of a given era’s music, certainly most of that era’s hits, fits.
Innovators, by contrast, are sometimes slow to find chart success.

In The Power of Habit, the Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times staff
writer Charles Duhigg profiles the strange case of the rap group OutKast’s
crossover 2003 hit “Hey Ya!” When label executives tested the song before
its release using a new data-driven technology called Hit Song Science, it
rated higher than almost any other song before it. But when the song reached
radio, it went nowhere. It sounded too different from everything else on the
airwaves, too unfamiliar. “ People listen to Top 40 because they want to hear
their favorite songs or songs that sound just like their favorite songs,” Duhigg
explains. “When something different comes on, they’re offended. They don’t
want anything unfamiliar.” The song became a major hit only after the la-
bel worked with commercial radio to program it in between “sticky” songs—
those that sounded more familiar to listeners’ ears, more in keeping with
stylistic and generic expectations. As listeners got used to “Hey Ya!,” it ac-
quired some of that stickiness itself, expanding the stylistic range of expec-
tation to contain its eclectic, frenetic sound. For pop audiences, OutKast’s
“Hey Ya!” was an innovation predicated on the consolidating influence of the
songs that surrounded it.
This innovation/consolidation dynamic functions on the level of individ-
ual songs, and on the level of genre and style as well. In the mid-1960s and
the 1970s, Kool & the Gang consolidated the emergent stylistic fusion of
funk, jazz, and R&B. They modeled their band on the Famous Flames, a
tight ensemble whose singer was none other than the great innovator James
Brown, while also demonstrating their facility with tender R&B ballads in
the style of the Commodores. At the height of Kool & the Gang’s commercial
success, between 1979’s disco-funk “Ladies’ Night” and 1980’s Billboard
number-one “Celebration” to 1985’s R&B ballad “Cherish,” they strung to-
gether top-forty hits and platinum and gold records.
By the mid-1980s, R&B meant Kool & the Gang. In January 1984 their
ballad “Joanna” held the number-one spot on the chart for two weeks. The
lyr ics are about as straightforward as a love song can be: “Joanna, I love
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

you / You’re the one, the one for me.” With a strong lead vocal by J. T. Taylor
and doo-wop style background vocals, its texture is decidedly R&B love bal-
lad. The first half of 1984’s R&B chart followed suit, with bombastic love
songs like Patti LaBelle’s “If Only You Knew” and Lionel Richie’s “Hello”
alongside the occasional funk-inflected dance song like Rockwell’s “Some-
body’s Watching Me” (featuring background vocals by Michael Jackson) and
Cameo’s “She’s Strange.” Essentially, the sounds were in keeping with the

understanding of R&B that Kool & the Gang had been consolidating since
the 1960s.
But something happened in the summer of 1984. For eight consecutive
weeks starting on June 30, a single song dominated the R&B charts and
climbed up to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 charts as well. It an-
nounced its difference, its radical innovation, with its inscrutable title: “When
Doves Cry.” The mystery is only intensified in the lyrics, which call equal
attention to the verses and the chorus. The song’s structure marks a shift
in the lyric center of gravity toward the verses, toward their strangeness and
indeterminacy rather than their legibility, toward the metaphoric rather
than the concrete. It’s still a song from a man to a woman, it’s still a kind of
love entreaty, but rather than the clear protestation of love in Kool & the
Gang’s “Joanna” and Patti LaBelle’s “If Only You Knew,” one hears lines like
this:

Dream if you can a courtyard

An ocean of violets in bloom
Animals strike curious poses
They feel the heat
The heat between me and you

“Me” and “you” are common enough, but the language that precedes them
is vivid and metaphoric. Prince conjures a sonic tableau reminiscent of Hi-
eronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, with lovers in passionate em-
brace and animals responding in kind. We’re quite a distance past “If only
you knew / How much I do / Do love you.” Innovation, as my friend Paul D.
Miller (aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid) defines it, is “when you refuse
to accept the world as it is and try to see its potential.” If this is true, then
Prince’s “When Doves Cry” is a dramatic act of pop innovation, born of seeing
the potential of blending the standard and the strange.
By 1984, Prince, born Prince Rogers Nelson in Minneapolis, Minnesota,
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

was already on his sixth album. His 1978 debut and 1979 follow-up had pro-
duced a couple songs that cracked the charts. Prince’s early albums reflected
elements of funk, soul, and rock consolidators. They shared something, too,
with the burgeoning independent music movement in Minneapolis described
by Jon Kirby in his liner notes to the marvelous collection Purple Snow:
Forecasting the Minneapolis Sound, as “a slick, black, technologically ad-
vanced genre fusion.” Listening back to Prince’s early albums in light of all

that we know Prince would become, something seems obvious that might
not have been as clear in the moment of his debut: Prince was an innovator.
Yes, his early music resides in much the same space as that of Kool & the
Gang—alternatively, funk-inspired jams and lovelorn soul ballads. One hears,
though, an iconoclastic difference from the very start. Some of the songs from
his early albums are so conventional that they sound as if Prince were trying
to be a good soul man, but doing something else in spite of himself. On
“Baby,” from Prince’s debut, For You, he rehearses familiar soul conceits like
loving a woman but “barely having enough money for two”; he even recycles
familiar rhymes—“do” rhymes with “you” rhymes with “two” in predictable
pattern.
The song is strange as well, with unexpected chord changes, crashing
cymbals, and layered vocals. Part of this strangeness no doubt springs from
the fact that Prince was playing all of the instruments and singing all of
the vocal parts himself. As Ben Ratliff observes, “When you are playing most
of the instruments yourself, a useful awkwardness can set in. It is unlikely
that you will be equally good on every instrument. There’s no cross-playing
and cross-listening; on the other hand, you’re not deferring to someone else
and don’t need to codify your song or teach it to anyone. The result is that all
kinds of idiosyncrasies can occur.” Prince may well have been shooting to
write an album of classic soul ballads and disco dance tracks. Thankfully, he
missed the mark.
An artist aiming for convention and missing is often the precondition for
innovation. “A lot of pop music has come out of people failing to copy their
model and accidentally creating something new,” writes Elvis Costello. “The
closer you get to your ideal, the less original you sound.” So many new styles
are born of failure. Keith Richards failed to play his guitar quite like his
idol Chuck Berry, and Mick Jagger failed to sing quite like James Brown,
but in missing their marks they defined something new with the Rolling
Stones. Only Prince knew if he understood his early albums as “failures” in
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

this way, as trying and failing to copy the artists he emulated. What is in-
disputable, now nearly forty years and forty studio albums later, is that one
hears in those early Prince albums the seeds of an original sound.
As I’ve argued, though, pop doesn’t only require the cutting edge. In fact,
the majority of the music that we hear and that we genuinely enjoy is not
marked by its novelty but by its fealty to convention. Originality isn’t every-
thing in pop music. Most artists at least begin by modeling themselves on
the familiar, because the creative process usually begins with emulation. The

mind craves familiarity. Most record labels want it, because they want to
sell music to all of those listeners who bought similar music from them in
the past.
The new science of style confirms the common assumption that listeners
want the familiar, but it refines that assumption by suggesting that they
want familiarity with just enough difference. Calibrating that balance is an
art that remains out of science’s reach. With more data comes more clarity
about style and taste, but mystery persists. The most successful developers
in the music analytics space are the Echo Nest, a company founded by two
MIT graduate students and acquired in 2014 by the music streaming ser-
vice Spotify. The Echo Nest has developed a “music intelligence platform”
analyzing some 37 million songs—nearly forty times the number of songs
charted by Pandora’s Music Genome Project. They have made a portion of
this data available to tech developers and academics, meaning that their an-
alytics can power everything from iPhone and Android apps to academic
research studies.
Noah Askin, a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD in Fon-
tainebleau, France, is leading one of these early Echo Nest–powered stud-
ies, attempting to understand better how a song becomes a Billboard hit. In
a December 2015 TEDx talk, he distilled some of his preliminary findings.
They seem to confirm what Duhigg observed about OutKast’s “Hey Ya!”: that
a big hit must sound familiar and different. “We actually found that the
songs that do best on the charts are not those that sound the most similar,
but those that are actually optimally differentiated,” Askin observes. “That
is, of the 25,000 songs that have appeared on the Billboard charts since their
inception in 1958 until the middle of 2013, the songs that do the best and
stay on the charts longest are those that sound similar to what else is going
on at the time, but not too similar.” This tension between the familiar and
the fresh is the essence of the hit. No matter our efforts to explicate its sty-
listic attributes, something about the pop hit remains ineffable. Perhaps the
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

best approach to the mystery of pop’s seductive style lies not in analytics,
but in looking to one of the basic building blocks of pop songs: the words
themselves.

POP DICTION

In the summer of 2015, Musixmatch.com posted an article titled “The Largest

Vocabulary in Music,” an analysis of the vocabularies of popular musicians’

song lyr ics. The article drew its inspiration from “The Largest Vocabulary
in Hip Hop,” posted in late 2014, which compared the vocabulary in rap lyr-
ics to the vocabulary in William Shakespeare’s plays and Herman Melville’s
Moby-Dick. “The Largest Vocabulary in Music” looked across the pop land-
scape and analyzed artists’ song lyric data to find the total number of unique
words each artist used; the lyric density, or the total number of words used
in each artist’s one hundred densest songs; and the new word interval, or
the average number of words separating words not used in the artists’ earlier
songs.
This study took as its subject group ninety-three of the ninety-nine best-
selling artists from all genres, from the hard rock of Guns N’ Roses to the
smooth jazz of Kenny G. (Copyright permission could not be secured from
the missing six.) The results were striking. Four of the top five artists were
from hip-hop: Eminem, Jay Z, 2Pac, and Kanye West. Bob Dylan, classified
as “folk,” rounded out the top five. The only other hip-hop entry, the Black
Eyed Peas, came in at number six. What all of the top artists share—Dylan
included—is an urge to extenuate the lyric line. The majority of artists in-
habited a narrow space in the middle, with nearly half falling within just 400
words of the average. As one might imagine, multilingual artists fared well,
with four placing in the top eleven.
The list has its limitations. The compiler, a graduate student in sound and
music computing named Varun Jewalikar, admits that “The Largest Vocab-
ulary in Music” is “meant to be a study, not an academic research paper.”
Certainly, methodological holes and tenuous inferences abound. Do the
lyrics used for the study adhere to uniform transcription practices? If they
don’t, then the same word might be counted multiple times. Is it fair to ascribe
the vocabulary ranking to the performer rather than to the songwriters?
Given that some of the performers write all of their lyrics, some write some of
their lyrics, some write none of their lyrics, and for some the matter is uncer-
tain, it seems problematic to pass the rankings off as the possessions of the
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

performers alone. What about the fact that the list narrows its field to artists
with the highest album sales? That seems a dubious means of seeking the
largest vocabulary in music given the fact that mainstream music often
follows a lowest-common-denominator mentality.
It would be easy to discredit the methodology and challenge the conclu-
sions of this study. However, provisional as it is, “The Largest Vocabulary
in Music” still presents an opportunity to glean insights into the function of

language in song lyrics. The report reveals several trends that are at least
directionally compelling, although not definitive.
The most obvious trend the study uncovers is the predominance of hip-
hop artists at the top of the list. Part of this, as Jewalikar observes in his
analysis, can be attributed to the fact that rap generally involves more words
per song than other genres. (A few months later, Jewalikar returned with a
companion study of lyric vocabularies in eight popular musical genres. Hip-
hop was far and away number one with an average of 478 words per song
and 98 new words per song; heavy metal came in second with 191 words per
song and 29 new words per song.) Eminem, who tops the list, also leads the
list of words per song with just over a thousand. In an extreme example from
him, like 2013’s rapid fire “Rap God,” Eminem delivers over 1,500 words in
around six minutes. His word palate in the song is fairly straightforward,
with one- and two-syllable words predominating. From time to time in the
verses, though, one finds knots of multisyllabic density born of rhyme. In the
final verse he uses “ricocheting,” an unusual word in a song lyric, then fol-
lows it with a succession of seven multisyllabic rhymes over the next six lines:
“devastating,” “demonstrating,” “levitating,” “never fading,” “forever waiting,”
“celebrating,” “elevating.” The rhyme impetus compels Eminem to devise
words that he might not have used in the normal course of expression.
Why do rappers have so many more words per song than other artists?
As I discussed in the previous chapter, rappers do not dilate their vowels
in the dramatic manner of singers, leaving considerably more space for
additional words on a line. The proliferation of different words in rap is also
rooted in the fact that rap tends toward the topical, with references to cur-
rent events, sports figures, entertainers, and other celebrities that further
expand the lyric vocabulary. Rap’s rhyme imperative also impels diversity
of diction, as MCs seek to distinguish themselves with complex patterns of
multisyllabic and slant rhymes. Add to that rap’s penchant for slang and ne-
ologism and it becomes even clearer how the genre might stand out from all
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

others. Rap’s dominance of the study’s results would have been far greater
had the study not limited itself to the biggest-selling artists of all time. Emi-
nem and the other MCs on the list do not have exceptionally expansive vo-
cabularies when compared to their rapping peers. Looking back to “The
Largest Vocabulary in Hip Hop,” Eminem doesn’t even rise to the median.
Aesop Rock, who ranks number one on the list, bests Eminem’s vocabulary
by over 60 percent.

This doesn’t mean, as “The Largest Vocabulary in Hip Hop” claims, that
rappers have a more impressive vocabulary than Shakespeare. Such a claim
misapprehends the vital distinction between linguistic variety and expres-
sive richness. It also doesn’t mean that rap lyrics are more sophisticated than
the lyrics of the Beatles or Stevie Wonder or Joni Mitchell. What’s often said
about something else is also true for vocabularies: It’s not the size that
matters, but what you do with it. This much is indisputable: Rap lyrics em-
ploy many words, more than the lyrics of other genres. Rap’s expansive vo-
cabulary shifts attention to rap’s narrative qualities, underscores rap’s
conversational affect, and helps explain rap’s appeal as a form of political
expression.
The study also leads to examining the relation between vocabulary and
commercial sales. Jewalikar takes it as a given that “simpler” vocabularies
are more commercially viable, and that pop music seeks the lowest common
denominator of communication. “No wonder the simplicity of their lyr ics
breaks the barriers of geography, age, language and they are admired glob-
ally,” Jewalikar writes. The problem is that Jewalikar is projecting a quali-
tative interpretation about lyric language based on a purely quantitative
measure. He would be on stronger ground had the study included an analy-
sis of the average number of syllables per word, but even this would provide
only a one-dimensional picture.
Data alone will not solve the mystery of the enchanting power some song
lyrics hold over us. Data won’t explain why we’re more likely to be moved by
Bob Marley (number seventy-eight) singing “Redemption Song” than by the
Black Eyed Peas (number six) performing “My Humps,” nor will they account
for the fact that sometimes a song finds just the right words and puts them
in just the right order. And data certainly can’t account for how music and
vocal performance have a way of charging banal and repetitive words with
the power to move us and to make us think. To make bigger claims about
complexity, aesthetics, and style we need a perspective that attends not just
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

to isolated words, but to words in relation.

Rather than considering vocabulary in isolation, think about words them-
selves and their constellations of meaning. Diction, as The Princeton Ency-
clopedia of Poetry and Poetics defines it, is “the words or phrases chosen for a
piece of writing.” When those words are chosen for song, the writer must con-
sider diction’s relation to sound and to instrumentation. John Fogerty once
remarked that his best songwriting came down to “finding a great-sounding
word to sing and doing some kind of sympathetic guitar part.” “I sort of have

a little library of phrases and words in my head that I like,” says the singer-
songwriter Sarah McLachlan. “Like ‘murmur.’ Never been able to use it yet,
but it’s a beautiful word. I like words that say so many things.” Studying
diction invites analysis of individual words like this, as well as of words
in relation. Diction, after all, includes all parts of speech, verb tenses, and
articles and prepositions, although it focuses attention on words that distin-
guish the writer’s style.
The poetry critic Helen Vendler encourages readers of poetry to consider
registers of diction, patterns of language that suggest a particular condition,
mood, or thematic coherence. Attending not just to the sheer number of
words, or the incidence of unique words, but to how the song lyric puts words
to work in unison lends a more practical application to the study of language
in song lyrics. Looking to registers of diction helps uncover the connections
the lyric makes beyond our conscious awareness, even in songs where it
seems not that much is going on. Santana and Rob Thomas scored the sec-
ond biggest hit in Billboard history with 1999’s “Smooth.” A good measure
of the song’s popularity undoubtedly rests on Santana’s soulful guitar play-
ing, but at least some measure resides in the patterns of the Thomas-penned
lyrics. The sense of the song is fairly conventional: a paean to an irresistible
but unattainable beloved. Much of the linguistic interest, though, comes from
the way the lyrics cluster language around a celestial register: “hot,” “midday
sun,” “melt,” “cool,” “ocean,” “moon,” “turning,” “world,” “round and round.”
Together, these words conjure an image that elevates the everyday theme of
a distant lover to the level of myth.
Diction is perhaps the most obvious distinguishing feature of an artist’s
individual lyric style, as well as the style of a given genre. “Words in all pop
genres work as recruiting symbols; their writers draw on a communal
language to create a sense of community,” Simon Frith observes. “In general
terms, the language of lyrics is used to construct pop genres: disco lyrics end-
lessly invoke us to dance, effectively connoting consumption; country lyrics
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

use plain language, reported speech, and country singers come across as the
detached observers of emotional plight; the message of punk lyr ics comes
simply from the odd words that stick out of the noisy chorus.” Through close
attention to diction, one can potentially uncover the registers common to
individual songs, to an artist’s body of work, or to the songbook of an entire
genre.
Some contend that the phrase, not the word, is the basic unit of composition
in songwriting. The literary critic Mark Booth argues that many popular

songs are a patchwork of prefabricated phrases, whereas most poems are

fashioned word by word. This is not a deficiency, Booth argues, but a neces-
sary aesthetic adaptation. “Given the relationship of redundancy to infor-
mation, a songwriter should not have anything really new to say, at least if
he expects to say it with the words of the song alone,” Booth writes. “A poet
on paper has much greater freedom to test the patience and ingenuity of the
reader and to stretch his comprehension. He can aspire to enlarge the reader’s
world of experience and ideas. But a song, hedged by the demands of unity
and clarity, must say things that are simplifications, and generally familiar
simplifications.”
Because listeners can’t slow down the flow of language or glance back-
ward to clarify without disrupting the listening experience, a songwriter
does well to use familiar constructions so that listeners can make sense of
her meaning. In the introduction to his practical tool for songwriters, The
Modern Rhyming Dictionary, Gene Lees seems to agree. “Take some ordi-
nary, everyday expression, such as ‘Guess Who I Saw Today,’ and use it as
a song title,” he advises apprentice songwriters. “The expression may be a
catchword of current slang, or one of the older clichés in language, but in
the hands of a master lyricist, it can take on startling freshness and origi-
nality, yet retain the advantage of general familiarity.” This balance between
freshness and familiarity in the language of lyric helps explain how so many
well-known recordings are often of songs made up of a series of familiar
phrases.
Effective song lyrics do not need to vivify language or incite thought or
passion, as good poetry usually does. Sometimes the lyrics consciously as-
pire to cliché. Speaking of her songwriting, Nicki Minaj observes that she
has two different approaches: one for writing imagistically rich language to
display her rhyming virtuosity and one for writing big pop hits for the global
market. “If you don’t speak English,” she says, “you still know it’s a fun song,
just from the tone and the cadence.” That helps explain the difference be-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

tween her virtuosic, star-making verse on Kanye West’s “Monster” and her
biggest global hit to date, “Super Bass,” which comes across as staid and sac-
charine by comparison. “The foreign tongue is first a kind of music before it
becomes a language; it is first pregnant with meaning before the meaning
is delivered to me,” writes the philosopher Don Ihde in reference to the spo-
ken idiom; song lyrics literalize that musical quality found in plain speech
in a foreign language.

For Nicki Minaj, the conscious constraint of expressive range and depth
is a part of her art. She understands that to write a hit song that crosses
divides of genre and geography almost always requires a chorus comprised
of words that express themselves in clear terms. “The brilliance of rock lyr-
ics is that they are indistinct enough to hint at everything,” writes David
Kirby. “No need to get into specifics.”
This aesthetics of the obvious is at work in many pop songs. The lyrics of
such songs can come across as careless, which they may well be, but often
there’s a conscious calculation at work. By deploying well-worn phrases, lyr-
ics are so easily absorbed that the song sounds as if it’s been around for years
even when it has just come out. One of the best examples of this is “All Star”
by Smash Mouth. When it hit the charts near the turn of the twenty-first
century it became a global hit, in no small part because of its paint-by-
numbers chorus, which amounts to little more than a hodgepodge of clichés:

Hey now, you’re an all star, get your game on, go play
Hey now, you’re a rock star, get the show on, get paid
And all that glitters is gold
Only shooting stars break the mold

Upbeat. Inspirational. Aspirational. It’s all of those things, not in spite of

its wooden language but because of it. The first two lines take little deci-
phering. The third line refutes a common aphorism (“All that glitters is not
gold”) in favor of a new vision perfect for the apex of the economic prosperity
of the tech boom and the housing bubble. The final line of the chorus is a
Frankenstein’s monster of mixed metaphor that underscores how prefabri-
cated phrases can work efficiently if not elegantly—in this case, for affirma-
tion. No wonder the song has become a staple in sports arenas. In contrast
to the chorus, the verses are downright literary— and decidedly unmemo-
rable. Sometimes an effective pop song demands a language of least resis-
tance.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Sometimes, too, songwriters exploit the comforting space of the obvious

to craft subtle subversions and strangeness. On her striking 2013 debut,
Same Trailer Different Park, the country singer-songwriter Kacey Mus-
graves fashioned a collection of song lyr ics both traditional in their atten-
tion to bedrock country diction, themes, and storytelling and avant-garde
in their figurative constructions. Her songs, most of which were co-written
with Nashville veterans Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne, are festooned

with fairy tales gone awry and reinvented clichés that somehow sound fresh
again. On “It Is What It Is,” for instance, Musgraves takes the commonplace
expression of the title and enlivens it in the closing lines of the chorus to
capture the unaccountable loss of a love affair: “It is what it is / ’til it ain’t
anymore.”
Musgraves makes an art of creatively misdirecting clichés and arriving
at newly forged aphorisms. On “Step Off,” sticks and stones won’t break your
bones; instead, they “may build a throne / But you’ll be up there all alone.”
In a 2015 interview with the podcast Switched On Pop, the New Yorker’s
Andrew Marantz marveled at Musgraves’s capacity to compose a phrase that
“sounds like a cliché, then you realize you’ve never actually heard it before.”
She does this on “I Miss You,” where she tells a lost lover that she’s “as happy
as half a heart can do.” Or hear it on “Biscuits,” a song from her 2015 soph-
omore album, Pageant Material, where she admonishes her listeners to
“mind your own biscuits and life will be gravy.” Musgraves, like many popu-
lar songwriters before her, is at her best when cultivating moments of sur-
prise from common speech, making meaning out of what some mistake as
meaningless.
“Some of my favorite songs are meaningless,” Sting writes, explaining his
inspiration for penning the Police’s “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da,” a song
that stretches the potential of the stock phrase to the extreme. “I was try-
ing to figure out why I liked songs like ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ and ‘Do Wah Diddy’
and ‘Tutti-Frutti.’ There’s a whole list of songs with just garbage as words
that seem to be able to communicate something without necessarily mean-
ing anything.” Sting here is exposing his own aesthetic biases, but his point
is instructive: Many pop songs communicate more than they mean. They do
so, as we’ve explored in this book, through the play of sound and performance.
I don’t want to dismiss so easily song lyrics that seem not to mean much
of anything. The Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron,” produced by Phil Spector, em-
ploys such a striking economy of language that it reads on the page like an
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

experimental poem; the constriction of diction is stylized, not haphazard.

Manfred Mann’s “Do Wah Diddy” distills an entire courtship, from first sight
to matrimony, into less than two and a half minutes. Little Richard’s “Tutti-
Frutti” is a sophisticated document— striking and strange, from the first
“Bop bopa-a-lu a whop bam boo” to the last. “It’s a huge song musically, but
it’s also a seminal text in American culture, as much as Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
‘Song of Myself,’ and the great documents of the Civil Rights era are. In a
sense, it’s America’s Other National Anthem,” writes David Kirby. Kirby’s

going a bit too far here, but the song gave birth to rock and roll as we know
it, which gave birth in so many ways to so many of us. Each of these records
works as recording and as song; as lyric alone, each offers a compelling, if
incomplete, portrait of an aesthetics of the obvious.
Without the prosaic patterns of the past, many of the later innovations of
avant-garde and more expressly “poetic” songwriters might not have been
possible. “I was using yesterday’s records as blueprints, as all pop music is,”
writes Elvis Costello, one of the most sophisticated and literary songwrit-
ers alive. “All the good pop clichés had been written and there hadn’t been
any new ones for a while. I wanted to take some of the ready-made clichés that
Goffin and King or Smokey Robinson would come up with and come up with
my own photo-negative versions of them. Almost every song on my first album
was an opposite—a diseased version—of another kind of song.” Costello lo-
cates the genesis of his distinctive songwriting style in the legible styles of
songwriting from the past. Costello’s first album, 1977’s My Aim Is True, in-
cludes one of his best-known songs, “Alison.” “Alison” is about the night side of
love—disappointment and disaffection—rather than the bright side often cel-
ebrated in Costello’s stylistic models. But it is not a complete renunciation of
the romantic sensibilities he inherited. “I’m not going to get too sentimen-
tal / Like those other sticky Valentines,” he sings, even as the feel of the song
and the sound of the singing suggest otherwise.
Words also carry the inflections bestowed by the music and the particular
performance of a recording. The multiple lives lyrics lead in language and
sound help explain how even a constrained linguistic space can dilate to
accommodate a range of emotions. Country music is often derided for the nar-
row scope of its themes: beer, pickup trucks, and parties down by the river.
The August 2015 issue of Billboard magazine included an interview with
seven top Nashville songwriters. When asked for the words they overuse in
their lyrics, Jon Nite, who’s written for Keith Urban and Miranda Lambert,
said, “Right now, I am instructed by my publishers not to use ‘truck’ or
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

‘whiskey.’ The problem is, I drive an F-150 and I live in Bourbon Country.”
Ross Copperman, who’s written for Kenny Chesney and Dierks Bentley,
agreed: “ We’re all trying to stray from the bro thing, you know? So ‘truck,’
I guess.”
Worn-out words, however, can be born again in the space of the song and
the style of the singing. For those acculturated to country music, the famil-
iar language of the lyrics can be both comforting and affecting. “ Those old
country ballads created a space for sentiment that wasn’t always allowed at

other times,” the Texas-born writer Stephen Graham Jones told me. “You
could connect to deep emotions, if only in the confines of the cab of your
pickup. It allowed those same guys who were so caught up in the pose—the
boot-cut jeans, the hat tilted just right, the lip packed full of dip—to feel fully
human for a little while.” Certain emotional registers consciously shut off in
daily life—vulnerability, grief, loving abandon— become accessible in the
span of the song. Music and the language of the lyric offer a way into these
places and extend the possibility that listeners can carry that feeling into
their everyday lives.
It should come as no surprise, then, that country music is also perhaps
the most grown-up popular genre, unafraid to come to terms with adult
relationships and problems. “ There are a lot of people listening to country
music who don’t have perfect lives, who have the problems we sing about,
whether it’s wife abuse, drinking, cheating, or whatever,” writes Reba Mc-
Entire. “If it’s a good song and people hear the message—the person in that
song fixed his marriage and so can I, or the woman in this song walked out
on a man who was beating up on her and so can I—well, you’ve used your
music to make a statement and maybe to offer hope or another way.” Sing-
ers who sing about beer and pickups as twenty-something upstarts might
find themselves exploring a markedly different register as they enter middle
age. That doesn’t mean that songs about heartache and divorce are neces-
sarily superior to songs about parties down by the lake. It just means that
the music can contain a broad range of human experience.
So what’s country? “If it sounds country, that’s what it is. It’s a country
song,” Kris Kristofferson drawls at the beginning of his live recording of
“Me and Bobby McGee.” That may be the best definition we can get. No
single register of diction can encompass a genre. And no register, however
dominant, is necessarily a barrier to emotive expression. Perhaps the best
way to come to terms with style as it manifests itself in song is to listen to,
and read closely, a handful of particular songs together.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

READING STYLE IN THREE SONGS

When we listen to a song we bring preconceptions about what the song should
be and an emergent conception of what the song is becoming in the listen-
ing. Before we know a song, we may make assumptions about genre (“coun-
try songs are about love and heartache, and occasionally about beer, pickup
trucks, and dogs”) or assumptions based on personal or situational experi-

ence (“so and so recommended this album, so it’ll probably be like this” or
“I’m hearing this song at the gym, which always keeps it locked to the light-
rock station, so that’s what this song must be”). While listening to a song, the
particulars of the song itself either confirm or complicate initial expectations.
As the mind identifies patterns, as one becomes more familiar with the
song, the potency of surprise dissipates. Dilute it enough and interest wanes.
However, there is a sweet spot balanced between these states, where the
surprise has mellowed but not lost all potency and the familiarity is com-
forting rather than cloying.
In Songbook the novelist Nick Hornby recapitulates a favorite explana-
tion for how and why we listen repeatedly to the same song. “Dave Eggers
has a theory that we play songs over and over, those of us who do, because
we have to ‘solve’ them,” Hornby writes, “and it’s true that in our early rela-
tionship with, and courtship of, a new song, there is a stage which is akin to
a sort of emotional puzzlement.” Puzzlement is a productive emotion for a
critic; indeed, it might be the governing impulse behind some of the great-
est criticism. “My books always begin with an unanswered question,” my for-
mer teacher Helen Vendler once told me. We may apply the same principle
of puzzlement even to casual encounters with songs; often it is active when
we aren’t consciously aware that we are applying it in the first place.
An attentive listener will experience a country song, a rock song, and a
rap song in different ways from one another. The kinds of details that de-
mand attention will vary widely, as will the aperture of attention itself. Does
the song invite more scrutiny on the gestalt or on the acute level? Do we let
the sounds wash over us, or is our ear captured by certain individual words
or phrases? Are the lyrics in the foreground, in the background, or do they
jump back and forth?
Eminem’s songs, for instance, generally foreground the rapping voice with
a steady beat below it and maybe some sampled sounds above it. By contrast,
Thom Yorke’s voice in Radiohead’s songs often recedes into the mix, becom-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

ing another part of the music. For an audible demonstration of just how much
difference the mix can make in our perception of the voice in song, compare
the original issue of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, which tends to
bury Mick Jagger’s voice in the mix, with the “lost” tracks reissued in 2010,
which push Jagger into the sonic foreground. These production choices, nei-
ther one necessarily better than the other, condition how we apprehend the
style of the recorded performance. Some songs announce from the start that
they are vehicles for voice, while others understate vocal virtuosity in the

name of illuminating the lyrics. Some of these differences track generally

with genre, while many vary from singer to singer, from song to song.
Try consciously applying these principles of style to three songs, vastly
different from one another in genre, audience, and time period. It’s unlikely
that you’ll be drawn to all three equally; in fact, the more you like one, the
less you’ll probably like the others. Hearing the three in succession could be
considered the kind of cruel trick usually attributed to iTunes’ shuffle func-
tion. Certainly Pandora would never play these three in sequence. I hope,
however, that this little listening experiment will illuminate the unwritten
and unspoken habits of listening that govern the way many of us approach
style in pop music.
I’ve selected these three songs not quite at random but close to it: Hank
Snow’s “The Engineer’s Child” (1946), the Dø’s “Dust It Off ” (2011), and
Chance the Rapper featuring Vic Mensa and Twista’s “Cocoa Butter Kisses”
(2013). My goal was not to select three songs with a tangible point of
connection—say, three songs about New York City, or three songs recorded in
1978. Rather, I chose what I judge to be good representations of their respec-
tive genres and styles: a country and western ballad, an indie-pop tone
study, and a rap posse cut. If anything coheres these three songs it is the
fact that none of them could be considered mainstream; Hank Snow predates
the Billboard Hot 100 charts, the Dø reside somewhere below or beyond it,
and Chance the Rapper’s song appeared on the then twenty-year-old’s break-
through mixtape. You might not know them all; you might not know a
single one. That’s fine. The goal is to listen with purpose, marking the dis-
tance between your preconceptions and the song itself, noting emerging pat-
terns and structures that define your experience of listening to each song.
You’ll find each of them on YouTube, and I encourage you to listen to them
before reading on.

Hank Snow, “The Engineer’s Child” (1946)

The country music pioneer Hank Snow’s “The Engineer’s Child” is a con-
ventional tune with just enough strangeness to keep it interesting. As a
lyric form, it follows the dictates of the traditional ballad. It is narrative-
driven and sentimental. Steel guitar dominates the song’s instrumentation,
aided by a two-bar fiddle solo. The song’s chugging rhythm is akin to the
train it describes. What stands out most, though, is Snow’s voice, baleful and
deep. He recounts the story of a husband, a railroad engineer, called away
from his wife and ailing infant child. As his train rattles through the dark-

ness toward home, the engineer awaits a sign from the window (“If our ba-
by’s dead, just show the red”).
What could make a more universal emotive appeal than the thought of a
child on the verge of death? It is, of course, a coercive emotion; the song
demands and expects a specific response. However, the lyric’s narrative
structure complicates the song’s straightforward sentimentality and adds
depth. The lyrics shift point of view from the third-person sympathetic chron-
icler in the first verse, to the engineer/protagonist in the second verse, and
finally to the mother in the third verse. The rudimentary recording technol-
ogy and the fact that the song speaks directly to us from a period when the
survival of a child to adulthood was far from certain work together to satu-
rate the song in sepia tones.
Given this song’s strong narrative, on the acute level it demands attention
engaged with the events the song describes. On the gestalt level, patterns
emerge from the ballad form and the repetition of the chorus. The first time
through, the song evokes tension and apprehension. The second time, one
finds a modest reassurance and a place for hope.

The Dø’s, “Dust It Off” (2011)

The Finnish-French indie-pop duo the Dø’s “Dust It Off ” begins with an in-
take of breath that leads to—nothing. A second intake of breath leads to
song. A naked piano figure provides the sole sonic setting for the singer, a
young woman whose voice is at once vulnerable and enduring. The song
offers no anchoring stability of form, no chorus or refrain. What lends it
coherence is the repeated vocal pattern, which is looser than a melody but
undeniably melodic.
Unlike “The Engineer’s Child,” “Dust It Off ” does not dictate a specific
emotional response from the listener. Instead, “Dust It Off ” creates a mood,
a less determined but still defined space of feeling generated by the nervous
energy of the repeated piano figure, the jumps in melody, and Olivia Merhi-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

lati’s singing voice. Where “The Engineer’s Child” insists on its melodramatic
narrative, “Dust It Off ” deflects narrative logic. The song sets a mood and
creates a cognitive space, through the lyrics’ abstraction, that is defined
without being definite. One gets the feeling that these lyr ics portend more
meaning than they actually contain. One also gets the feeling that the
lyr ics were written by a songwriter for whom English is a second lan-
guage, which might help explain the song’s attention to words as sound
and feeling. Though not quite nonsense verse, the lyric functions on the

same logic; enough of the structures of ideas are in place to leave the im-
pression that the ideas are fully formed, even if they remain elusive to the
most focused critical ear. It necessarily shifts listening attention from the
acute to the gestalt.

Chance the Rapper Featuring Vic Mensa and Twista,

“Cocoa Butter Kisses” (2013)
The third song in our sequence is Chance the Rapper’s “Cocoa Butter Kisses,”
from his 2013 mixtape, Acid Rap. The fact that this song appears on a
mixtape is significant. As a form the mixtape emphasizes spontaneity and
disposability, although recent releases have sounded more like studio albums
in their production quality and thematic cohesion. The second point of differ-
ence from the previous examples is that this song involves more than one
voice. It is what’s known in hip-hop as a posse cut, in which a succession of
rappers flow over the same beat with more or less attention to a loose theme.
The bulk of the song is taken up by the verses, where the theme is far from
clear. In fact, each of the three MCs goes in a different thematic direction.
The song’s coherence isn’t in theme, but rather in how each MC flows to the
beat. In this regard, the performance is akin to a jazz cutting session, where
each soloist tries to outshine the other. One doesn’t long for narrative or the-
matic coherence because the song calls attention instead to micro-patterns:
the discrete effects of flow and rhyme, the particular figures of speech and
turns of phrase, the isolated lyric references.
“Cocoa Butter Kisses” lends itself to decoding in a way that “The Engi-
neer’s Child” does not, given that Snow’s song makes its meaning so plain.
It also is more satisfying on the level of figurative language than the Dø’s
“Dust It Off ” because its figures inevitably resolve into something either
readily apparent or clarified through decoding. The song provides a certain
melodic appeal through the sung chorus, serviceably rendered by Chance the
Rapper himself in a way that invites singing along without fear of being left
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

behind. Repetition of the chorus anchors the song, holding it together as a

whole. The song’s gestalt appeal lies in the beat and the clear structure of
verse and chorus. The acute appeal, the source of much of the song’s inter-
est, resides in discrete displays of lyric virtuosity. For instance, Twista
makes a surprising reference to the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle (“And
when it come to rapping fast, I’m the Higgs boson”).
“Cocoa Butter Kisses” differs in striking ways from “Dust It Off.” Nei-
ther song provides the concrete narrative of “The Engineer’s Child,” but the

lyrics of “Dust It Off ” cohere in a kind of emotive and ideational logic. Where
Chance the Rapper’s rhymes call acute attention to language, the Dø’s lyr-
ics resist comprehension and push toward the gestalt. To put it another way,
“Cocoa Butter Kisses” holds together as a series of small parts that are only
loosely related, though always relatable. “Dust It Off,” in contrast, coheres
through the accretion of image and feeling, which makes for a gestalt logic
that satisfies a listener’s desire for some kind of meaning making by the
whole.
How much of these differences are the product of genre and how much
they are the product of the artists’ individual styles is a question open to
discussion. Comparing songs across such vast differences of style is a useful
approach to understanding the fixed and the moveable features of their re-
spective forms. Another approach is to consider what happens when one song
finds expression across two or more distinctive styles: the cover song.

STYLE AND THE COVER SONG

A cover is a recording of a song by someone other than the original song-

writer or performer. Sometimes covers mirror the original recordings down
to the singer’s vocal inflections. Other times, they take the originals apart
and build them back up in a different genre and sonic space. Just how much
and what parts of a song must stay the same, though, is open to analysis.
Do we hear Patti Smith’s “Gloria” as a cover of Them’s “Gloria” in spite of
the dramatic differences in arrangement and lyr ics? What about when the
original artist reinterprets his or her own song, making dramatic changes
to lyric and melody, as Bob Dylan is wont to do with the songs from his
expansive catalog?
For all the possible relations among original recordings and their covers,
copyright law keeps the connection relatively close. The law affords anyone
the opportunity to cover any song provided they pay the price in advance.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Securing the mechanical license for a composition grants the right to record
and distribute a cover version of a song in one’s own style, provided that it
does not substantially change “the basic melody or the fundamental charac-
ter of the work.” What constitutes “the fundamental character,” however, is
not clearly defined. In practice it has come to mean little or no alteration to
the melody and the lyrics. Given all the legal constraints facing those who
wish to record a cover, why do so many artists choose to do it anyway? The
reasons are many, but we can usefully highlight these:

(1)To capitalize on something that’s already proven to be popular.

In 1955 Little Richard’s original composition “Tutti Frutti” reached
number seventeen on the Billboard charts at the same time that Pat
Boone’s cover version reached number twelve. In the early days of
rock and roll when the single was king, it was common practice for
singers to cover songs that had already enjoyed chart success. The
cover is commerce.

(2)To let your audience know something about yourself or your

band. The Rolling Stones’ first American release, 1964’s England’s
Newest Hitmakers, comprises almost entirely covers of blues and
soul tunes by Willie Dixon, Jimmy Reed, Phil Spector, Chuck Berry,
Holland/Dozier/Holland, and others. Most of the original artists’
recordings were not particularly commercial at the time; the Stones
and the other mostly English bands at the cutting edge of the rock
revolution made them mainstream by virtue of their cover versions.
Their choice of songs expressed their musical influences. “We were
almost Jesuits—let’s say missionaries. Our whole aim was to turn
London on to rhythm and blues and the blues. That was the scope of
our whole universe,” Keith Richards told Marc Maron in 2015. One
need only listen to the covers from their debut album to guess ex-
actly what artists and albums mattered most to the group. By let-
ting their listeners into their record collection, they forged intimacy
with them.

(3)To preserve or to regain something we’re losing or have lost.

Jack White has become a one-man preservation society for a body
of early blues recordings that the English invasion largely over-
looked a few generations before. He’s done this through acts of
actual musical archivism, best represented by the Rise and Fall of
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Paramount Records series, and also through his carefully curated

covers of some of these same old blues tunes. He released a seven-
inch cover of bluesman Willie McTell’s “Lord Send Me an Angel” in
2000 and a wrathful cover of Sun House’s “Death Letter” on De Stijl.
Covers will lead his listeners back to the original, if only to listen for
what White so obviously hears there himself.

(4)To correct, to complete, or to reimagine a song that on its own

seems unresolved. This might mean, for instance, stripping away the

dated period production qualities that keep listeners of today from

hearing the beauty of the song underneath. It might mean conceiv-
ing a new conclusion to a song left incomplete. It could mean shift-
ing the gender of the pronouns in the lyrics, or keeping the pronouns
the same while changing the gender of the singer. These constitute
a radical species of cover because they engage in a dialectical rela-
tionship that leaves both the original and the cover transformed.

One could identify an equal number of reasons why listeners seem so

drawn to covers. At its most basic level, the cover satisfies the ear’s desire
for familiarity and difference. It’s the same reason that live recordings can
be so exciting: we listen both for the fulfillment of sonic expectations and for
moments of surprise. Cover songs occasion a sonic palimpsest; we hear the
new version over and against the original and take note of the differences.
Hearing the cover with knowledge of the original highlights the exertion of
the new artist’s style and sensibility. We can come to know new artists by
their differences and distances from the artists and songs with which we are
already familiar.
The French soul singer Ben L’Oncle Soul’s recorded body of work consists
almost entirely of cover tunes, many of which owe their appeal to his radical
displacement in genre, gender, and voice of our inherent expectations of the
original song. The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” becomes a soul stir-
rer while still retaining the defining character of the original’s vicious guitar
riff. The Spice Girls’ “Say You’ll Be There” reveals its surprising poignancy
when stripped of its dated production. Other songs, though, are diminished.
Katy Perry’s mildly transgressive “I Kissed a Girl” becomes standard issue
when sung by a man without changing the gendered pronoun. With covers
not everything is better, but something is always changed.
On other occasions, the pleasure to be had from a cover has little to do
with the original recording, even to the point of making many forget that
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

there was anything else that came before it. Jimi Hendrix incites a sonic
revolution on “All Along the Watchtower” that does the unthinkable of sup-
planting Bob Dylan’s original in many listeners’ minds. I’ve heard even
knowledgeable music people talk about “that Whitney Houston song ‘I Will
Always Love You,’ ” when it was Dolly Parton who wrote and recorded it years
earlier. The sheer virtuosity and bombast of Whitney’s version drowns out
the small and personal (and equally remarkable) version by Dolly. Count-
less websites offer lists of covers that are “better than the original.” At any

given time in our collective cultural moment such judgments may shift
toward or away from the original in what the music critic Carl Wilson terms
the “Epidemic of Second Thought”—the “cycles of revisionism” that move
critical consensus toward innovation and the new (the cover) or toward pres-
ervation and the “authentic” (the original). The beauty for individual listen-
ers, though, is that we don’t have to choose one over the other.
It’s unlikely that Don Henley set out to write songs worthy of covers when
he began recording his third post-Eagles album, The End of the Innocence,
in 1988. The album sold more than 6 million copies and spawned three top-
forty singles, each of which would soon become part of the contemporary pop
music repertoire. The soul singer India.Arie covered “The Heart of the
Matter” on her 2006 album, Testimony: Vol. 1, Life & Relationship. More than
a dozen artists, from the Ataris to KT Tunstall, have covered “The Boys of
Summer.” By far the most intriguing case study for covers, though, is the title
song. “The End of the Innocence,” which Henley wrote with the pianist and
singer Bruce Hornsby, was the album’s lead single and its most successful,
reaching number eight on the pop charts during the summer of 1989. This
was the summer of Milli Vanilli and New Kids on the Block, of Paula Abdul
and Bobby Brown. It was a summer, in other words, dominated by dance
music and love ballads, a summer like so many others.
By contrast, “The End of the Innocence” is about ambivalence. At once, it
is a social critique of American empire after eight years of Ronald Reagan,
that “tired old man that we elected king.” On the other, it is a nostalgic glance
back at a simpler place and time. Both lyrically and musically, the song
embodies tension. Minor chords of concern in the verses give way to major
chords of hope in the chorus. I can recall listening to “The End of the Inno-
cence” at fifteen and getting caught up in the romance of it all. I imagined
myself living in the chorus, where I’d invite a young lady to lay her head
down on the ground and let her hair fall all around me. Listening to the song
today, it is still beautiful, though tarnished a bit by time. The unfaltering
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

ba-bum-crack of the programmed drum machine dates it, as do Hornsby’s

lovely but overfamiliar piano chords and the jazz great Wayne Shorter’s
dulcet soprano solo—tastefully played, but rendered guilty by association
through sonic proximity to the canned facility of Kenny G’s soporific solos.
Indeed, “The End of the Innocence” is a song ready made for smooth jazz,
where easy instrumentals wash away the complications of the lyrics. Five
years after Henley’s single charted, the John Tesh Project recorded the first

cover version, suitable for elevator transportation. More striking, though,

were Bob Dylan’s live concert covers of the song. Dylan stays faithful both
to lyric and melody, and his voice, far more abrasive than Henley’s honied
tenor, tips the song’s tone more decidedly toward invective. The most curi-
ous cover is by co-writer Hornsby’s touring super group, featuring Bonnie
Raitt, Shawn Colvin, David Lindley, and Jackson Browne. Performing the
song for Jay Leno on The Tonight Show, Hornsby saws away on the accor-
dion as the rest divvy up parts to sing, the whole performance somehow add-
ing up to less than the sum of its parts.
Then there’s the case of Okkervil River’s “The End of the Innocence” cover.
In the summer of 2014, a quarter century after the original song’s release,
the indie folk group included their radical reinterpretation on a free album
of covers posted to their website. Okkervil River’s frontman and lyricist, Will
Sheff, recalls first hearing the song as a child in his father’s car as they lis-
tened to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 on Sunday mornings. “Shuffled in
with sappy late-’80s cuts like ‘From a Distance’ and ‘Cuts Both Ways,’ ‘The
End of the Innocence’ stood out,” he wrote in Rolling Stone soon after Hen-
ley’s attorneys issued a cease and desist order to have the cover removed from
Okkervil River’s website. “Sonically it was just as soggy as those Bette Midler
and Gloria Estefan ballads, but there was this deflated masculine middle-aged
world-weariness to it that haunted me, although I wouldn’t have thought of
those exact words at the time.”
Henley’s objections to Okkervil River’s cover went beyond the fact that
the band had not secured permission before posting it. Indeed, it is unlikely
Henley would have granted that right given his low opinion of what Okker-
vil River did. “They don’t understand the law,” Henley told Australia’s Daily
Telegraph in June 2014. “You can’t re-write the lyr ics to somebody else’s
songs and record it [sic] and put it on the Internet. I’m sorry, but it wasn’t
an improvement. We were not impressed.”
After listening to Okkervil River’s cover, it’s easy to understand why Hen-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

ley was upset. Sheff ’s version is more or less faithful to the original in word
and melody through the first verse and into the chorus, announcing its dif-
ference only with the home demo quality of its recording, which strips away
the layers of the original’s production down to voice and acoustic guitar. As a
consequence, when Sheff sings the last lines of the first chorus (“This is the
end / This is the end of the innocence”), the recording enacts the lyrics; when
he sings “end” the song does in fact end, giving way to a silence that seems

final until it isn’t. By contrast, when Henley’s voice pauses between those
lines the space is filled with drums, synths, and Hornsby’s industrious pi-
ano comps.
The real weirding of Okkervil River’s cover begins with the next verse,
though, where Sheff lyrically disrupts the meaning and the meter of the
original. Henley’s lovely “O beautiful for spacious skies / Now those skies
are threatening” becomes “O beautiful for spacious skies / Turned smogified
and threatening.” Sheff ’s neologism is awkward, but purposely so. It shifts
the song’s registers of diction, which Henley and Hornsby neatly divide
between the foreboding language of social critique of the verses and the
pastoral language of safe retreat of the chorus. The cover exchanges the orig-
inal’s promise of washing away society’s sin and finding respite as the “tall
grass waves” with the image of stripping down to the skin and watching as
the “tall grass dries.”
Sheff repeatedly denies the consolations of Henley’s original: the warm
nostalgia of the country, the sweet assuredness of Henley’s phrasing, the
comforting shape of the melody. The first half of the song is still within
the bounds of the common cover. Its subtle subversions, however, presage
more radical reinventions to come. Sheff closes his cover of the song with an
entirely new verse and chorus that he felt more fittingly resolved the song’s
subject. “ ‘The End of the Innocence’ is surprisingly fatalistic and despair-
ing for a pop radio hit, but it seems to back off of that despair at the end,”
Sheff wrote after being forced to take the song down. “I felt like it would be
interesting if the lyrics worked through that feeling of despair and tried to
understand it and take it to the limit, as it were.” Reflecting a year later on
the whole matter of his cover and Henley’s response, Sheff told the podcast
Pitch the following:

[Henley’s] song is saying, “I’m an old, irrelevant sack of shit and

people like me ruin the world. And the world is fucked now.” And then
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

at the end he’s kinda like, “Oh, well, as long as you love me we’ll go
away and it’ll be great.” And it’s like, “No, that’s not true! That’s not
how that song ends.” You know what I mean? And so I felt like I
wanted to take that song and drive it into the tree instead of drive
it off into the sunset. And, I mean, I think it pissed him off for that
reason.

In Sheff ’s alternative conclusion, the place of solace promised by Henley’s

chorus is gone. While Henley reclines with his lover, Sheff finds that his for-

mer hiding place is now just a “place that I rent.” When Sheff speaks to his
beloved, saying that he sees her head hanging low and hope draining out,
he might as well be speaking to Henley’s song itself. “This is the end,” he
sings, echoing Henley’s resolution. Then he hits us in the face with “You
know it’s the end”— a line that denies even the euphony of the original mel-
ody, before closing with the same lyric sung in a decidedly different tone than
the original: This is the end of the innocence. The difference is that Sheff
makes us believe it.
One can understand why Okkervil River’s cover would have pissed Henley
off. It violates the integrity of his composition. Henley’s original is a song,
after all, about the possibility of escape from worldliness and pain. Sheff de-
nies that recourse, rendering so many of the things that go down easy in the
song now labored and pained—Henley’s smooth tenor becomes Sheff ’s world-
weary warble, Hornsby’s brave block chords become Sheff ’s spare strums,
Henley’s lyrical language becomes Sheff ’s awkward neologisms and strained
syntax, Henley’s clear contrast between innocence and experience becomes
Sheff ’s muddied reality in which beauty and ugliness intermingle. Of course,
we all know which song’s vision of the world is closer to the world in which
we live. The only question is how much truth one desires from pop songs.
Sheff ’s cover is in dynamic relation to Henley’s original. Henley’s song es-
capes to beauty and nostalgia—of the uncorrupted landscape, of the union
of a man and a woman offering up their best defense in love. “The End of
the Innocence” joins a long tradition of literature and songs of loss and
mourning: the elegy. Sheff rejects the elegiac impulse, asserting instead that
Henley’s original is finally just another poisoned fairy tale.
Depending on one’s aesthetic and sensibility, Okkervil River’s version can
send you running back to the warm embrace of the original or give you the
vocabulary for explaining your rejection of it. Either way, it does no disser-
vice to Henley’s original. What it does is occasion a more profound and im-
mediate reflection on the tension that Henley’s song concerned itself with in
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

the first place: What is one to do when the world is crumbling all around us?
If the song’s commitments are true, one wonders why Henley would object
to Sheff ’s extension of their aims. Henley’s song even anticipates Sheff ’s prac-
tice when it quotes the famous opening line from “America the Beautiful,”
one of the anthems of American exceptionalism, only to subvert it. Sheff does
on a large scale what Henley does on the small scale in that single line, and
unlike Henley’s subversion, Sheff ’s finishes the job—allowing for no com-
fort in the face of faltering empire.

COPYRIGHT AND THE COVER SONG

For Okkervil River and for a generation of artists weaned on the remixes
and samples of hip-hop, the cover song is not an act of imitation and theft,
but one of creation. “I feel like it’s very native to art, this talking back and
forth between generations, between artists, adding your own thing, chang-
ing it, spinning it around, undermining the original emotion, building a
house entirely out of pieces of other people’s houses,” Sheff said. On Twitter,
he offered the following distillation of principle: “(Honestly I think copyright
law is garbage that damages the culture. Some of the best art is built around
(loving) theft & defacement.)”
Such “loving theft” is the point where culture meets commerce. The natu-
ral state of culture is freedom, including free exchange and free expression. In
contrast, commerce entails regulation and restriction. But without commerce,
the creative impulse has no way to sustain itself. The relationship between
freedom and commerce is crucial in popular music because so many commer-
cial interests are at work and there is so much money to be made. We need to
feed our artists; there’s no shame in that. At the same time, we do not want
to choke the source of their creativity, which is the free range of aesthetic
motion and the free exercise of the vernacular process, that hallmark of
American culture. “Every pop musician is a thief and a magpie,” observes
Elvis Costello. “I have an emotional affinity for certain styles, but none of
them belong to me.” To whom, then, do styles belong? How much of a sound,
how much of a style, can be owned? How much are we willing as a society to
restrict the process of adaptation and adoption that has always been at the
core of musical culture?
“Popular music as an industry is based on intellectual property rights,”
argues Tara Brabazon. If this is true, then we are living in the golden age
of intellectual property and music copyright litigation. This is partly a re-
sult of scarcity in the music industry, where rights holders feel compelled
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

to capitalize on whatever they can. It’s partly a consequence of the litigious

nature of our culture and the readily available access to almost every sound
that gets produced. It’s also a consequence of the recent success of some liti-
gants, which inspires other artists to file similar lawsuits.
Copyright generally protects melody and lyrics. “The copyright of a mu-
sical composition is based on the top-line melody, the specific harmonies that
support it, and, in the case of a song or opera, the lyrics. There is no acknowl-
edgement of groove, sound, texture, or arrangement— all of which are fea-

tures of the recorded music of our era that we listeners have come to savor
and identify as integral to an artist’s work,” David Byrne wrote in 2013. In
the swiftly evolving field of music copyright law, a few things are clear: Mel-
ody is sacrosanct, as is language. Increasingly, it appears that courts—or at
least juries like the one that decided in favor of the Marvin Gaye estate in its
dispute with Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams over “Blurred Lines”—
are considering other things open to ownership, even a groove, a feel, or
timbre. Rhythms, however, have generally been exempted from copyright,
save for in cases of samples like James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” beat.
What about a vocal cadence, a quality that structures the shape of a song
as much as a melody? What about a groove, or, even more abstract, a sonic
feel? Should courts treat these as they do a melody? Should they be protected
or considered fair game? These questions underlie a series of events in 2015
that seemed to change the mindset if not the law around the ownership of
sound and style. The first occurred when Tom Petty’s attorneys secured co-
writing credit and royalty sharing from Sam Smith for the resemblance
between Smith’s Grammy-winning “Stay with Me” from 2014 and Tom
Petty’s 1989 hit “I Won’t Back Down.” The second was the suit between Robin
Thicke and Pharrell Williams and the Marvin Gaye estate regarding
Thicke’s 2014 hit “Blurred Lines” and Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up” from 1977.
Much has been written about these already, with more still to come.
At least as it concerns the poetry of pop, an even more compelling instance
of style adaptation never reached litigation. When Mark Ronson and Bruno
Mars’s ubiquitous hit “Uptown Funk” debuted on commercial radio in No-
vember 2014, it sounded like nothing else playing at the time. Although it
was distinctive in its pop moment, the song is decidedly imitative. Depend-
ing on your perspective, it is either slavishly derivative or cleverly celebra-
tory of a good many styles, artists, and individual songs. One hears a panoply
of 1970s and 1980s funk, from the Gap Band to Prince to the Sequence to
Roger Troutman’s Zapp & Roger. It’s in the groove, the guitar licks, the horn
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

hits, the call-and-response between Mars and his background singers. It’s
even in the video, which looks a lot like an outtake from the Time rocking
their set on Prince’s Purple Rain film. None of these influences is credited.
This is fair enough, given that most of these allusions and echoes are either
part of a long history of African American oral practice or recontextualized
enough to be untraceable to a certain song.
“Uptown Funk” owes a more par ticular debt, however, one that is ac-
knowledged in the publication rights but that firmly undercuts the song’s

claims to its own style. That debt is to the bizarre viral rap hit by a larger-
than-life character from Atlanta named Trinidad James, called “All Gold
Everything.” The press linking the two songs has focused exclusively on the
way that “Uptown Funk” repurposes the signature refrain from “All Gold
Everything”: “ Don’t believe me? Just watch.” James repeats the line twelve
times; “Uptown Funk” does him five better. The line is memorable, and cer-
tainly plays a part in the remarkable success of “Uptown Funk.” At four my
daughter went through a phase where she would run around the house re-
peating that line incessantly, and this after hearing it only once. Given the
repetition of such a distinctive phrase, it makes sense that Ronson would
forestall any claims by offering James a share of royalties.
When I first heard “Uptown Funk” Trinidad James did not cross my
mind. What did, however, was the song’s strangeness, its anomalous ex-
istence in the popu lar soundscape of 2014, which was dominated by pop
country ballads and EDM-inspired every thing else. Thinking back, the
strangeness did not reside primarily in the canned funk, something that the
song performs rather than inhabits. Rather, it was in Mars’s stutter-step
vocal delivery, broken by unusual elisions, pauses, and antiphonal echoes.
Mars is a singer, at times a crooner; here he was locating his voice in the
song’s groove like he was a percussionist—with sharp hits, percussive riffs,
and vocal jabs. He was relating to the rhythm more like a rapper than a
singer, through rhythm more than melody. To be sure, the song has a mel-
ody, though not one you’re likely to whistle while you work. What sets “Up-
town Funk” apart is its rhythmic texture in the instrumentation and in the
voices as they play off one another.
This brings me back to my earlier question: Can you copyright a ca-
dence? It wasn’t long before I decided to listen to Trinidad James’s song
again, and what I found was that the cadence of “Uptown Funk” is a near
replica of James’s, sometimes down to the specific words. Look at how each
song begins, first “Uptown Funk,” then “All Gold Every thing.” The italics
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

show exact word replications, while the bold print shows identical rhyth-
mic replications.

This hit that ice cold This ain’t for no fuck nigga
Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold You a real nigga, then fuck with me
This one for them hood girls This one for the hood niggas
Them good girls, straight masterpieces Hipster bitches that shop at Lenox
Stylin’, wilin’ Dark skinned, light skinned

More telling, though, are the lines that follow:

I’m too hot (hot damn) For the hoes, my nigga

Call the police and the fireman That’s pussy popping at Magic City
I’m too hot (hot damn) Flash strong, my nigga
Make a dragon wanna retire, man Then come match that shit with me
I’m too hot (hot damn) Smoking mid, my nigga
Say my name, you know who I am Then don’t pass that shit to me
I’m too hot (hot damn) This one for my niggas
And my band ’bout that money (Break And bitches ’bout that money (Cash
it down) Out)

James’s profane punctuation (“my nigga”) becomes the playfully anti-

quated “hot damn,” with the same preceding medial caesura. Further, the
sixteenth line of “Uptown Funk” nearly repeats the sixteenth line of “All
Gold Every thing.” It is as if Ronson and Mars put tracing paper over
James’s lyrics, repeating the structure of the cadence down to the pattern of
stressed and unstressed syllables. Why does all of this matter? Well, it
speaks to an unacknowledged debt that is, to my reading, even greater than
the debt the song owes to the host of funk songs that it references and inter-
polates. This debt to James poses both an aesthetic and, potentially, a legal
question: To whom does the cadence belong? To James for constructing it, as
basic and repetitive as that “it” is? To Ronson and Mars for endowing it with
a certain melody? Or to no one at all? Perhaps Ronson anticipated the legal
question about cadence as well, giving James credit not just for the cribbed
catchphrase but for the rhythm of the vocal line as well.
The question of whether vocal cadence can be copyrighted has broad im-
plications for rap, which has been closely scrutinized when it comes to sam-
pling, but which has garnered almost no attention when it comes to the
intellectual property of the MC’s flow. In the hip-hop community, MCs often
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

talk about other rappers stealing their flows; such theft is looked down upon
but hasn’t been the subject of litigation in the way that a surreptitious sam-
ple has. If rap in particular, and pop music in general, is to be respected
and protected, it might be worth considering the degree to which flow can
be owned and whether a style can, indeed, be copyrighted.
For us as listeners, though, it’s a simpler matter than it is for the artists.
We’re free to enjoy Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’s “Uptown Funk” and
Trinidad James’s “All Gold Everything” with knowledge of their connection

or in ignorance of it. In both cases, the flow just works. Whatever its debts,
“Uptown Funk” captures a style that’s also its own.

CROSS- GENRE COVERS

The crooner Paul Anka has been recording covers since he was a teen heart-
throb in the late 1950s. He covered the Drifters’ “Save the Last Dance for
Me” in 1963 and Frank Sinatra’s signature tune “My Way” in 1974. In 2005
he recorded an entire album of pop covers that included a striking rendition
of Nirvana’s grunge anthem “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Anka’s version brings
more swing than angst, with big-band accompaniment to go along with his
jaunty delivery of the lyrics. There’s an element of kitsch at work, but the
cover also underscores Anka’s unfailing professionalism in arranging and
delivering songs as well as the integrity of Nirvana’s original. As Anka ex-
plains it, “ ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ works with a swing arrangement because
it’s poetry and it has a real cool melody to swing to.” In an instance like this,
the song’s displacement from genre and from the defining style of its perfor-
mance results in revelation rather than stagnation.
Cross-genre covers help define both the genre of the original, the donor
song, and the genre of the cover, the recipient song. By seeing what changes—
say, how the Gourds fashion a melody for Snoop Dogg’s original lyr ics on
“Gin & Juice”— and what remains, but now calls attention to itself in a way
that it doesn’t in the original song— say, how the white singer-songwriter
Ben Folds retains the word “nigga” in his acoustic cover of Dr. Dre’s “Bitches
Ain’t Shit”—it is possible to isolate some of the defining stylistic features of
the original. Like Ben Folds’s cover of Dr. Dre, many cross-genre covers are
also cross-racial and cross-cultural covers as well, which means that they
carry significance that stretches beyond aesthetics and taste.
Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen” is a stylistic hybrid, both singing and rapping,
both loopy love song and drug tale. Fetty Wap dubs his style “Ignorant R&B,”
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

perhaps for the ways that he takes staple soul elements like extolling a
woman’s faithfulness and their mutual passion while setting their story in
the underworld of drug dealing. The most striking hybridity, though, is the
way that “Trap Queen” blends sing-along vocal delivery and mass-appeal
electronic instrumentals with thematic and linguistic insularity. You don’t
need to be conversant in the song’s arcane language— cooking pies, bandos,
and the titular site of the trap—to comprehend the song’s meaning. The fact
that the song remained in the Billboard Hot 100 top ten for months testifies

to its crossover appeal, even as it has retained its legitimacy in the narrower
realm of hip-hop and R&B.
However, the mainstream saturation of “Trap Queen” does not prepare
one for the cover by the twee English crooner Ed Sheeran. During a visit to
The Tonight Show, Sheeran recorded a version of the song backstage with
the house band, the Roots. Sheeran frequently integrates rap covers into his
live shows, creating a conscious dissonance that lends some needed edge to
his sensitive sound, and some welcome melody to the songs he covers. In this
instance, Sheeran accentuates the nascent melodic qualities in Fetty Wap’s
hybrid rapping-singing vocal delivery, committing to the limited but potent
melodic possibilities of the original song. The more profound transformation
occurs with the lyrics, which change by staying entirely the same. The dif-
ference is, when Sheeran speaks of cooking pies with his beloved, one won-
ders whether they’ll be apple or cherry.
Sheeran’s cover, like the best pop-music covers, calls attention to what is
distinctively appealing about the original while it underscores the stylistic
fingerprint of the artist recording the cover. In the distance between origi-
nal and cover, one can isolate what the new singer brings to the song. In
proximity, one sees the elemental qualities of the original composition that
survive any stylistic conversion. Sheeran’s “Trap Queen” is a new manifes-
tation of the ironic cover, best defined in 1996 by the music critic Jake Lon-
don. Traditionally, the ironic cover is a product of the cognitive dissonance
brought on by a cool band (in London’s example, the Replacements) covering
a song by a decidedly uncool one (Kiss’s “Black Diamond”). The caché of
the cool band gives listeners license to enjoy in public the “uncool” music
that many of them might already enjoy in private. For its part, the cool
band is free to embrace the pleasure of the original—be it out of nostalgia, a
genuine appreciation for the song, or both—knowing that they are protected
by what London terms “preemptive irony,” which “disarm[s] the critic by
calling the novelty of his or her enterprise into question before the critic has
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

a chance to call the artist’s enterprise into question.”

London’s formulation fits elegantly with, say, an up-and-coming Run-
D.M.C. covering a then lukewarm Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” in 1986, or
Okkervil River covering George Benson’s disco-jazz 1980 hit “Give Me the
Night” on their 2013 EP of eighties covers, Golden Opportunities 3— the
album that also boasted their controversial cover of Don Henley’s “The End
of the Innocence.” But the Fetty Wap–Ed Sheeran exchange is something
different. If forced to define them in a binary, then surely Fetty Wap is the

cool to Sheeran’s uncool. The pattern, then, is reversed. Instead of a cool band
resurrecting an uncool song, it’s an uncool artist covering a cool song.
The ironic currency of the cover, the reason Sheeran would choose to do
“Trap Queen,” then, is not centered on critical taste but on something else:
on race. Sheeran’s act of preemptive irony is not aimed at excusing the song,
but rather at excusing himself and his image of coffee shop, middle-of-the-road
pop. “Trap Queen” gives him edge, while showing him to be self-aware enough
to be the first to laugh at how unlikely it is for him to sing such a song. The
humor comes in the distance between Sheeran’s boy-next-door public image
(an image, incidentally, that doesn’t necessarily square with reality) and the
explicit content of Fetty Wap’s original. Sheeran’s cover also implicitly invites
us as listeners to side with him in exoticizing “Trap Queen,” in exploiting it as
a source of amazement and amusement. It’s a racial game that plays into
centuries-old black-white cultural binaries. Sheeran’s cover relies on notions
of black cool and white squareness, black danger and white safety, that have
long been part of the American racial imagination.
One final example of this cross-racial cover dynamic will suffice. Early in
2011, the R&B singer Chris Brown released “Look at Me Now,” a Diplo and
Afrojack–produced club banger featuring the rappers Lil Wayne and Busta
Rhymes that peaked at number six on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and has
earned more than 350 million YouTube views. The song’s cultural satura-
tion far exceeds its chart position. But why? In most respects, “Look at Me
Now” is a paint-by-numbers hip-hop/R&B recording. Brown delivers his lyr-
ics with unselfconscious bluster; there’s nary a hint of self-awareness behind
his swagger and his boasts. The song celebrates wealth and sexual prowess.
It’s less a Chris Brown song than it is a Lil Wayne song, and it is less a Lil
Wayne song than it is a Busta Rhymes song. Busta Rhymes delivers the most
memorable performance with a rapid-fire display of rap virtuosity. In eigh-
teen bars, he is by turns sinister and playful. His delivery creates the tone,
not the words, which flash by in such rapid succession that most escape
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

comprehension.
The longevity and cultural impact of “Look at Me Now” are due in part
to the fact that it quickly became an exemplar of an emergent cultural trend:
the hipster cover. The hipster cover is one in which a rap or R&B (read: black)
song is ironically performed by a white artist or comedian, usually in a per-
formance style that contrasts sharply with the lyric content. Think again of
Sheeran’s rendition of Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen.” In the case of “Look at Me

Now,” the cover in question was by the pop duo Karmin, which consists of
vocalist Amy Heidemann and instrumentalist/producer Nick Noonan. In the
YouTube clip a preening and posing Heidemann delivers all the lyrics to the
song verbatim, save for the conspicuous omission of the word “nigga,” to
the stripped-down accompaniment of Noonan’s keyboard. The cover draws
its novelty from the obvious contrast between the over-the-top boasts of the
lyrics (a kind of black male hip-hop mythos) and the ironic performance.
Heidemann regenders the song and recodes it in race and in genre.
Much of the cover’s appeal lies in the same qualities that made the origi-
nal remarkable, namely, the virtuosity of the lyric delivery of the Busta
Rhymes verse. Heidemann distinguishes herself as a talented performer in
her own right, irrespective of the ironic play and intentions of the song as
a whole. She deserves the dust-off-the-shoulder “I’m done” at the end of the
verse almost as much as Busta Rhymes does. The Karmin version cuts
against the original’s tone of self-seriousness even as it celebrates the origi-
nal’s rapid-fire percussive vocalization. In fact, Karmin’s cover might make
the Chris Brown version more palatable by encouraging listeners who know
both versions to direct their attention to what makes the song great rather
than to what makes it objectionable and even, when combined with Brown’s
off-the-record transgressions, repulsive. The tone of the cover supplies a leav-
ening self-awareness that the original lacks, while the quality of the cover
version’s performance reflects the virtuosity of the original. As a result, we
don’t dismiss the original as we might have had the cover been simply comic,
nor do we dismiss the cover as we would have had it been a rote repetition
of the original.
Somewhere in the relation between Chris Brown’s original and Karmin’s
cover of “Look at Me Now” is a key to understanding the present disposition
of musical culture when it comes to race and style. The past decade has seen
cross-genre and cross-racial covers emerge from novelties on the peripher-
ies of music to become a musical force. These covers exist almost entirely in
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

the pop space of the web and are inextricable from their visual evidence of
racial difference. They must be seen as well as heard.
Take, for instance, Jimmy Fallon’s spoof group the Ragtime Gals’ (with
guest performer Kevin Spacey) cover of R&B crooner Jason Derulo’s
“Talk Dirty,” complete with barbershop harmonies. Fallon extends a long-
standing Tonight Show tradition stretching back to the 1950s when host
Steve Allen performed a sardonic reading of Gene Vincent’s 1956 rockabilly

hit “Be-Bop-A-Lula” to polite chuckles from the audience. Both Allen’s and
Fallon’s performances owe their appeal to a series of contrasts and contra-
dictions that their listeners are asked to resolve. In the Derulo original,
words like “booty” and the sexual provocation of the line “first class seat on
my lap, girl” are unremarkable because they confirm expectations of genre,
and perhaps also of gender and race. When shifted out of genre, out of race,
and even out of time when delivered a cappella by five white men dressed up
in straw hats and 1920s-style suits, the lyrics reveal their comic excess and
innate absurdity. Who says this kind of stuff? This can’t be serious.
But who is the joke on here? Certainly it’s on Derulo and others like him
who pass off such paltry lyrics with the sweet distraction of style and sound.
The joke is also on the cover performers, whom we see as the squares. Unfor-
tunately, this humor reinforces racial paradigms in which the black artist is
cool and sexual and transgressive and the white artist is awkward and
asexual and safe. These parodies are at once new and familiar: The novelty
comes from hearing songs in a new genre, a new style, and a new voice; the
familiarity comes from the way these covers reaffirm faulty assumptions
about race, gender, and power. In the latter regard, there is something fun-
damentally conservative and antiprogressive about these covers, in their ef-
fect if not always in their intentions.
Scott Bradlee’s “Postmodern Jukebox” also revels in the creative disconti-
nuities and discoveries found in the distance between song and performance
in cross-genre covers. His YouTube channel includes an ever-expanding cata-
log of cover versions of pop songs, new and old, recast in genre and time
period. Perhaps the best known of these is a haunting and beautiful 2013
clip entitled “Sad Clown with the Golden Voice,” a version of Lorde’s “Royals”
with vocals by Puddles the Clown, an Atlanta-based performance artist and
singer with a rich and resonant baritone that contrasts with his white face
paint and comic attire.
Bradlee’s covers investigate the interplay of genre and sound far more
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

deeply than Fallon’s barbershop quartet skits do. This is due in large part to
the mixed-race identity of the performers; this isn’t a “Hey, look how cute the
white boy/girl is by saying dirty words that black people say.” Instead, these
covers revel in the sonic possibilities inherent in the act of taking a song out
of its native performance style and recasting it using the conventions of an-
other style. There’s theater to the clips as well, with period costumes, dance
steps, and, of course, the sad clown, but the focus is on the sonic appeal. One
can listen with pleasure to the audio alone.

I know that I’m betraying my own aesthetic bias in the contrast between
these two cover song practices. I do think that one is more sophisticated than
the other. That’s not to suggest that I don’t enjoy the joke of the simpler cov-
ers at times as well. Both speak to the present state of pop music; both re-
veal sometimes hidden desires in sound and style.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Story
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Bradley, Adam. The Poetry of Pop, Yale University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fdu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4815350.
Created from fdu-ebooks on 2025-02-09 22:08:59.
T
he bluesman Willie Dixon believed that songs should arouse empa-
thy through story. “When you’re writing a song,” he told an inter-
viewer, “you’re projecting how somebody else feels. ‘How would I feel
if that happened to me?’ When you’re in a position to put things in a
poetic form, it creates sweetness, understanding, and emphasis. Some people
just get up and recite a poem. I think when you sing it in a blues form you get
more attention for it.” The communicative power of singing extends beyond
the blues, of course, something Dixon must have known well given how many
of his songs were covered over the years by artists across many genres, from
Aretha Franklin to the Rolling Stones to George Thorogood.
Dixon’s “Hoochie Coochie Man,” a song first recorded by Muddy Waters
in 1954 and covered over the years by everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Dion
to the New York Dolls, projects a character of mythic scale. It’s a song full of
outlandish boasts and sexual bravado, and subtler forms of self-affirmation
as well (“But you know I’m him / Everybody knows I’m him”) that must have
sounded particularly radical coming from the pen of a black man like Dixon
and the voice of a black man like Waters in the same year as the landmark
Brown v. Board of Education decision began dismantling Jim Crow segre-
gation. The song’s expression of empathetic connection through language and
sound, structured by the songwriter’s craft, accounts for its capacity to con-
nect to listeners these many years later.
Sometimes this empathetic connection happens through details, the spec-
ificity of setting or character or time. But sometimes the calculated blurring
of details engages the listener more fully in the co-construction of meaning
and image. “I know from writing lyr ics that some details—names, places,
locations—are desirable; they anchor the piece in the real world,” writes Da-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

vid Byrne. “But so are ambiguities. By letting the listener or viewer fill in
the blanks, complete the picture (or piece of music), the work becomes per-
sonalized and the audience can adapt it to their own lives and situations.
They become more involved with the work, and an intimacy and involvement
becomes possible that perfection might have kept at bay.” As it is with other
literary forms, the goal of the song lyric is to provide just enough detail to
invite that mingling of authorial and readerly invention. The goal is to con-
jure a story.

Songs tell stories. Stories are the primary means through which the mind
orders experience and then communicates that experience to others. One of
the pop songwriter’s jobs is to tell a story in a handful of verses, a practice that
emerges from an oral tradition in which songs served the social functions of
communal entertainment and collective memory. Though it may be hard to
imagine the typical three-and-a-half-minute Billboard hit descending from
Homeric epics and the fifteenth- century ballad stanza, the epic poem and
the ballad comprise part of the narrative heritage of the contemporary pop
song. As do all modes of story, ancient and modern, pop music and the
poetic forms of their lyr ics come together to entertain, to instruct, and to
commemorate.
Song narratives share a great deal with written and spoken narratives,
but differ in ways that complicate character, setting, time, and the rest of
the constitutive elements of a storyworld. Like stories in an oral tradition,
we experience songs in real time rather than as written artifacts perused at
our leisure. Song stories also differ fundamentally from stories spoken
aloud in that the narrative drives of their lyrics work in conjunction with,
and sometimes in subservience to, music’s melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic
impulses.
Understanding how story expresses itself in song, though, begins even be-
fore the lyric. Instrumental music, too, tells a story, if we understand it, as
Theodor Adorno does Gustav Mahler’s orchestral songs, as that which “nar-
rates without narrative.” One usually finds in instrumental music the rudi-
ments of plot, which is to say a beginning, a middle, and an end. One finds
instrumental voices that interact with one another as if in conflict or commu-
nion or conversation. One also finds the emotive push and pull of harmonics
and melody and rhythm that stands as a kind of semiotics of sound—a way of
making meaning through a language of aural signs. “Like stories, music is
said to be central to human ordering, shaping, and meaning-making needs,”
observe the literary critics Linda and Michael Hutcheon.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Though critics continue to dispute whether the connection between music

and narrative is metaphorical or actual, an increasing number of musicolo-
gists and narrative scholars argue for a narratology of instrumental music,
that is, a means of studying “the logic, principles, and practices of narrative
representation,” in the words of the literary critic Marie-Laure Ryan. Instru-
mental music, writes Ryan, “cannot imitate speech, represent thought, nar-
rate actions, or express causal relations.” “Its mimetic abilities,” she continues
“are limited to the imitation of aural phenomena: the gurgling of a brook,

the song of birds, or the rumbling of thunder.” That being said, instrumental
music can inspire listeners’ impressions of narrativity, albeit of an indetermi-
nate variety. “Narrative content is something that is read into a composition
rather than read from it,” Ryan argues. Music carries certain advantages
when it comes to narrative, namely, its capacity to conjure emotion and its
direct means of expressing time. When fitted with the language of lyrics,
song becomes a potent way to tell stories.
A comprehensive understanding of storytelling in human experience must
account for stories voiced in songs. Minimally defined, a story is a narrative
of events. Narrative, in the words of the literary theorists James Phelan and
Peter J. Rabinowitz, “is somebody telling somebody else, on some occasions,
and for some purposes, that something happened to someone or something.”
Narrative is not always a series of ordered events, of course; nor is it always
framed as direct communication. Some stories disrupt temporality, as Bob
Dylan does on “Tangled Up in Blue” by presenting the past and the present
at the same time. Some reject narrative purpose, as Jack White does on the
Raconteurs’ “Carolina Drama” when he sings these opening lines: “I’m not
sure if there’s a point to this story / But I’m going to tell it again.” Some dis-
guise the intended hearer of the narrator’s story, as Townes Van Zandt does
on “Pancho and Lefty.” Stories like these leave us to find our way through
worlds in which the air the characters breathe is composed of different stuff
from our own.
Rather than a sequence of events, narrative is an event in itself. It is, in
other words, a rhetorical act. To quote Phelan and Rabinowitz again, narra-
tive is “a multidimensional purposive communication from a teller to an au-
dience.” This construction of teller and audience, metaphoric as it relates to
literature in print, is literal when it comes to recorded songs. Songs invite
empathy. “Remember,” the producer and performer Nile Rodgers wrote, re-
flecting on the enduring success of one his collaborators, Madonna, “the art-
ist is telling a story, one that we must believe—the ability to convey feelings
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

is the key to pop, not perfect technique.” Emotive connection between teller
and audience is story’s defining difference in song. Songs are engines of em-
pathy that work through the voice’s direct address to listeners and through
the “I,” “you,” and “we” of most lyrics.
Lyric density also shapes story. More words usually mean a greater capac-
ity for narrative expression. We tend to associate rap, country, and folk music
with narrative in part because they are densely linguistic. Bruce Springs-
teen averages 281 words per song; Eminem averages over a thousand. Com-

pare those numbers to the 102 words per song average of the Beatles’ Abbey
Road and it is clear why there might be greater potential for narrative to
find a home in the songs of rock troubadours and rap MCs. Conversely, the
greater lyric density of these genres might speak to the artists’ need to fit
their forms to their expressive desires.
Stories take on a range of forms and invent structures that defy conven-
tional chronology. Song lyrics do the same. A taxonomy of storytelling in pop
songs includes numerous modes. The most common mode is vaguely narra-
tive; it has a protagonist, the “I” of the singer, and at least one other charac-
ter, often the beloved “you.” I say it is vaguely narrative because it is reliant
on feeling rather than incident. It resists paraphrase because it is not cen-
trally concerned with narrative action. Think of Paul McCartney singing
“When I find myself in times of struggle / Mother Mary comes to me” on “Let
It Be,” or Stevie Nicks revealing “Well, I’ve been afraid of changing / ‘Cause
I’ve built my life around you” on Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” or really the
majority of pop songs ever recorded. A far smaller but significant category
consists of songs that make narrative a central feature of their form. They
satisfy the requirements of setting, character, and action. They are amenable
to paraphrase. These are songs like the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling
Stone,” recounting a son’s talk with his mother about his wayward father, and
Joni Mitchell’s “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” whose opening line estab-
lishes time and setting (“The last time I saw Richard was Detroit in ’68”). Most
songs relate incidents and feelings; a few enact dramas.
But not all songs tell stories, or at least not a story as we conventionally
think of it in our culture, which is to say as something with a beginning, a
middle, and an end. Many songs are ambient, emotive. They work through
image and feeling. They reject narrative action and refuse to be upfront about
their meaning. Lyric obscurity or fuzziness also occludes narrative. Lyrics
sometimes clarify, sometimes particularize, and sometimes complicate the
narrative and emotive impulses that listeners gather from the music. Story-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

telling is a social action, though it is not the only social action song enacts.
A consonance of feeling, as one finds in genres as far-flung as gospel and
death metal, can fulfill the social function of song just as ably as a well-
rendered story.
Nonetheless, as Chuck Berry once put it, “a song is written for the story.”
Whether telling a story or summing up a feeling, song lyr ics work with
rhythms, melodies, chords, and harmonies to affect a listener’s conscious-
ness. The goal of this chapter is to expand the categories of narrative to

account for the multimodal stories that songs often tell. It concerns both the
songs in which narrative is incidental and those in which it is active in tell-
ing stories. We’ll begin by considering the ways that all songs are stories in
the broadest sense, and end by exploring the specific ways that pop songs
create new worlds ready to inhabit.

THE LOW END THEORY

What are pop songs doing when they are only vaguely narrative—which is
to say, what are pop songs doing most of the time? Even in rap and country,
genres often associated with narrative, most songs aren’t primarily about
story either. Glance through Jay Z’s catalog, and for every “Song Cry,” a pain-
ful confession of personal failures to a distant lover, you’ll find a dozen
songs like “Otis,” an ode to excess. Even Jay Z’s best-known story, which de-
scribes a roadside confrontation with a police officer on “99 Problems,” only
takes up the second verse of a song that is not otherwise narrative. George
Jones scored a big hit in 1983 with a simile-driven song called “Tennessee
Whiskey”— a song that Chris Stapleton would take all the way to number
one on the Billboard country charts in 2015—while the B-side, “Almost Per-
suaded,” is the song with the story: a taut three-minute narrative about a
married man resisting the allures of a younger woman.
Could it be that pop songs are better off being about nothing more than
the joyous clash and clangor of syllables and sounds? “ There’s a theory that
really good rock & roll is all below the waist,” Lou Reed told the writer Bill
Flanagan. “The theory continues—if I understand it right—that as you in-
troduce any other kind of thought to it, it starts to stutter and become less
rock & roll, less danceable, less everything, until it’s no fun at all. There is
that point of view.” Following this theory—I call it, with apologies to A Tribe
Called Quest, the Low End Theory— a pop recording should locate its en-
ergy below the waist, in the groove, in the sex, in the feet rather than in the
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

head. The emblem for such a theory could be Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan
Show, the camera frame cropping just above the waist, inadvertently em-
phasizing what was going on down below. It could be Madonna crawling
across the stage while performing “Like a Virgin” at the 1984 MTV Video
Music Awards or Michael Jackson repeatedly grabbing his crotch during his
halftime performance at 1993’s Super Bowl. It could be Nicki Minaj twerk-
ing and Miley Cyrus trying to twerk. The Low End Theory encompasses a

sonic attitude that’s all about the bass, no treble, and a cognitive attitude that
privileges sound over semantics. Narrative, after all, tends to draw us into
the mind, away from the visceral energy and erotic pleasure of the body.
Reed, however, described this theory of popular music in order to refute
it. First with the Velvet Underground and later as a solo artist, Reed culti-
vated a style that demanded listeners’ attention, even as it still served the
music’s below-the-waist imperative. “Then there’s my point of view,” Reed
continues, “that says if you do it right you should be able to have everything
you had before and—if you want it—you should be able to have these other
levels. You can have a plot, you can have a whole mess of things going on for
the people who want to hear it. Other people don’t have to. But it should still
be in there as a rock & roll thing—i.e., not get too wordy, not get bogged down
in anything that takes away from the basic fun of a rock record.” Reed’s use
of “record” here instead of “song” reminds us that the dual purposes of pop
need not be served in lyric alone.
As song lyric, the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting for the Man” de-
mands immense cognitive attention, drawing us entirely above the waist
to the top of our heads; it’s a song, rich with narrative detail, about copping
heroin: the “twenty-six dollars in my hand,” the uptown address on 125th
and Lexington, the dealer’s style of shoes, the scraps of dialogue between the
black dealer and the “white boy” junkie. Experiencing the lyric as recorded
song, though, shifts the center of aesthetic gravity closer to the waist, or
below. The percussive pounding of piano, bass, drums, and electric guitar
blends together in singular purpose and in nearly singular sound, rendering
the song strangely, seductively danceable despite the starkness of the lyrics.
When Flanagan shared Reed’s theory with Sting, Sting responded by
describing another theory of pop music that makes room for both extremes.
“ We’re now conditioned to expect nothing of lyrics, to know that as long as
they have the semblance of meaning that’s enough,” Sting said. “And that’s
the function of abstract art, abstract poetry. You can’t really tell what’s good
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

and what’s bad. I agree with Lou Reed—with some songs it doesn’t matter.
And there’s room for that music. But there’s also room for serious, well-
thought-out lyrics.” The duality between songs in which the meaning of the
lyrics doesn’t matter and those that offer “serious, well-thought-out lyrics”
is schematically useful. However, it fails to account for the fact that many
so-called frivolous lyrics are also well thought out, as a vessel for sound, for
instance, or as a cue for a particular emotion.

Take Harry Nilsson’s “Coconut.” It’s simple enough, both in lyric and
music. Musically, the entire song consists of a single chord and an alternat-
ing bass note. Lyrically, it’s what some dismissively label a novelty song; in
this case, the majority of the lyric comprises a simple recipe for curing an
upset stomach: “You put the lime in the coconut, you drink them both up.”
What makes the song indelible, though, is how Nilsson narrows the vocabu-
lary and calibrates the repetition to fashion a pleasing series of rhythmic
echoes, vocal inflections, and sonic textures. The song is playful and funny.
Above all, it’s good.
Pop demands that we interrogate easy oppositions: silly/serious, simple/
complex, above/below the waist. These dichotomies can be useful begin-
nings, but they demand refinement. Writing about fellow folk legend Woody
Guthrie, Pete Seeger cautioned us not to be fooled by the seeming simplicity
of Guthrie’s music. “His songs are deceptively simple,” Seeger writes. “Only
after they have become part of your life do you realize how great they are.
Any damn fool can get complicated. It takes genius to attain simplicity.”
We do well to keep Seeger’s words in mind. When reading lyrics on the page,
there’s a natural tendency to privilege those that are outwardly literary: lyr-
ics that are narrative-driven, for instance, or richly textured with figurative
language and densely patterned in rhyme and syntax. However, a necessary
part of the poetics of pop rests in examining the craft at work in the plain-
spoken, the minimal, even the underdeveloped. Such lyrics are less likely to
make their full worth known on the page; their value becomes apparent when
we look at the lyrics while listening to their performance as sound recording.
No one is likely to be favorably impressed when reading the lyrics to Chic’s
1979 disco hit “Good Times.” The lyr ics offer little story to follow, few im-
ages to unpack, and not much in the way of rhyme patterns. But the lyrics
underlie the song’s arresting quality in performance. To return to Reed’s
theory, “Good Times” clearly qualifies as a below-the-waist song; the funky
bass line inaugurated an entire genre of music in hip-hop when the “Good
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Times” instrumental became the basis of the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s
Delight.” That said, “Good Times” still invites enough above-the-waist
interest to make it a compelling object of critical reflection. Think of the
salient oddity of the phrase “clams on a half-shell and roller skates, roller
skates.” Even the most seemingly vacuous pop lyric likely has at least some-
thing to offer on close inspection. Some songs, however, promise far richer
rewards. With the expansion of pop’s ambitions as a storytelling medium and
as a literary form, songwriters have fashioned works of startling scope.

More ambitious songs, however, are not always better songs, just as more
ambitious recordings are not always better recordings. Received opinion
holds that pop music attends to only a handful of themes, the preeminent of
which is love, or love’s lesser urges. Ted Gioia writes that “love has been a
dominant theme of popular song for at least a thousand years.” Some of the
greatest song lyrics ever written concern love. Nonetheless, the bias persists
that a song about, say, a disgraced prizefighter (Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane”) is
necessarily more sophisticated than a song about a girl meeting a boy
(Rihanna’s “We Found Love”) or a girl meeting a girl (Ani DiFranco’s
“Shameless”).
The turn toward pop songs as a medium of broad expressive range can
be marked from one obvious point: the 1960s, with Bob Dylan, and after him,
the Beatles. “One of the great legacies of the Beatles was to extend the
subject matter of the genre,” writes Steve Turner in his account of the Bea-
tles’ songwriting, A Hard Day’s Write. “Fewer than half the songs on Revolver
were about love. The rest of the songs on this album ranged from taxation to
Tibetan Buddhism.” This thematic variety is worth noting, but I resist the
attendant assumption that this means the recordings are superior because of
the lyrics’ thematic reach. As a post-Beatles Paul McCartney would sing,
“Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs / And what’s wrong
with that?”
In his own account of the Beatles’ songwriting, Dominic Pedler cautions
against ascribing an evolutionary arc of refinement when comparing the
more straightforward structures and lyric themes of the Beatles’ early
recordings with their more experimental and thematically diverse later
recordings.

But were the songs that originally fuelled Beatlemania really so

naïve compared with what came later? Of course, the Beatles matured
as songwriters in myriad respects, as would naturally be expected of
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

any artists over the course of a decade of development. But a pre-

occupation with the group’s pioneering recording practices threat-
ens to obscure the extensive array of musical principles evident in
their writing as early as their debut album, Please Please Me. Simi-
larly, there is the trap of assuming that innocent pop songs, lyrically
long on youthful exuberance, must necessarily be short on musical
substance. And vice versa, that hip themes of counterculture, rebel-
lion, philosophy and cynicism automatically make for ‘superior’ music.

The trap is that we assume that not only do these lyrics make for supe-
rior music, but they also make for superior poetry. My own literary inter-
ests are equally piqued by the near-Dada strangeness of a late-career song
like “Come Together” and by the spare and moving early-career “This Boy.”
If we understand poetry not as a matter always of adornment and indirec-
tion but, in the words of the poet Audre Lorde, as “a revelatory distillation
of experience,” then the plainspoken economy of so much song lyric finds a
central place in the poetry of pop.
Another approach to pop says that it is, in fact, possible to stray too far
from the bread-and-butter lyric themes of love and happiness, love and trou-
ble. Elvis Costello began his career by crafting what he called “diseased ver-
sions” of classic pop love songs to arrive at another kind of love song. “I carried
on with that for some time,” he writes, “until I hit subjects that were too big
for pop songs. Despite what some of the weightier songwriters of today will
tell you, there are some ideas pop songs won’t carry effectively. They’ll always
sound pompous or overreaching. I always tried to stay away from writing
about big issues.” It’s worth recalling, though, that Costello is the singer-
songwriter behind “Shipbuilding,” a scathing song about England’s military-
industrial complex. Costello may wish to steer away from “big” issues, but as
his own varied body of work demonstrates, pop songs have the capacity to
take on any subject.
Some songwriters argue that it is easier to write about the dark than
about the light. “Beauty can be very challenging,” says Michael Stipe of R.E.M.,
a group known for brooding and cerebral lyrics. “It can really be challenging.
It’s so much easier to write about angst and anger and fear and darkness and
fucked-up feelings than to write about incredible, intense happiness. Happi-
ness just sounds dorky. We’ve all experienced it, but it’s much harder in a pop
song to pull that off. It’s much easier to pull off the darker stuff.” This atti-
tude may explain why Stipe cringes knowing that one of his biggest hits
might be the band’s happiest, dorkiest song: “Shiny Happy People.”
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Could it be, then, that pop music is as limited in its thematic scope and
narrative point of view as it seems? Perhaps there are stories that pop should
not or cannot tell. “ There are five things to write songs about: I’m leaving
you. You’re leaving me. I want you. You don’t want me. I believe in something.
Five subjects, and twelve notes. For all that, we musicians do pretty well,”
Costello elsewhere observes. Constraint, of course, can be generative. A song-
writer needs limits, be they formal or thematic, organic or imposed. When

those limits cluster around certain subjects and exclude other voices, then
it might be time for intervention.
All but the most abstract song lyrics employ some element of storytelling.
“The three minute pop song has proved an ideal structuring device for filmic
montages to signify the passing of time or an emotional transformation,”
writes education professor Tara Brabazon. Songs that consciously embrace
the forms of narrative—point of view, temporality, climax, and resolution—
have a particular impact on consciousness. “When we are being told a story,
things change dramatically,” writes Leo Widrich in his article on the science
of storytelling. “Not only are the language processing parts in our brain
activated, but any other area in our brain that we would use when experi-
encing the events of the story are too.”
Neuroscience suggests that our brains do not always differentiate between
represented and real experience. Listening to music activates the brain’s
mirror-neuron system, which, the UCLA researcher Istvan Molnar-Szakacs
observes, “allows someone to identify with another by providing an automatic,
pre-cognitive mechanism by which to understand their actions by mapping
them onto our own neural representations of those actions. In addition, it rep-
resents the intention behind those actions.” Simply put, listening to music is
always a social activity, a communion with the singers and musicians present
only in sound. So when we listen to Otis Redding’s recording of “(Sittin’ on)
The Dock of the Bay,” we take in Redding’s first-person narrative and also
somehow watch “the tide roll away” ourselves, feeling the damp weathered
boards beneath us and seeing the sun dip below the horizon. The song evokes
both linguistic and sensory response. The capacity of songs not simply to
describe an imagined experience but also to activate in the listener a sen-
sory and emotional response to that imagined experience has radical impli-
cations for how we hear music. We are all active listeners, whether we know
it or not. The value, then, of consciously attending to the stories that songs
tell is in understanding the songs as objects of critical and aesthetic atten-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

tion, and in better understanding consciousness.

Gaining a fuller understanding of storytelling in pop songs means un-
learning the habit of obsessing over so-called hidden meanings while ignoring
surface structures and effects. It means understanding that song lyrics, like
lyric poems, resist attempts at paraphrase. It’s easy enough to summarize the
lyrics to Mac Davis’s “In the Ghetto,” a song made famous in 1969 by an aging
Elvis Presley, desperate for a comeback. A child is born to an overburdened

mother on the South Side of Chicago. From the start, he’s fated for a life of
desperation and crime, ending in death and mourning. Lost in the descrip-
tion, though, is the song’s exquisite melodrama, generated by Presley’s qua-
vering voice atop the sentimental strings, picked guitar, and wailing female
backup singers. Lost is the fact that, for all the song’s coercive sentimental-
ity, there’s something moving in the way that Presley sings the final line:
“And his momma cries.”
The meaning and power of Presley’s recording of “In the Ghetto” reside
as much or more in his performance as they reside in Davis’s lyr ics and
music, and as much or more in our experience of hearing the song as they
reside in our comprehension of the meaning of its story. This is not to say
that the story’s social comment is inconsequential, but that whatever conse-
quence it has is in large part a product of Presley’s performance of Davis’s
song. “Works of art need to attract and arouse audiences before they ‘mean,’ ”
argues the literary critic Brian Boyd. “Every detail of a work will affect the
moment-by-moment attention it receives, but not necessarily a meaning
abstracted from the story. Our minds can focus on only a few things at once.
To hold an audience, in a world of competing demands on attention, an
author [or, in our case, a songwriter and singer] needs to be an inventive
intuitive psychologist.” We understand the song, and something in the song
understands us.
The stories song lyrics tell are not simply imbedded in their meanings.
Sometimes stories are deeply intimate testimonies, like Trent Reznor’s
“Hurt,” a song about his heroin addiction that was so painful for him that
he was initially averse to the idea of Johnny Cash covering it. At other times,
the stories pop songs tell are occasions for lyricist and singer to escape the
self and embody imagined personas. Sometimes song lyrics abandon mean-
ing, edging toward nonsense verse and luxuriating instead in the play of syl-
lable and sound. One could even argue that the production and arrangement
of pop music, beyond the lyrics, constitute a kind of storytelling, with their
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

attention to pacing, tonal shift, climax, and resolution. Still, the most ap-
parent expression of story in pop music lies in the beginnings, middles, and
ends of the lyrics.

BEGINNINGS, MIDDLES, AND ENDS

After publishing his classic novel Invisible Man in 1952, Ralph Ellison spent
the next forty years of his life, until his death in 1994, laboring over a sec-

ond novel. Ellison amassed thousands of pages of episodic drafts and notes,
but he left no comprehensive table of contents to act as a road map for who-
ever had the task of piecing together his literary jigsaw puzzle. Along with
Ellison’s literary executor, John Callahan, I had both the blessing and the
burden of editing the disparate drafts of Ellison’s novel into a publishable
whole, which after more than a decade of labor resulted in Three Days
before the Shooting . . . , a thousand-page collection of Ellison’s narrative se-
quences. Early in the editorial process, Callahan related a conversation that
he had with Ellison’s widow, Fanny. Still holding on to the promise that a
complete novel was hidden somewhere in the mountains of pages, she said
to him, “John, there has to be a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
For Ellison’s second novel, the integrity of a linear narrative structure was
not to be. In place of forward momentum from beginning to middle to end
was a series of circles, sometimes intersecting and sometimes isolated. The
linear model, however, is well suited to the pop song. “We must accomplish
our aims and tell our entire story in a time frame of about three minutes
(plus or minus). Every word, every note must count,” writes Jimmy Webb.
“This means among other things that we are not vouchsafed the luxury that
some of our literary cousins have—the meandering and descriptive setting
of scene, the leisurely development of a myriad of colorful characters and
the exploration of plot in counterpoint throughout a seamless and climac-
tic story line that culminates in every pesky loose end being tied off in a
bowline.”
Many songs fulfill that move from beginning to middle to end, or, as we
might also figure it, the narrative schema of commencement-crisis-resolution.
Consider a familiar lyric like the Eagles’ “ Hotel California.” It has a clear
beginning (“On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair”) that situates
the listener in narrative perspective and setting. The middle defines a point
of crisis through the oblique threat of the feminine antagonist and the host
of other men— suitors, fellow sufferers, both?—who reside in this spectral
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

hotel (“And still those voices are calling from far away / Wake you up in
the middle of the night just to hear them say”). The narrative’s conclusion
forestalls resolution, both in the lyr ics (“You can check out any time you
like, but you can never leave”) and in the music, which continues for two
more minutes, featuring an iconic guitar solo before fading into silent ir-
resolution.
Most discussions of “ Hotel California” center on the potential metaphoric
valences of the story rather than on its narrative. Is it a song about an actual

place? Perhaps the drug rehabilitation center that members of the Eagles
might have visited? Something else? Such lines of questioning are ultimately
limited. “Oh, God,” Don Henley told Crawdaddy! around the time of the
song’s release, “you can interpret that a million different ways.” Then Glenn
Frey piped in: “ We’ll stay off that one. We cannot betray our own poetry.”
Most fans who want to speculate about “ Hotel California” would have likely
ignored what the band had to say about it anyway, not necessarily out of defi-
ance but out of desire to maintain the aura of mystery the song so richly
conjures. It might therefore be more useful to reflect on what makes a song’s
story particularly potent as a recording.
One of the most powerful ways that songs invite listeners into the lan-
guage of their lyrics is through a mystery that demands engagement, if not
always resolution. In discussing a poem, Helen Vendler would always ask
her students to consider the antecedent scenario—an imaginative conjecture
as to what might have preceded the poem’s beginning. “In life, things don’t
simply start up for nothing,” points out the narrative theorist Brian Rich-
ardson, by which he means that individual lives are always knitted in a com-
plex social fabric that exists before them and continues after them. Though
it’s easy enough to mark the textual beginning of a poem or the temporal
beginning of a song, it is far more challenging— and rewarding—to reflect
on their reasons for coming into being.
What do we imagine has happened just before the poem or song lyric com-
mences to provoke this kind of speech? What might have prompted the
speaker to break silence and to seek this particular form of expression? Why
has the poet or songwriter chosen this point of entry? Why has the singer
taken a particular approach to delivering the lyric? Song lyrics often invite
these questions. “Busted flat in Baton Rouge, headin’ for the trains / Feelin’
nearly faded as my jeans” begins Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby Mc-
Gee.” The mystery surrounding the antecedent scenario helps explain why
these opening lines are so striking. We know that the speaker is broke, and
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

we know that he—or, in Janis Joplin’s iconic cover, she—is, in the evocative
image, “feelin’ nearly faded as my jeans.” In this case, the questions inspired
by the opening lines stimulate the construction of character from the very
beginning of the song. In capturing interest the lyrics also capture empa-
thy, which builds investment in the story the song has to tell.
Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life,” from 1977, suggests a different kind of ante-
cedent scenario. The song begins like this:

Here comes Johnny Yen again

With the liquor and drugs
And the flesh machine
He’s gonna to do another striptease

Narrative tension springs from the juxtaposition of the shock value of its
open invocation of liquor and drugs, the opacity of the phrase “flesh machine,”
the strangeness of the name Johnny Yen, and the implication that all of this
is routine (“ Here comes Johnny Yen again” to do “another striptease”). Re-
solving the mysteries of these lines might lead to the literary source of in-
spiration, William S. Burroughs’s novel The Ticket That Exploded, which
introduces Johnny Yen, “the Boy-Girl Other Half strip tease God of sexual
frustration.” One need not follow that particular referential thread, however,
to be entranced by the manic energy of Iggy Pop’s vocal delivery and these
evocative opening lines. Reflecting on antecedent scenario is about asking
questions more than it is about settling on answers.
Sometimes a song’s invitation to the listener to contemplate the lyric’s an-
tecedent scenario is an indispensable part of the song’s success. The Talking
Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” begins with a direct address to the listener: “And
you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack / And you may find yourself in
another part of the world / And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a
large automobile.” The succession of phrases beginning with “and” suggests
a beginning in medias res; the structure of anaphora matched with Byrne’s
speech-song vocal delivery captures the mood of an evangelical sermon.
Both Byrne’s tone and the direct address of the opening lyric render “Once
in a Lifetime” confrontational and compelling.
Finding the middle of a song is less obvious. When it comes to narrative
arc, the middle is not always the temporal midpoint in the song. For the pur-
poses of a lyric’s structure, the middle might usefully be figured as the pivot
point in the narrative action, the high point of tension either on the register
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

of incident or of emotion. Because the middle in this formulation is not a fixed

point, it seeks definition and context from what surrounds it. In Tunesmith
Jimmy Webb outlines the practice of charting the emotional trajectory of a
song. “When drafted effectively a lyric will usually begin with a question,
puzzle or ambiguity and then build to a revelation or declaration, an emo-
tional payoff or high point,” Webb writes. “When a composer sets such a lyric
to music it is only logical to assume that one of the primary functions of the

tune will be to enhance the emotional dynamic of the lyric (or vice versa if
the melody comes first). How does a melody do this? By changing direction
effectively.” That change of direction often marks the song’s climax, which
defines itself against the equilibrium of the opening and the resolution of
the song’s conclusion. Often a sonic shift musically underscores this lyric
transition, through the introduction of a bridge or some other change of sonic
climate.
A vivid, albeit somewhat schematic, rendering of this kind of climactic
middle comes in Idina Menzel’s performance of “Let It Go,” the ubiquitous
signature song from the animated feature Frozen. The emotive trajectory of
the song builds slowly, with dynamic development from the controlled opening
verse to the impassioned end. The climax, both musically and lyrically, comes
with the bridge, in which Menzel, voicing the self-exiled Princess Elsa, as-
serts, “I’m never going back; the past is in my past,” before returning trium-
phantly to the chorus. “Let It Go,” like many of the songs on the Frozen
soundtrack, owes its success to a sense of song craft born of the Broadway
tradition. Like Tin Pan Alley songs of decades past, “Let It Go” relies on its
structural precision to guide its listeners’ emotional responses. The song cer-
tainly could not be accused of subtlety, but it effectively illustrates the critical
value of attending to the middle of a song’s narrative, its emotional center.
The middle can also serve an organizing function on the level of narra-
tive. Shawn Colvin’s “Sunny Came Home” illustrates the power of the
middle of a song to organize what comes before it and what follows it. In just
over four minutes, the song stages an atmospheric drama, portentous and
opaque. Roughly speaking, the song tells of a woman’s abuse and her arson-
ous revenge, but it does not follow the explicit tradition of the murder bal-
lad. Instead, the song renders its drama in subtle shifts of language and
tone. The pivot point of the song is the bridge, which falls at the middle of
the recording (2:16 of 4:23). Before the bridge, the song alternates twice
between the apprehensive tone of the verses and the brightness and release
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

of the choruses. The bridge is disconcertingly subdued, both in Colvin’s near-

whispered vocal delivery and in the stripped-down musical accompaniment
that builds to the line “strike a match, go on and do it” that lead into the
triumphant return to the chorus. The chorus, and the following section that
is musically identical to the chorus but divergent in lyrics, now feels like a
release; no longer tempered by the foreboding tone of the verse, the chorus—
and with it, we imagine, Sunny— can live unburdened and free.

“Sunny Came Home” closes by reclaiming the song’s title. The words
“Sunny came home” appear six times in the song, four times before the bridge
and twice after it. Each time before the pivot point of the bridge, it is an
enjambed phrase (“Sunny came home / to her favorite room,” “. . . with a
mission,” “. . . with a list of names,” “. . . with a vengeance”). After the bridge,
the phrase becomes a complete declarative sentence unto itself: “Sunny came
home.” The song’s final lyrics underscore the certainty of this resolution, and
the fading language echoes the fading music, from “Sunny came home,” to
“came home,” and finally simply to “home.” In a song that rejects explicit
storytelling and relies on inference, a careful structure around a climactic
and cathartic middle point makes the song emotionally legible.
As a discrete node in a song lyric, the end is obvious; it is when the song
resigns itself to silence. Songs end in any number of ways, from the fade that
suggests the interminability of the music to the natural decay of the last chord
struck or the last note sung. Regardless of the sonic means of a song’s con-
clusion, the end is often also an occasion to address questions the lyric leaves
unresolved. When the song fades out or when the final note gives way, what
avenues of thought demand attention? Tom Petty’s “American Girl,” for in-
stance, ends in both semantic and emotive irreconcilability: “God, it’s so pain-
ful when something that’s so close / Is still so far out of reach.” The statement
is at once axiomatic and specific, resigned but not despairing. It is an appeal:
to God, but also to the listener. The line makes the song’s challenge our own.
“I don’t think I’ve ever written [a song] where I knew how it was going to end
up,” Tom Petty remarked to Paul Zollo. “So the endings sometimes are kind of
ambiguous. But I think in song it’s got to be. You don’t want to nail it down too
much. In songwriting, I think the better ones have some element of ambiguity,
where it allows the listener to create his own picture. And those are the ones I
like.” Often lyric and music mark the depth of their emotive and cognitive
impression by how much work remains for listeners to do in their wake.
Eminem’s “Stan” designs its narrative and emotive payoff to come at the
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

very end of the lyric. This epistolary song consists of three verses written as
letters from an obsessed fan who goes from fawning to deranged with each
letter that meets with no reply; the fan’s final letter narrates the murder of
his girlfriend, trapped in the trunk of his car, and his own suicide as he
drives off a bridge. The fourth and concluding verse is Eminem’s belated
letter back to the fan. The final lines of the verse, which are the final lines of
the song, offer the narrative turn:

I just don’t want you to do some crazy shit

I seen this one shit on the news a couple weeks ago that made me sick
Some dude was drunk and drove his car over a bridge
And had his girlfriend in the trunk, and she was pregnant with his kid
And in the car they found a tape, but they didn’t say who it was to
Come to think about it, his name was, it was you . . .
Damn

Lightning strikes as Eminem’s final word fades, punctuating the revela-

tion and the dramatic irony of the situation: The audience already knows
what the character of the song, “Slim,” Eminem’s alter ego Slim Shady, finds
out. The revelation, in other words, is not for the listener, but for the charac-
ter Eminem in a song of Eminem’s own design, a self-conscious comment on
the fraught relationship between celebrities and their fans. The ending pro-
vokes vicarious shock and surprise that settle into reflection on obsession and
isolation. The recording as a whole is a study in the play of voice across char-
acters. It is also a testament to the power of endings as vehicles for thought
and feeling.
Often it is the coordination of beginning (the curiosity over antecedent
scenario), middle (the point of climax), and end (the resonance that follows
a song’s formal resolution) that makes for a classic song. One final example
will serve to illustrate all three. George Jones’s “He Stopped Loving Her
Today” has been called the greatest country song ever written; certainly it
showcases the melancholy and melodrama that country sometimes shares
with the blues. The song’s opening line, “He said, ‘I’ll love you ’til I die,’ ” is
the beginning of an end: the end of a marriage or a love affair and the be-
ginning of a protracted period of loss and longing. Importantly, Jones is the
chronicler of the story rather than the heartbroken man himself, a position
that frames the narrative at a third-person remove but nonetheless allows
for empathy. “Singing is George,” Waylon Jennings observed. “He tries to
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

live, breathe, and eat the song while he’s singing it, and he’s told me that,
especially when he’s in the studio, his mind goes completely blank but for
the focus of the story and the melody in his throat. He imagines the man, or
woman, he’s singing about and how they might be reacting to every word.”
That empathy is on display here.
The middle of the song, in terms of its climax and pivot, comes at the 2:17
mark of the 3:17 song when Jones moves from song to speech, narrating the
woman’s return. “You know, she came to see him one last time,” Jones be-

gins, as a female singer’s voice wails in the background. Then he breaks

through the third-person narrative frame to speak about the situation in the
first person: “Oh, we all wondered if she would. And it kept running through
my mind, this time he’s over her for good.” By shifting from song to speech,
and then by speaking for himself and for the imagined community that
knows this unnamed man, Jones crafts an atmosphere of authenticity and
intimacy. The melodrama is now a drama on a human scale, at least for a
time.
When Jones’s voice returns, singing again, the song has changed once
more. The central line of the chorus, “He stopped loving her today,” now takes
on its full meaning. They’ll put a wreath on his door; they’ll carry him away.
We recall the declaration that opens the song (He said, “I’ll love you ’til I
die”), and we now know that the man has passed away. As Jones put it sim-
ply in his memoir, “The song is about a man who loved a woman so much it
killed him when she left.” That subject is unremarkable in the annals of
popular song. Here, however, the songwriter and singer’s orchestration of
beginning, middle, and end renovates and renews a familiar melodramatic
tale.

HOW WE HEAR NARRATIVE

When a story becomes a lyric, then a song, it fundamentally transforms the

listening experience. Memory functions in diametrically opposed ways when
the mind confronts a written narrative or one set to song. When processing
written words, the mind quickly discards the surface effects of language to
capture the information being communicated. When hearing music, the mind
hovers over those same surface effects and linguistic patterns, the stuff of
rhythm and melody and figurative language. These elements constitute the
meaning of the performance even more than the information and incident
being communicated. As a result, song lyrics exist in an unusual relation-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

ship to memory. They invite reflection on repeated patterns even as they sup-
port an unreflective recollection of the whole. This trick of memory helps to
explain instances when we might know every line of a song and can sing
along, but we never stop to think about what the words actually mean.
In 2013 Paste magazine ran a series titled “Secretly Horrifying Song
Lyrics” in which writers offered running glosses on well-known lyr ics
that people rarely interrogate. Examples ran the gamut, from the Human
League’s “ Don’t You Want Me” to the Kinks’ “Art Lover.” The articles are

satiric, underscoring a serious point: Our perception of the stories that songs
tell can change drastically when we actually pay attention to what the words
have to say. Philip Bailey, the onetime lead singer of the R&B group Earth,
Wind & Fire, reveals how flabbergasted he is that people still come up to
him to say that they got married to “Reasons,” a song he co-wrote with Mau-
rice White about one-night stands on the road. Undoubtedly the newlyweds
knew each and every word, but “didn’t anyone bother to listen to the lyrics?”
Perhaps they were only attending to the lyrics of the chorus (“the reasons,
reasons that we’re here”) rather than those of the morally compromised
verses. In this case it’s a matter of hearing only what they want to hear.
The French philosopher Peter Szendy observes that pop songs often take
up residence in the mind in spite of our best efforts to expel them. “Most of
the time,” he writes, “we do not understand, and do not want to understand,
what they are saying, the story they are telling. We listen to them without
lending them an ear, welcoming them grudgingly, thinking we must be deaf
to worn-out words and washed-out lyrics carried by these manufactured me-
lodic products diffused on such a large scale.” For Szendy, our unawareness
of, or resistance to, specific meaning is actually a spur to memory. “Yet,” he
points out, “it is precisely because we do not want to get anything out of mu-
sical commodities—upon which we impose censorship unaware of itself—it
is for this very reason that they are all the more ready to reemerge when we
are least expecting it, without our having called them up or desired them.
They come back then, these haunting melodies; they come back in us and in
spite of ourselves to speak to us about us. They even make us gain access to
ourselves.”
A perceived misalignment between melody and lyric may also interfere
with listeners’ comprehension of a song’s story. The country music legend
Buck Owens observes that one of his best-known songs, the ballad “Together
Again,” is often misunderstood precisely because of the tension between mel-
ody and lyrics. “The funny thing about ‘Together Again’ is that it’s actually
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

a happy song,” he writes, “but since the melody is kind of mournful sound-
ing, most people think it’s really sad. That’s because they haven’t listened to
the lyrics. The singer is talking about how his tears have stopped falling
and how his lonely nights are over because he’s back together with the woman
he loves. The guy couldn’t be happier—but I put the lyrics to this slow, melan-
choly melody—and that’s what causes folks to misunderstand what the song
is really about.” Paul Simon does the same on “My Little Town,” the Talking
Heads do it on “ Don’t Worry about the Government,” and other examples

abound in the pop-music catalog. Tension can be generative; such songs

demand conscious attention on the part of the listener.
Whether drawing meaning from specific lyrics or from generalized musi-
cal patterns, when most of us follow narrative in song on a conscious level
we look for something concrete, often incidents in imagined lives. The key
word here, however, is “imagined.” As our minds and memories absorb nar-
rative and drift between the impressionistic and the precise, we must also
bear in mind that the stuff of narrative in song is an artist’s or artists’ con-
scious craft. It is not reality. Although genre and style may condition cer-
tain habits of narration, and although certain genres may lend themselves
to songs of incident and other genres to more abstract songs of feeling, all
songs construct illusions.
“Well, songs are just thoughts,” Bob Dylan told the interviewer Bill Flana-
gan when asked about the “literal reality” of his lyrics. “For the moment they
stop time. Songs are supposed to be heroic enough to give the illusion of stop-
ping time. With just that thought. To hear a song is to hear someone’s thought,
no matter what they’re describing. If you see something and you think it’s
important enough to describe, then that’s your thought. You only think one
thought at a time, so what you come up with is really what you’re given.
When you sit around and imagine things to do and to write and to think—
that’s fantasy. I’ve never been much into that.” The British rocker Richard
Thompson prefers to think of songs as “mediated reality,” rendered through
the songwriter’s imagination and the musicians’ exercises of craft.
These exercises of craft mold narrative. All narratives are stories, but not
all stories are narratives. Stories are simply sequences of events that become
narration by virtue of their structured telling. A story lives in the air, but a
narrative takes more tangible shape, be it a Homeric epic or a graphic novel.
“Narration reveals the finite in its fragile uniqueness, and sings its glory,”
observes Adriana Cavarero. Narration is a crafted thing, though also a deli-
cate art.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Songs, therefore, would seem to be an anomaly: stories without a text. In

fact, songs almost always leave an artifact (be it handwritten lyrics, pub-
lished sheet music, or even just a digital audio file), though we generally ex-
perience them in sound. In our era of compressed audio files and streaming
services, most of us are almost entirely alienated from the physical mani-
festation of the song, as vinyl or CD or some other format. This matters
because it helps explain how in listening to the story a song has to tell we
can lose sight of the craftedness of the tale, its highly wrought artifice

through which it conjures a persona, invites empathetic identification, or in-

cites curiosity and close attention.
The contemporary pop song is the site of numerous narrative drives.
Jimmy Webb identifies nine categories of songs, conditioned by temporality,
tone, and narrative mode. One could come up with even more, but we might
usefully classify song narratives into two broad categories. The first cate-
gory is the tale, or story-song. The second is the study in persona.

THE STORY- SONG

“A song is a short story,” writes Willie Nelson. He ought to know. As the

writer of more than 2,500 songs over seven decades he has certainly earned
the right to make such grand proclamations. But to what extent is Nelson
speaking in metaphor and to what extent in fact?
On a literal level, the story-song comes closest to fulfilling Nelson’s one-
to-one identification of song with story. Story-songs are invested in outward
action, as in the Charlie Daniels Band’s “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”
or Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle.” They resemble what we colloquially
understand a story to be: linear narratives that move from beginning to
middle to end. To expand Nelson’s dictum, song lyrics are never just narra-
tives. Although they harness the emotional power accessible only through
story, they do so in a medium with the immediacy of poetry. Pop songs are
generally meant to reward their audience richly on first encounter. The best
songs balance emotional depth with surface effects.
In a typical story-song, the vehicle for the story is the verse, and the most
common form of verse-based story-song is the ballad. Over the course of pop-
music history the ballad’s popularity has waxed and waned, but it remains a
mainstay of country music, which may be why country is often spoken of as
a storyteller’s genre. One finds a rich catalog of story-songs across country
music’s history. “Most of our songs told a story,” recalls Loretta Lynn. “You
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

could tell me that’s the old-fashioned way people had of telling the news, before
newspapers and radio. All I know is, most country songs are ballads.” The
ballads of which Lynn speaks are traditional, story-driven ballads. The
songwriter Jimmy Webb traces the lineage: “It is in the Scots, Irish and
English ballads and reels transplanted to the Deep South, subtly altered by
African and Christian laments, pounding rhythms and ‘field hollers,’ that
the roots of modern American songwriting reside.” Webb differentiates the
ballad as colloquially invoked to refer to a slow love song from the ballad as

traditionally construed as “a story told in song utilizing multiple verses that

are musically identical. What would seem to define the ‘form’ of the ballad
is the story that it tells. The song goes on long enough to tell the tale, so
that its length and number of verses is dictated by its plot points and can
consist of as many verses as are needed to serve the narrative’s beginning,
middle and end.”
The plot-driven ballad is far less prevalent today than it once was in popu-
lar music, though it expresses itself vividly in country music. Reflecting on
“Lucille,” one of the dozens of ballads he recorded, Kenny Rogers observes
that it is “a classic example of the story-song.” He continues, “First, in these
kinds of ballads, you know exactly where you are from the first line. In a bar
in Toledo across from the depot. Then the song takes you on a journey and
drops you off at the end with a powerful feeling.” Establishing setting and
enacting emotional transformation through a journey grounded in narrative
detail and incident are qualities that define the genre of the story-song, both
inside and outside the historical frame of the ballad.
Sometimes a balladeer and sometimes a rocker, Bruce Springsteen may
be the modern master of the story-song, often producing entire albums that
function as song cycles circling around a group of characters, a particular
setting, and a particular time. His characters might be born in autobiograph-
ical memory, but Springsteen employs his narrative craft to untether them
from that specificity without robbing them of their communicative power.
“ They’re all emotionally yours,” Springsteen says of the characters that pop-
ulate his songs. “ They’re part of your emotional life and in that sense, you
could say the songs are all yours. In the sense of the detail that you hang
the emotions on—that’ll vary.” Across Springsteen’s career, his approach to
crafting characters has evolved. “The characters on Born to Run were less
eccentric and less local than on Greetings and The Wild, the Innocent. They
could have been anybody and everybody,” Springsteen writes. “When the
screen door slams on ‘Thunder Road,’ you’re not necessarily on the Jersey
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Shore anymore. You could be anywhere in America. These were the begin-
nings of the characters whose lives I would trace in my work for the next two
decades.”
Springsteen is acutely aware of how music and lyric work together to craft
narrative. Reflecting on “Tom Joad,” Springsteen reveals that “the melodies
were uncomplicated, yet played an important role in the storytelling pro-
cess. The simplicity and plainness, the austere rhythms defined who these
characters were and how they expressed themselves.” For all our attention

to storytelling in song as a narrative technique, it’s worth recalling that

songs are primarily a sonic expression. “The precision of the storytelling in
these types of songs is very important,” Springsteen continues. “The correct
detail can speak volumes about who your character is, while the wrong one
can shred the credibility of your story. When you get the music and the lyrics
right in these songs, your voice disappears into the voices of those you’ve cho-
sen to write about.” Attention to incident, and to voice, including the singing
voice and the voice of the song’s persona, are defining features of Springs-
teen’s craft and the storyteller’s craft as a whole. In a passage worth quoting
at length, Springsteen reflects on his songwriting as a matter primarily of
narrative:

When I’d write rock music, music with the whole band, it would some-
times start out purely musically, and then I’d find my way to some
lyrics. I haven’t written like that in a while. In much of my recent writ-
ing, the lyrics have preceded the music, though the music is always
in the back of my mind. In most of the recent songs, I tell violent
stories very quietly. You’re hearing characters’ thoughts—what they’re
thinking after all the events that have shaped their situation have
transpired. So I try to get that internal sound, like that feeling at night
when you’re in bed and staring at the ceiling, reflective in some fash-
ion. I wanted the songs to have the kind of intimacy that took you in-
side yourself and then back out into the world. I’ll use music as a way
of defining and coloring the characters, conveying the characters’
rhythm of speech and pace. The music acts as a very still surface, and
the lyrics create a violent emotional life over it, or under it, and I let
those elements bang up against each other. Music can seem inciden-
tal, but it ends up being very important. It allows you to suggest the
passage of time in just a couple of quiet beats. Years can go by in a
few bars, whereas a writer will have to come up with a clever way of
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

saying, “And then years went by . . .” Thank God I don’t have to do

any of that! Songwriting allows you to cheat tremendously. You can
present an entire life in a few minutes. And then hopefully, at the
end, you reveal something about yourself and your audience and the
person in the song. It has a little in common with short-story writing
in that it’s character-driven. The characters are confronting the ques-
tions that everyone is trying to sort out for themselves, their moral
issues, the way those issues rear their heads in the outside world.

No matter how naturalistic Springsteen’s narratives, it is important to

remember that they are, in fact, crafted. Nick Hornby reminds us of this in
his inimitable way when he observes, “In Bruce Springsteen songs, you can
either stay and rot, or you can escape and burn. That’s OK; he’s a songwriter,
after all, and he needs simple choices like that in his songs. But nobody ever
writes about how it is possible to escape and rot—how escapes can go off at
half-cock, how you can leave the suburbs for the city but end up living a limp
suburban life anyway. That’s what happened to me; that’s what happens to
most people.” Songs are not life. They can sometimes present themselves as
imagined and organized life, but they are always constructs governed by art-
ists’ values and intentions.
It is also important to remember that story-songs are not necessarily com-
plex. “The majority of popular songs express one moment’s feeling—a single
emotion like desire (‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’), or surprise (‘I Can’t
Believe That You’re in Love with Me’), or regret (‘Didn’t We’),” Sheila Davis
writes in her classic The Craft of Lyric Writing. “Some make a simple state-
ment (or ask a simple question): ‘Don’t Fence Me In,’ ‘All I Want for Christmas
Is My Two Front Teeth,’ or ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It?’ Those ‘ideas’ are
self-evident because the titles tell all. Lyrics with plots may be thought to say
something more complex; but well-written story songs also embody a simple
idea that can be summarized in a few words.” In addition to thinking about
songs with a complex, plot-driven architecture, it is also necessary to turn
to those driven by feeling and persona.

PERSONA SONGS

Valerie June’s music has been variously described as folk, country, blues, gos-
pel, soul, and bluegrass. She is a black female singer-songwriter with a defi-
antly independent musical vision. It might be best to think of her simply as a
storyteller in song. In a revealing interview with National Public Radio, June
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

characterized her songwriting process as a communion with voices. “Usually,

it’s not my own voice,” she said. “It’s usually many different voices, and that’s
always a hard subject to talk about because it kind of sounds crazy, you know,
to say, hey, I hear an older black male voice. Sometimes, I hear a younger
woman’s voice. Sometimes, I hear a child’s voice or, you know, there’s many,
many different voices, either you feel connected to them and you write them
down. I try to write down every song that comes to me, and if you just write
every song, then you get to the good ones.”

June’s emphasis on individual voices epitomizes the nature of the persona

song, with its interest in the internal lives and drives of characters. Persona
accounts for songs that take the explicit shape of dramatic monologues, like
the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.” Persona also might be under-
stood to include just about every other song that does not privilege narrative
action but rather explores the “I” of the singer or the “we” of a relationship.
In this regard, at least, there’s an element of narrative craft functioning in
even those lyrics bereft of outward incident.
Persona is a product of lyric and voice. “The way that a persona becomes
clear to a listener is partly, self-evidently, through the lyrics of the track but,
perhaps more importantly, by means of the melody through which those lyr-
ics are delivered, and by means of the voice through which the lyrics and
melody are articulated,” observes the musicologist Allan F. Moore. The voice
as persona entwines with the voice as instrument, but the difference is worth
exploring. Voice as persona is an act of conjuring consciousness, either a con-
structed character brought to life by singer and songwriter, or a constructed
self that we’re meant to associate with the singer. “With each record I’ve done
so far, the narrator of the record has been some version of myself,” Joanna
Newsom explains to Marc Maron. “It hasn’t been a pure, unedited version of
myself, but it’s been sort of a—you know, the stories, the songs have ele-
ments of autobiography, or speaking to my own experience and they are
united by some common character, and that character is an exaggerated and/
or edited and/or stylized version of myself.” This kind of constructed lyric
self in song, assembled from autobiography or exaggeration, conscious eva-
sion or pure fancy, invites a relationship with listeners. Sometimes song lyr-
ics in performance aspire to the condition of the human voice overheard. On
other occasions, the voice addresses a specific audience directly. On still other
occasions, the idea of address is never taken up at all or is beside the point.
When the singer is not the songwriter, finding consonance between lyr-
ics and the performing self is an external process, focused on selection. “From
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

the beginning of my life as a singer I knew immediately whether a song was

meant for me,” recalls the folk singer Judy Collins. “ There are songs I will
never sing because they have a phrase I would never speak. Language is so
very intimate and vital, and I choose only those songs that reflect the way I
might say things.” For the singer-songwriter, alignment is primarily an in-
ternal process. The country singer Loretta Lynn elevates the connection be-
tween the lyrics she writes and performs and the life she leads to a first

principle of her craft and a way to expand the expressive range of the coun-
try genre. “Most of my songs were from the woman’s point of view,” she states.
“In the old days, country music was directed at the men— truck-driving
songs, easy women, cheating songs.” A singer telling her own story, even if
that story is a reflection of a collective experience, can achieve revolution-
ary things. “ People often say, ‘Where do you come up with all of these songs?’
Well, I don’t come up with them! I’ve lived them! I tell it like it is,” Lynn
writes in her memoir.
“Telling it like it is” can be a gesture at authenticity or the thing itself;
for the audience, it often doesn’t matter. Even autobiography is governed by
narrative craft. What Adriana Cavarero terms the “narratable self ” is the
urge in us all to have our story told, for our lives to become the subject of
narration by others. “The narratable self finds its home, not simply in a con-
scious exercise of remembering, but in the spontaneous narrating structure
of memory itself,” Cavarero writes. “This is why we have defined the self as
narratable instead of narrated.” The narratable self is not a matter of how the
mind structures one’s past, a process that is always fallible. Rather, the nar-
ratable self is a social selfhood, the product of relations with others. “I’ve al-
ways been good at chronicling the many moods of my life, but mostly I have
done it through my music,” writes Melissa Etheridge. “I tell stories of life,
pain, joy, and love in three-minute snippets—little glimpses of who I am or
who people perceive me to be.” That blend of perception of self and others
defines the space of the “I” in popular music.
We encounter the same interpretive challenge when it comes to first-
person narration in song lyrics as we do in literature, where we must grap-
ple with the indeterminacy of relation between author and speaker. Is the
“I” of Anne Sexton’s “Her Kind” necessarily the poet herself? I have gone
out, a possessed witch, / haunting the black air, braver at night. Most literary
critics find this to be an unhelpful question, one that leads away from the
poem itself and into the morass of biography. In pop songs, unlocking the
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

identity of the lyric “I” is a nearly irresistible matter; the prying attentions
of celebrity-obsessed culture work to strip naked the pop singer’s persona in
hopes of revealing the person underneath. Add to that the fact that the lyric
“I” is audible, that another person is claiming the name right before our ears
and sometimes before our eyes, and the confusion and the conflation make
sense. Is the “I” of David Byrne’s “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)”
Byrne himself?

Home is where I want to be

Pick me up and turn me round
I feel numb, born with a weak heart
I guess I must be having fun

Reading the lyrics, hearing Byrne sing them on the studio recording from
the Talking Heads’ 1983 album Speaking in Tongues, seeing Byrne perform
them today live as a certain cast of light shines across the stage, it’s easy to
conceive dozens of questions more interesting than wondering whether the
“I” is in fact he.
That said, the lyric “I” is certainly worthy of discussion. Sometimes the
pronoun makes all the difference. In a striking last-minute revision to his
classic “Tangled Up in Blue,” Bob Dylan went back to the studio to rerecord
much of the song in the first person rather than the third person. What was
a song at arm’s length became palpable through the personal, as Dylan under-
stood that his listeners required the bridge of the personal to access more
fully the emotions in the song. He gave his listeners not his narrated self,
but a narratable self. “Like many writers who present an autobiographical
surface,” explains Richard Tillinghast, “Dylan works with the illusion of an
actual life— autobiography as a poetic convenience, a resource, a vehicle for
communication with an audience. ‘I’ really can be ‘another,’ and particularly
for people who create lyrics and tell stories, the self is no fixed commodity.”
For a gifted singer, the “I” need not have any autobiographical connec-
tion. “ People often think the lyrics you’re singing have some special personal
significance for you, which often isn’t true,” Michael Jackson observes. “It is
important to reach people, to move them. Sometimes one can do this with
the mosaic of the music melody arrangement and lyrics, sometimes it is the
intellectual content of the lyrics.” The country singer Reba McEntire agrees:
“I used to believe that you can’t sing songs that contradict your own personal
lifestyle. But after a few years of maturing, I found that it’s best to find the
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

songs people can relate to—whether you can or not.”

The “I” of the pop song contains multitudes. The most revealing autobio-
graphical song lyrics depend on the perception of others. Though Ralph El-
lison once observed that “we tell ourselves our individual stories so that we
might better understand the collective,” Cavarero would counter by warn-
ing against the erasure of individuality. “The effect—or, perhaps, the empa-
thetic motive for reciprocal narration—thus risks frustrating that reciprocal
appearance of uniqueness that qualifies the dynamic of recognition as an

ethic,” she writes. “To recognize oneself in the other is indeed quite differ-
ent from recognizing the irremediable uniqueness of the other.” Though the
idea that one should aspire to recognizing the other in the self has become
an accepted ideal in many societies, perhaps the preferable goal is to recog-
nize that which is disparate and defining in the other.
What happens when we listen with the conscious ear for that “irremedi-
able uniqueness” of experience and expression in the song? When it comes
to confessional song lyrics, the assumption is that they generate their emo-
tional appeal through empathy and vicarious engagement. This, however, is
an illusion. The intimate spaces that song lyrics visit are stagings of inti-
macy. This observation is not meant to take anything away from their power,
only to acknowledge the essential exercise of craft on matters closest to
the heart. James Taylor is among the first names that come to mind when
one thinks of confessional songwriters. Though he admits that his songs
come across as often nakedly autobiographical, he troubles the assumption
that songwriting can ever be confession. “It departs from being anything like
a real representation of what I am,” Taylor tells Bill Flanagan. “It seems au-
tobiographical because it is self-referred and it’s intimate and some of it is
downright confessional. But it also has to rhyme and fit into a musical con-
text. And as the song goes through, various ideas will be set against one
another.” The songwriter’s imperative of form, from rhyme to prosody to
diction, means that few songs ever end up as pure confession, even if they
begin as such.
Trent Reznor’s “Hurt” may be among the most emotionally bare lyrics in
contemporary music, but it too is subject to complications of form and per-
formance. “Hurt” was the final track on Nine Inch Nails’ 1994 album The
Downward Spiral. It responds both to circumstances of the persona at the
center of the concept album and also autobiographically to Reznor’s strug-
gles with heroin addiction. “I hurt myself today to see if I still feel / I focus
on the pain, the only thing that’s real,” Reznor sings over an instrumental
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

track thick with dissonance and distortion. The song might seem like an un-
likely candidate for a cover, but eight years later Johnny Cash recorded
“Hurt” for his final album, American IV: The Man Comes Around, just a year
before his death. What began as a six-minute study in pain becomes a dis-
tilled three-minute accounting for a life of pain, both suffered and inflicted.
Cash’s voice is weathered, his pitch at times imprecise, but his masterful
phrasing renders the cover at once a testament to Cash’s estimable gifts and
to the durability and power of Reznor’s song.

Reznor’s response to Cash’s cover, which garnered even more attention

due to the striking Mark Romanek– directed video that accompanied it, was
ambivalent at best. “It felt invasive,” Reznor recalls, years later. “It was my
child. It was like I was building a home, and someone else moved into it.
When I write a song, I’m only considering myself as the one narrating it. It’s
my voice. So it did seem very odd at first.” Certainly one could never mistake
Cash’s voice—neither his physical instrument nor the persona he embodies
in delivering the lyric—for Reznor’s. Reznor eventually came around to ap-
preciating his song’s second life, its second voice. “I haven’t listened to my
version since then. I’ve been so proud of what they’ve done with it that I
haven’t thought that much about it. I’m over my initial shock, and I realize
that’s what music’s all about. I’ve thrown some things in the pot, and now
it’s turned into something else. It’s a pretty powerful thing.”
Sometimes an artist’s persona can rise to the level of ego or even identity.
Rap is the obvious genre in which this happens, although a few rap artists,
like Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar, use all or part of their given names. Of
course, even artists using their real names still construct a persona, even
multiple personas. “I Love Kanye,” Kanye’s forty-four-second a cappella cele-
bration of his multitudinous self from 2016’s The Life of Pablo, anatomizes
the construction of a public persona. “See, I invented Kanye, it wasn’t any
Kanyes / And now I look and look around and there’s so many Kanyes,” he
rhymes, gesturing at his host of imitators, and also at his own complex, com-
pound identity. In addition to the many meanings of Kanye, West also inhab-
its Yeezy, a nickname that he elevates in song to a full-fledged alter ego.
There’s a distinction of intensity, though not necessarily of kind, between
taking on a stage name—like Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson going by Katy
Perry, or Paul Hewson going by Bono, or Declan Patrick McManus going
by Elvis Costello—and taking on an alter ego. One need only hear Marilyn
Manson (Brian Hugh Warner) talk about it to understand the craftedness
of a persona expressed first in song, then on the stage:
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Marilyn Manson was the perfect story protagonist for a frustrated

writer like myself. He was a character who, because of his contempt
for the world around him and, more so, himself, does everything he
can to trick people into liking him. And then, once he wins their con-
fidence, he uses it to destroy them. He would have been in a longish
short story, about sixty pages. The title would have been “The Pay-
back,” and it would have been rejected by seventeen magazines.

Today, it would be in the garage of my parent’s house in Florida,

faded and mildewed with all the other stories. But it was too good
an idea to rot.

Marilyn Manson’s name fit perfectly with his dangerous, androgynous

persona. He intended to offend. “As a performer, I wanted to be the loudest,
most persistent alarm clock I could be, because there didn’t seem like any
other way to snap society out of its Christianity- and media-induced coma,”
he recalls. Now, many years later, this character born of a song-lyric per-
sona has subsumed the performer’s public self, at least in the public eye. It
is nearly impossible to find present-day photographs of Manson without his
signature white powder makeup and livid red lip. The song has possessed
the body, but in doing so the song often gets overlooked in favor of the
extreme image. “A lot of people like to pass me off as a devil worshipper,”
Manson says. “That could only be true if I considered myself to be the devil,
because I tend to be narcissistic and believe in my own strength and my own
identity. I find God to be what exists in what you create. I make music. That’s
coming in touch with God when I write a story, when I come up with a phrase
or paint a picture, because that’s about creating. Art gives people a reason
to be alive.”
The story-song and the persona-driven song meet most vividly in a space
beyond the recording itself—in the music video. Videos are perhaps the most
powerful medium for narrative expression; their relation to pop-song lyrics
and recordings illuminates a final part of the life of lyrics as story.

MUSIC VIDEOS AND THE ANTI- NARRATIVE

I was a failed writer of music video treatments. Sometime in 2005 my old

college roommate, Justin Francis, now a well-regarded director living in Los
Angeles, asked me to try my hand at writing a treatment— a brief narrative
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

and visual script—for a song he had just been sent. “Give it a shot,” he told
me. “I know you can help me.” His confidence in me was encouraging, but
when I sat down to write for the song I realized how unfamiliar I was with
the conventions of music video narrative. I knew that a treatment was a kind
of mini-script, and I knew from watching music videos since I was a child
that a video could be anything from an abstract visual piece like Björk’s “All
Is Full of Love” to a concert clip like Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on
Me” to a multi-act narrative like Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” I decided that

the best approach was to start with the song and let it announce what kind
of video it needed to be.
For those of us who grew up in the era of MTV, pop music is a narrative
medium because pop music is a visual medium, with music videos render-
ing even the most abstract song as a story. Music videos act variously in the
service of the song’s narrative, as a substitute in the absence of a song’s clear
narrative, and in tension (or even out-and-out defiance) of a song’s narra-
tive. Without even knowing it, I already had a narrative vocabulary from
which to draw. As a viewer, I’d been training to write music videos for years
now. At least that’s what I told myself.
The song was “So Sick,” by the then little-known R&B singer Ne-Yo.
Though Ne-Yo was a new artist, he was a music veteran, having written hit
songs for several other performers. This was to be his breakout as a solo art-
ist, so it made the impact of the video all the more vital. Broadly speaking,
“So Sick” is a song about love and loss. It begins at the end of the speaker’s
relationship: “Gotta change my answering machine now that I’m alone.” The
chorus self-referentially bemoans the love song itself, “And I’m so sick of love
songs, so tired of tears.” I listened to the song dozens of times: while I walked
across the college campus where I was teaching, while I lifted weights at the
gym, while I wallowed in my own sense of loss and longing caused by my
bicoastal relationship with my then-girlfriend (now my wife). I connected
with the song, both lyrically and sonically, with its restrained accompani-
ment and bittersweet melody.
As I sat down to write my treatment, I approached it from two direc-
tions: the narrative and the imagistic. On the narrative level, I keyed in
on certain details that established setting, suggested incident, or implied
temporality. We know the separated lovers once shared an apartment, we
know that it’s been months since they were together, we even know the date
of their anniversary (July 15) because it’s marked on his calendar, and we
know that he is listening to the radio and being emotionally torn apart by
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

every love song that reminds him of the love he’s lost. I could feel these details
coalescing into the rudiments of a narrative. I could even envision setting—a
city, perhaps New York—and a time period—the present, with a certain noir-
inspired sensibility.
At the same time, I couldn’t shake an image when hearing the song: rain
against a lighted windowpane. The rain image likely came to me from the
music itself, which suggests falling raindrops. And then, of course, there’s
the old conventionalized association in music of raindrops as teardrops. The

image had a more personal source for me; I have a vivid memory of waiting
in a parked car outside the grocery store as a child of seven or eight while my
mother shopped—it was the 1980s, so a car seemed a perfectly reasonable
place to leave a child— and I was watching rain bead up on the windshield
and leave a snaking trail as it slid down the glass. I was moved by the mo-
ment; I still am, just by the memory of the image. The recollection captures
a mood and, in doing so, the essence of a story that does not require a begin-
ning, middle, and end to make meaning.
My first draft of the “So Sick” treatment was an awkward hybrid of the
narrative and the imagistic. It began with an image of rain on a window-
pane, then became overdetermined narrative as Ne-Yo did the things the lyr-
ics describe— checking his answering machine, erasing the anniversary
date on his calendar, adjusting his radio. I cringe now to think how naïve I
was in my approach, and at the same time how earnest. I shudder to think
that I sent this early draft to my friend, who sent me back some encourag-
ing notes, asking me to “refine” the concept and “strip away” the excess. He
wanted more details, but the right kind of details.
I revised, producing a treatment that I thought communicated my sense
of the story. My friend, dealing with multiple submissions, submitted my
treatment with little adjustment. The job went elsewhere. Hype Williams’s
video for the song was inexplicably set on a ski slope in Aspen with Ne-Yo
wearing a fur-collared coat and glancing pensively out of the windows of a
multimillion-dollar house overlooking snow-capped mountains. Though any
number of reasons can explain why one director gets a video over another, I
knew that my treatment hadn’t helped. Looking back, I now understand that
my treatment demonstrated a fundamental lack of understanding of the
function of the music video in relation to a pop song, and of the very nature
of narrative in pop. I made the mistake of aspiring to mimesis, of rendering
in image what the lyrics were saying rather than seeking something evoca-
tive and visually striking that might accompany and accentuate the music
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

and lyrics together as song. It was all about providing actions, communicat-
ing strong ideas in visual terms. I came, too late, to understand the music
video treatment more as a sales pitch than a piece of creative prose, as a
story told through a visual vocabulary rather than a linguistic one.
My early efforts at writing music video treatments mirrored the early years
of music videos as a medium, with the slavish attention to lyric and the idea
that the visuals must represent the incidents the song describes. The first
videos that appeared on MTV on August 1, 1981, were almost exclusively

performance clips (The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” Rod Stewart’s
“She Won’t Dance with Me,” Pat Benatar’s “You Better Run”). The exceptions
were strange hybrids like REO Speedwagon’s “Keep on Loving You,” which
begins with the lead singer, the prodigiously mulleted Kevin Cronin, on what
we imagine is a psychoanalyst’s couch speaking about a woman who haunts
his memory: “Here’s the problem, doctor. It’s this new album. I wrote a song
about a girl. I made her up! It was only a song, but I can’t get her out of
my mind. Every time I think of her, I picture her with the other guys—never
with me. She’s driving me nuts. But she’s sooo beautiful.”
Cut to said woman, a striking brunette gazing fixedly at the middle dis-
tance. The camera pulls back to reveal that her attention is directed at a
small television screen where Cronin and the rest of Speedwagon are per-
forming their song. The remainder of the clip cuts between conventional con-
cert footage and shots of the woman, clothed in a white fur coat, with the
band members lounging on the couch, inexplicably in formal attire. As the
song draws to a close, we return to the room where the woman, now wear-
ing pink lingerie, sits on the couch watching the television with that same
fixed gaze, the guys from the band sitting beside her watching as well, though
she doesn’t acknowledge their presence. She turns off the television and we
cut back to Cronin on the couch: “It happens every time I play this song.
Where does she come from, doctor? Who is this woman?” And— surprise—
the camera pans to reveal that the doctor is the mystery woman herself. “I’ve
absolutely no idea,” she says as she lets down her hair. End scene.
Years later, Cronin recalled the experience of the video: “For Hi Infidelity,
we’d made four videos in one day with Bruce Gowers. They were horrible.
‘Keep On Loving You’ made us look like even bigger dorks than we were. It
starts with me sitting in a psychiatrist’s office—a female psychiatrist, because
someone figured out that you had to have a hot chick in the video.” Even this
rudimentary video understood something that I still had to learn: When it
comes to narrative, a music video need only have the thinnest relation to the
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

song itself. What matters is the story that music and image tell together on
the level of style and feeling.
Music videos are not beholden to the narrative and incident of a song, but
they serve many important purposes— even today when music videos now
reside online rather than on television. They can help to evoke a mood, like
the seductive one-shot clip for D’Angelo’s “Untitled (How Does It Feel).” They
can satisfy the narrative urge all on their own, like No Doubt’s film noir–
inspired video for “It’s My Life.” They can fashion metanarratives with no

apparent correlation to the lyrics, like Britney Spears’s “Toxic,” in which she
goes around in a comic-strip world killing men for no particular reason. They
can render apparent what is only implicit in the lyric, as is the case with
Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” or Aerosmith’s “Janie’s Got a Gun.” Other videos, like
the clip for Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space,” come together at the same time as
the song rather than as a retrospective creative act.
Music videos offer a way of approaching storytelling in song lyrics at an
angle; as visual media that support narrative, videos underscore the con-
straints of expressing songs’ stories in words alone. Out of those constraints,
of course, emerge opportunities. The narratives in songs ask the listener to
participate in the construction of image in a way that video forestalls by its
rich saturation of visual stimuli. Sometimes the best thing is to turn away
from the screen and just play the song. Listening to the stories pop songs
tell connects us to the long tradition of storytelling as an oral form—to the
power of recitation, memory, and voice.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Bradley, Adam. The Poetry of Pop, Yale University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fdu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4815350.
Created from fdu-ebooks on 2025-02-09 22:08:59.
H
ow do poets listen to pop songs? Do they hear things that the rest
of us don’t? Do they count the rhythms of the lines? Do they sepa-
rate the half from the full rhymes? Do they feel the song more
deeply because of their knowledge of the inner workings of sylla-
bles and sounds, or does that knowledge get in the way of listening?
How do pop singers read poems? Do they hear music that the rest of us
miss? Do they feel compelled to perform, to speak, even to sing? If we read
poems the way that singers sing song lyrics, might poems feel less distant
than they sometimes do in their inscrutable silence?
Read pop songs like poems. Sing poems like pop songs. Both acts will
seem unnatural, perhaps even perverse. Some parts won’t fit. But the prac-
tice can inspire new clarity and insight. It can offer fresh awareness of the
careful craft of a line from a song that you’ve known half your life—a line
that stuck with you, and now you know why. Familiarity and nostalgia play
their parts; so too do words arranged in a certain order and sung by a certain
voice in a certain way against certain sounds.
Poetry and pop songs, as different as they are, are united in this: They
are both equally impractical. Both, in the harsh light of utilitarianism, are
utterly useless. Although people reserve a certain respect for poetry, they
do so out of reverence for a craft largely out of phase with the time, as one
respects a watchmaker or a cobbler for the mastery required to do small
things with great skill. In contrast, people disregard or disparage pop songs
as disposable cultural confections. But where do we go when our hearts
are broken, when we celebrate, when we mourn? Often we turn to pop
songs. Lyr ics that at other times seem silly or slight or saccharine become
necessary. Although we need neither poetry nor pop to live, it’s hard to
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

live without them.

The poetic tools of sound, meaning, and feeling are at work in even the
most banal pop song, just as they are at work in the most trite ode or son-
net. Yet the poetics of pop songs remains overshadowed by bombastic po-
lemics on whether this or that songwriter should be considered a poet. By
focusing on such matters of nomenclature, we overlook an opportunity to
engage the tools of poetic analysis to understand and to appreciate one of the
most widely disseminated lyric traditions in the world.

As rhythm and rhyme recede from contemporary poetry, pop song lyrics
have emerged as the most accessible and exciting body of language to show-
case the music of words. In fact, many of the tools of poetic analysis we
learn in school, including scanning the rhythm of lyrics, identifying rhyme
patterns, and looking for registers of diction, work better on song lyrics than
they do on most contemporary poetry.
Poets, songwriters, and critics often draw a bright line between poetry
and song lyr ics; indeed, there are differences worth preserving for the bet-
terment of both forms. Just because pop song lyr ics do not meet the ex-
pectations of contemporary poetry, however, doesn’t mean that they are
somehow a debased form. “I often lament that true songwriting will end up
as an arcane folk art, like Appalachian basket weaving or divining water
with a stick,” observes the singer and songwriter Rosanne Cash. “In dark
moments, I suspect that no one really appreciates the beauty of a precisely
rhymed couplet, sewn perfectly into a heartrending melody, delivered by
an honest voice. I have devoted my entire adult life to the pursuit of that
beauty, to discovering the internal rules of each individual song, to reveal-
ing the truth, and not the facts, of its subject matter, and to understanding
the subtleties of tempo, feeling, and tone.” This book has been dedicated to
appreciating and analyzing— and appreciating through analyzing— the
manifold beauties of language, form, and sound that are unique to pop
song craft.
Popu lar music is in a continual process of renovation and rebirth. If
we find less to comment on in the poetics of pop’s song lyr ics today than
we might have in the past, it does not mean that there’s nothing there but
rather that we must adjust our eyes and our ears so as better to see and
to hear the music around us. Much of this poetics resides in per formance
rather than in the language of the lyric; it rests in vocalists’ phrasings
and intonations, in the interplay between the lyric as voiced and the music
as played, in the decisions of producers and sound engineers. In fact, in
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

most ways pop’s poetics is a more complicated affair today than it has
ever been.
Studying song lyr ics creates a new connection and commitment to
the music we love— and perhaps to the music for which we previously did
not care. The new pleasure radiates from the cerebral joy of close analy-
sis in the revelation of pattern and form, as well as from the more vis-
ceral enjoyment of listening to familiar recordings again, the experience
now subtly and silently enriched by new discovery. Accepting song lyr ics’

identity as poetry gives us the opportunity to direct a dif ferent critical

gaze at them than our collective habits of listening and music criticism
normally use.
Pop songs are far more than the sum of their poetic parts; they always
find full expression in sound and performance. Through the poetry of pop,
we also come to understand that the work of analysis is enacted through
looking at the parts that comprise the whole rather than at the whole all
at once. This book has approached the fullness of per formance through
the specific lens of lyr ics, emphasizing the fundamental dynamic between
language and sound that gives life to pop music. Given the arguments for
denying song lyr ics the status of poetry, one better have good reasons to
read the poetry of pop anyway. I’ll leave you with a few:

Read song lyrics to reconnect with the pleasures of rhythm and

rhyme, familiar from childhood and once common in page-born po-
etry, now largely forgotten.

Read song lyrics to recognize the often-overlooked craft of songwrit-

ers and musicians, singers and producers, who work together to
create aesthetic artifacts of beauty, power, and cool.

Read song lyrics to illuminate the complex and shifting relationships

that lyrics establish with their music and their performance.

Read song lyrics to learn about poetic structures and forms in a user-
friendly way, with a familiar body of language.

Read song lyrics to understand what so many people hear in them,

whether or not the songs speak to you.

Read song lyrics because even when they comprise only half, or less,
of a song, they command attention.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Read song lyrics because they’re often more compelling than they
need to be to satisfy the performative demands of their songs.

Read song lyrics because you want to write better songs.

Read song lyrics because you want to write better about songs.

Read song lyrics because no songs will be harmed in the pro cess;
if you love a song before reading the lyrics, you’ll love it still.

The poetry of pop is never about lyrics alone. The dance of word and music
makes songs act on our imagination and emotions just as the best poems
do. As attentive readers, our task is to unlock the mysteries of lyric expres-
sion through the poetics of form, as well as through the ineffable qualities of
voice and music. This is the poetry of pop.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

T
he playlists that follow present recordings and song lyrics to consider as
you continue to explore the poetry of pop. They take inspiration from Ego
Trip’s Book of Rap Lists (1999), which took inspiration from Dave Marsh
and Kevin Stein’s The Book of Rock Lists (1981). Both books are driven by a
fan’s love and loathing of particular artists and songs, as well as a scholar’s and fan’s
attention to detail. Their lists range from the silly to the sublime and concern every-
thing from sound to fashion. The lists presented here focus on the matters of poetics
and performance addressed in this book. Unless otherwise noted, all songs are iden-
tified with the performers and the specific recordings that made them famous.
I’ve organized the lists following the book’s chapter sequence so that you may pe-
ruse them while you read their respective chapters, or save them all to read at the
end. Add to the lists yourself, supplementing them with new examples and devising
lists of your own. These lists are neither exhaustive nor definitive. They’re explor-
atory. Think of them as a series of trailheads from which to commence self-guided
treks through pop’s language and sound. Singers and songwriters can use them to
find good examples of song craft. Teachers can use them to structure lesson plans.
Students can use them to deepen their familiarity with poetry and poetics. Just about
anyone can find something surprising in these collections of songs.

CHAPTER ONE: LYRIC AND SONG

Eleven Pop Songs Adapted from Poems (and Two Inspired by Poets)
Pop songs and poems aren’t the same—unless they are. The songs listed below borrow
their lyrics, entirely or in part, from poems by others. In some instances, lyrics and
poetry are identical. In others, the lyrics derive inspiration in more subtle ways.
Wilco’s “Born Alone,” for instance, took shape after lead singer and songwriter Jeff
Tweedy browsed through a poetry anthology in search of inspiration. “I wasn’t
coming up with anything specific,” he said, “so I opened up a book of American poetry
and randomly turned to the Emily Dickinson pages, no one poem in par ticular. I
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

took a lot of words, most of them verbs, and put them against words that looked ap-
pealing to me from [John Greenleaf ] Whittier and other 1800s poetry. It’s just look-
ing at the words and writing a little poem trying to use as many of them as possible.”
Listen to the songs as you look at the lyrics and the poems side by side. What’s
changed and what’s stayed the same? What makes some lyrics more successful than
others at bridging the gap between poetry and song?

Song: Judy Collins, “Golden Apples of the Sun” (1962)

Poem: William Butler Yeats, “The Song of Wandering Aengus” (1899)

Song: Iron Maiden, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1984)

Poem: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798)

Song: Sting, “ Sister Moon” (1987)

Poem: William Shakespeare, Sonnet 130 (1609)

Song: Vic Chesnutt, “Stevie Smith” (1990)

Poem: Stevie Smith, “Not Waving but Drowning” (1957)

Song: Sheryl Crow, “All I Wanna Do” (1993)

Poem: Wyn Cooper, “Fun” (1987)

Songs: Richard Buckner, The Hill (2000)

Poems: Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology (1915)

Song: Nickel Creek, “Sweet Afton” (2000)

Poem: Robert Burns, “Sweet Afton” (1791)

Song: Brazilian Girls, “Me Gustas Cuando Callas” (2005)

Poem: Pablo Neruda, “Poema XV” (1924)

Song: Okkervil River, “John Allyn Smith Sails” (2007)

Poet: John Berryman (1914–1972)

Song: Mumford & Sons, “Sigh No More” (2009)

Poem: William Shakespeare, “Sigh No More” from Much Ado about Nothing
(1598/1600)

Song: Natalie Merchant, “Maggie and Milly and Molly and May” (2010)
Poem: E. E. Cummings, “maggie and milly and molly and may” (1958)

Song: Esperanza Spalding, “ Little Fly” (2010)

Poem: William Blake, “The Fly” (1794)

Song: Wilco, “Born Alone” (2011)

Poets: Emily Dickinson, John Greenleaf Whittier, and others.

A Playlist for Poetry Lovers

Brian Buckley and Kate Hunter are the proprietors of Innisfree Poetry Bookstore
and Café in Boulder, Colorado, one of only four poetry-focused bookstores in the United
States. Visiting the store, you’re likely to hear an eclectic mix of music, from Radio-
head to Rakim, as you browse the shelves stacked with all manner of poetry, classic
and contemporary. I asked Brian to devise a playlist pairing songs with poems, united
by theme or form or feeling. What resulted is a celebration of unexpected connections
across time and genre. I’ve used this list to structure a week of study in both my under-
graduate and graduate seminars. It helps me to model for students the continuity of
experience between music and poetry as exemplified in one person’s lifelong love affair

with language. “The road to the poetry shop began with the transistor radio that
wrapped around the bed pole at the pillow end of my bed,” Brian tells me. “Now I open
a shop every morning and am surrounded by poetry and music. It’s hard to fathom
the arc of my life without the artists and songs, the poems and lyrics on this list.”

Bob Dylan, “Visions of Johanna” (1966), and Kevin Young, “Hurricane Song”
(2015)

Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi” (1970), and Jane Kenyon, “Other wise” (2005)

Stevie Wonder, “Living for the City” (1973), and Philip Levine, “What Work
Is” (1991)

The Clash, “Lost in the Supermarket” (1979), and Allen Ginsberg, “A Super-
market in California” (1955)

Bob Marley, “Redemption Song” (1980), and Phillis Wheatley, “On Being
Brought from Africa to America” (1773)

U2, “A Sort of Homecoming” (1984), and W. B. Yeats, “The Lake Isle of

Innisfree” (1890)

Tracy Chapman, “Fast Car” (1988), and César Vallejo, “Piedra negra sobre
una piedra blanca”/“Black Stone Lying on a White Stone” (1939/1971 Robert
Bly translation)

Sinéad O’Connor, “Black Boys on Mopeds” (1990), and Langston Hughes, “I

Look at the World” (1930)

Neil Young, “Helpless” (1993), and Sinéad Morrissey, “Driving Alone on a

Snowy Evening (After Frost)” (2005)

Joseph Arthur, “In the Sun” (2000), and Jimmy Santiago Baca, “What Is
Broken Is What God Blesses” (2007)

Some Poets Pick Some Song Lyrics Worth Reading

Poets love pop songs, too. I asked a handful of poets to name a par ticular song lyric
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

that they believe richly rewards our reading attention. What lyrics capture their
ears? Are there particular lyrics that have influenced their styles and informed
their own poetic practices? I’ll let them tell you.

H. L. Hix picks Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” (1967). It will surely be
the most uncool choice in this playlist, and it was long “before my time” (I didn’t
encounter it until many years after it had disappeared off the charts), but
Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” brilliantly achieves (in a song that is all
lyrics— the guitar just keeps the rhythm) a poetic value I find power ful:
subordination of event to situation. “Ode to Billie Joe” seems ostensibly about

events: the narrator and Billie Joe throwing something off the bridge, Billie
Joe jumping off the bridge, and so on. But although those events get named,
they are mostly withheld: we don’t know what the pair were throwing off the
bridge, we don’t know why Billie Joe killed himself. What is revealed with ut-
ter clarity is the narrator’s situation: she is spoken to and spoken about within
the poem, but she herself is never allowed to speak; she is closely monitored
(told to wipe her feet, interrogated for not eating, observed and reported on)
but not recognized at all; she is kept in place by her society, but is afforded no
place in her society; kinship relations are enforced on her from without, but
the kinship she feels is denied her. In Gottlob Frege’s terms, “Ode to Billie
Joe” obscures reference in order to disclose sense. In Aristotle’s terms, “Ode
to Billie Joe” inverts the tragic focus on mythos for a lyric focus on ethos. The
narrator makes no explicit criticism of her society, but her implicit critique
is devastating. She does not declare her social alienation and erasure, but I
feel it all the more strongly for its not being declared. Her protest takes the
form of lamentation. I experience “Ode to Billie Joe” as a most robust fulfill-
ment of Emily Dickinson’s advice to “tell all the truth but tell it slant.”
Kyle Dargan picks Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Hol-
ler)” (1971). Anyone who has taken a workshop with me has heard my idea
about writing poetry being like building the lightest possible plane that will
fly. Sometimes, that is. There is a place for excess, for every thing in poetic in-
tent, but, staying with this idea of efficiency and vicious concision, Marvin
Gaye and James Nyx’s “Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler)” has im-
pressed me for a long time by capturing so much depth and nuance with so
little. The sense of being caught in an inescapable economic spiral builds over
the verses, but let’s start with the second: “Inflation, no chance / to increase
finance. / Bills pile up sky high. / Send that boy off to die.” “Inflation, no chance”
is an economics white paper in itself, but the juxtaposition of all four lines
makes it possible to see a connection among poverty, loss of economic ground,
and the pressures to enlist (and die) in the army. A sparse-sparse, quiet but
wrenching verse that creates space for the “holler” to emerge as the chorus.
Evie Shockley picks Joni Mitchell’s “Hejira” (1976). Set with an impossible
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

task (pick one??), I default to the songwriter who, for me, set the standard of
song lyrics as poetry. “Hejira” is not my top Joni Mitchell song for listening,
but these are definitely the lyrics I’d most want to read. From the gorgeous
one-word title (an Arabic word signifying a flight from danger or journey to a
more congenial place), we move into the “melancholy” meditation of a woman
who travels to escape from “the petty wars / that shell shock love away.” She’s
recovering from a relationship that seems to have been overpowering—relieved
to be released back to herself, but at the same time, in withdrawal. The qua-

train that moves me perhaps most of all carries forward both her theme of du-
ality and her breathtaking talent for making abstractions tangible through
metaphorical images: “In the church they light the candles / And the wax rolls
down like tears / There’s the hope and the hopelessness / I’ve witnessed thirty
years.” There. One image does double duty, daring us to pretend that the fire
burning within us is not also burning us, or that we can avoid for long being
“suck[ed] . . . back” into connection with others by our need to and for love.
Raza Ali Hasan picks Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” (1980). W. H.
Auden reputedly mined the Beatles songbook in his search for new influences
for his own work. I am no Auden, but in the poem “British Steel,” which is the
last poem in my newest poetry collection, Sorrows of the Warrior Class (2015),
I riff on lines not from the Beatles but from an American band: “Once in a
Lifetime, / you may find yourself, / pondering how the English,” is the first
stanza. The line “you may find yourself ” appears another three times, and
“you may tell yourself,” twice. The final stanza goes like this: “You may say
to yourself / Same as it ever was. / Same as it ever was.” Yes, you guessed it,
I am talking of Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.” The British, as the title
of the poem implies, steal in three different ways. In the poem the British are
stealing steel-making technology from India. The poet (that’s me) is stealing
lines from the pop song in order to call the British imperialists. But the truth
is I wasn’t stealing in order to call the British first- class thieves, but to do
something about the long-standing hold this song and its lines have on me.
Call it jealousy, not sought-out influence. I stole those Talking Heads lines
and used them verbatim in my poetic world—at last making them mine.
Douglas Kearney picks De La Soul’s “I Am I Be” (1993). It all comes together
on this one—the opening chorus collage of “I am — —; I be — —” statements
is the sonic predecessor of A Tribe Called Quest’s Midnight Marauders cover,
but lyrically it sets up a cascading and layered anaphora (which Pos reprises
at the head of his first verse and that envoi of a third; and which Dove revises
in a kind of phrasal chiasmus as his last line of the second verse). Within the
verses themselves, Pos remixes clichés from common English (including “I am
an early bird but the feathers are black / so the apples that I catch are usually
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

all worms”); alludes to past examples of people misunderstanding who he is

and what he does (“. . . to bring the peace, / not in the flower / but the As-salaam
Alaik’ and the third I am.”); and, in one of the song’s loveliest moments, says
simply: “I cherish the twilight”— a thorn rhyme line (though it’s assonant with
“maximized” and “right size”) that, when voiced, sounds almost like a sigh re-
lieving the density of his flow. Dove, ever underrated, abstracts his imagery to
the point that I feel I can turn his words like three-dimensional objects shaped
in letterforms and what he’s describing. My favorite bars—and I quote this

every chance I get to show how dope he is: “I bring the element H-to-the-2 / so
you owe me what’s coming / when I’m raining on your new parade”—of course,
H2O, thus water. But also, H(ip) H(op) and rap’s association with water (flow,
spit); “raining on your new parade” suggests battling but also De La’s place as
sly critics of peers from within hip-hop culture. Please. Listen to it right now.
Noah Eli Gordon picks Jawbreaker’s “Lurker II: Dark Son of Night” (1995).
Although the band’s single major label release ultimately failed to garner them
the success of their peers like Green Day, and other post-punk acts of the early
nineties, there’s a near cult-like following for Jawbreaker, due in no small part
to Blake Schwarzenbach’s emotionally tinged, sonically attuned lyrics. Rather
than the story behind domestic failure and dejection, Schwarzenbach con-
denses into a series of objective correlatives the emotional tenor of events—the
core feelings associated with a postmodern Prufrock: “Two room condo, tree-
less cul-de-sac. / A nun’s dark habit. All arm, no follow through.” Here, that
“All arm” also carries with it the homophonic echo of alarm, doubling the sense
of a fraught relationship that is already over just a few lines later: “Hook up
the Sega. Have sex alone.” True to his dexterous balance between the sonic
and referential potential of words, Schwarzenbach, later in the song, offers
another gem of an image in this line about a tree’s fallen fruit: “Dead in sun-
shine, decomposing there.” That “Dead in” is also a dead-end, as well as some-
thing deadened. There is between the page and the performance, between the
words as written out and the echo each carries when heard aloud, a transfor-
mative polysemy, one that, thankfully, keeps Jawbreaker very much alive.
Major Jackson picks the Fugees’ “How Many Mics” (1996). “Problem with no
man / Before black, I’m first human / Appetite to write like Frederick Douglass
with a slave hand.” The above excerpt from “How Many Mics,” one of the tight-
est cuts on the Fugees’ classic and impactful album The Score, has graced and
blessed my writing space for nearly twenty years now and served as an exam-
ple of how allusion and metaphor can harness and expose deeper levels of
meaning. Of the talented and distinctive trio members whose cypher-like, im-
provisatory rhyming skills turned them into household names overnight,
Wyclef, Lauryn Hill, and Pras, it is Wyclef who slips this bit of subtle black
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

history onto the album and in one of their most successful tracks. Emcees and
poets either live or die by metaphor or allusion. In the best-case scenario, meta-
phors and allusions create bridges, reaffirming shared knowledge, and tap
into a reader or listener’s awareness and consciousness, or at worst, they can
leave them hanging by their sheer unfamiliarity and novelty. No matter the
genre of music, rock, hip-hop, or R&B, I have always gravitated towards those
lyricists who reference history, literature, or current events: as a teenager, I
thrilled in recognizing that U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” was a direct address

of the Troubles in Ireland or that the Cure’s “Killing an Arab” was a lyric in
the persona of Meursault, Albert Camus’s protagonist in the novel The
Stranger. I guess listening to one of my mother’s favorite Marvin Gaye albums,
What’s Going On, encouraged me to demand more from song lyrics. It could be
said Wyclef built his reputation as a rapper by name-dropping, showcasing his
wide range of allusions, and in “How Many Mics,” they are plentiful: by the
time he has finished his portion of the song, he plays golf with David Sonnen-
berg; runs through Crown Heights screaming “Mazel tov”; makes deals with
Tommy Mottola; wishes to survive like Seal in the song “Crazy”; notices
drug fiends dance like John Travolta in the movie Grease; and narrates once
getting hit by Guinness stout. But it is his reference to the famous slave
narrative The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass that resonates most
with me. I have always felt that hip-hop, like poetry, is a question of liberty
attained through literacy, one of creation and maintenance of style that sings
an individual’s life. To express oneself in words on a page or in a song is one of
the highest acts of freedom. As an enslaved descendant of Africans in Amer-
ica, Douglass yearned for freedom, and like many black folk, found learning
how to read and write the ticket toward a greater self-awareness and indepen-
dence. Douglass not only writes himself into freedom but writes himself into
existence, inscribes his humanity. That ongoing hunger among black folk, and
indeed, in all of us, is reflected in Wyclef ’s words of immense power, yet said so
succinctly and wittily, I might add.
Adrian Matejka picks Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” (1997). “When I am
king, you will be first against the wall / With your opinion, which is of no con-
sequence at all.” Sometimes, Thom Yorke’s lyrics are deeply encoded and need
musical gestures to open up for the listener. But other times, as with “Para-
noid Android” and many of the songs on OK Computer, the lyrics are so tight
and generous to their disconnected, pre-Millennium listeners that no musical
exposition is necessary. Yorke’s false bravado in these lyrics captured my frus-
trations and insecurities (back then and now) with being housed in our amor-
phous, digital neighborhoods. And when he lingers on “consequence” so that
each of the three syllables become their own musical continent, the contradic-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

tions in self-fulfillment and community get cracked wide open.

Julie Carr picks Cake’s “Short Skirt/Long Jacket” (2001). John McCrea sings
through my car and through my son who is singing along. He’s seventeen. This
song, he says, is a lesson in negative space. There’s that break, that longgggg
silence just after the first “longgggg jacket”—it’s the Citibank lit up late, the
empty moment between swiping your card to unlock the door and the door un-
locking. There’s the little exhale after the next “long jacket,” like the breath
between high school and college when you’re riding shotgun with your mom but

almost done. There’s that gap between McCrea’s “I want a girl” and the back-
up’s “hey, ho,” “na-na na na na,” which is the space between being the boy
dreaming a girl and being the woman who once was one. Then there’s the empty
space at the back of the throat, what we named “flat affect” just when he was
born, those Citibank years, those temp years, those liquid years strolling on
even flatter Brooklyn streets. And then finally there’s that nothing, that rest
or that dead space, when the song just cuts right off and the boy is gone.

The Eleven Chapter Illustrations: Leland Chapin’s Liner Notes

When first conceiving the book, I knew I wanted some visual accompaniment to the
language and the sound of pop music. I approached a friend, the artist Leland Chapin,
with the following proposition: listen to a handful of songs from the book and inter-
pret them as image. I drew inspiration from an unlikely source: sixteenth-century
German woodcuts. The Nuremberg Prints captured the music and the revelry of
tavern culture and were intended for everyday people, not just elite art collectors.
Leland proved more than up to the task, bringing unexpected insight and a deep
sense of soul to his rich illustrations. Below you’ll find his notes for all the images
that begin the chapters.

Guns N’ Roses, “Welcome to the Jungle” (1987). My father is an anthropolo-

gist who works with indigenous peoples. I’ve had many adventures walking
with him through rainforests in Panama, Belize, and Colombia. These images
sprang to mind when listening to GNR’s sonic jungle. I envisioned an intimate
concert on a dreamy stage filled with clouds, intended only for the wildest
animals.
Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi” (1970). Joni warns her listeners to slow down
and listen to Mother Nature. It brought to mind family farms and a bygone
era in which many of us lived closer to nature— before we paved paradise to
put up a parking lot.
Marvin Gaye, “What’s Going On” (1971). These lyr ics were a call to action
then, and they remain so today. I wanted the image to capture Marvin’s inner
turmoil as well as the outer turmoil that surrounded him then, that surrounds
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

us now.
Jimi Hendrix, “Purple Haze” (1967). Legend holds that the song was not in-
tended as a drug allegory, but rather as a chronicle of a vivid dream Hendrix
had in which he found himself under the sea, lost in the purple haze of jelly-
fish. I wanted to capture that fanciful image.
The Rolling Stones, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” (1965). The Golden Ratio
is apparent throughout the universe, from the formation of galaxies to the
growth of plants and the structure of the human body. It lent itself quite natu-
rally to illustrating the Stones’ uncanny longevity.

Stevie Wonder, “Higher Ground” (1973). I always thought of those lyrics like
the layers in tiramisu: he arrays the strata of society, illuminating our inter-
dependence. I wanted to portray those layers in the image, with Stevie’s vi-
brant energy radiating from the center.
Jay Z & Kanye West, “No Church in the Wild” (2011). This song conjures im-
agery of everything from gods and kings to faceless mobs of protestors. Heavy
breathing, animals growling and screeching—it hits your ears in waves. Ex-
ploring it visually brought me to a kind of fractured stained glass style of col-
lage and drawing.
Aretha Franklin, “Respect” (1967). Aretha is the Queen of Soul. I wanted the
illustration to capture her regal bearing as well as her deep spirituality. It
might sound funny, but I kept thinking of her as a kind of musical Jedi. What
you see is the result.
Amy Winehouse, “Rehab” (2006). This drawing represents the idea of Amy
Winehouse as a deeply inventive and original vocalist who felt pressured to
become a commodity.
Bob Dylan, “Talkin’ New York” (1962). The one-man band: songwriter, poet,
and enigma. I first encountered Dylan’s music in college. Years later, as an art
teacher I analyzed his watercolor paintings with my students. Here, I tried to
capture his independence as a young artist.
Prince, “When Doves Cry” (1984). Prince’s song has always evoked in my
mind the brilliant title of Maya Angelou’s first autobiography, I Know Why the
Caged Bird Sings. Perfectly gender fluid, he was both handsome and beauti-
ful. A man of faith and of principle, I tried to make his image as monumental
as his legacy.

CHAPTER TWO: READING

Out of the Blue: Ten Songs Supposedly Written in Ten Minutes (or So)
A striking number of songwriters claim to have composed some of their most famous
songs in ten minutes. It’s almost always ten minutes, not five or seven or fifteen. Maybe
this is just an example of artists playing into the mythos of creative genius, the idea of
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

lightning-strike inspiration that’s been with us at least since the Enlightenment.

But what if we take these songwriters at their word? What are the mechanics of
composing in so little time a classic like Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” or Al Green’s
“Let’s Stay Together”? The Welsh theorist Raymond Williams posits about literature
that the key to creative practice is “the rare capacity to articulate and to form, to make
latencies actual and momentary insights permanent.” Perhaps artists are able to
write these songs with such speed because they have been writing them all along—not
explicitly, but through cultivating their sense for syllables and sounds in the song-
writer’s craft. It really comes down to what constitutes writing a song—whether we

start the stopwatch at the point at which the words begin to take final form or at
which the intimations of musical ideas begin coalescing in the mind.
Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler explains the whole ten-minute song mystery in his own
inimitable way: “When a song comes to you and you write it in ten minutes, you
think, There it is. Dropped in our laps like a stork dropping a baby. It was always
there. The song. On the inside . . . I just had to get rid of the placental crap that was
around it. Because at the end of the day, who really wrote that? If Dylan were here,
he would tell you in his laid-back Bobness, ‘Well, now where would it come from?’
Out of the blue, lines come to you.”

Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller on composing the Coasters’ “Yakety Yak”
(1958). “ ‘Take out the papers and the trash!’ Just like that, I yelled back, ‘Or
you don’t get no spending cash!’ The tune just demanded two-part harmony;
ten minutes later, ‘Yakety Yak’ was born.”
Bob Dylan, “Blowin’ in the Wind” (1963). “I wrote ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ in
ten minutes, just put words to an old spiritual, probably something I learned
from Car ter Family records. That’s the folk tradition. You use what’s been
handed down.”
The Rolling Stones, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” (1965). In its assemblage
of the 500 greatest songs of all time, Rolling Stone magazine offered the fol-
lowing: “Two decades later, Jagger admitted that ‘Satisfaction’ was ‘my view
of the world, my frustration with every thing.’ Inspired by that riff and the
title line, also Richards’ idea, Jagger wrote the words—a litany of disgust with
‘America, its advertising syndrome, the constant barrage’—in 10 minutes, by
the motel pool the day after Richards’ dream.”
Irving Caesar, “You Can Dance with Any Girl at All” from No, No, Na-
nette (1970). “Vincent [Youmans] and I went home that night and in about
ten minutes I wrote ‘You Can Dance with Any Girl at All’— I can write very
fast when it hits me. Sometimes lousy, sure, but always fast. What the hell,
[George] Gershwin and I wrote ‘Swanee’ [1919] in about eleven minutes
flat!”
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

John Denver, “Annie’s Song” (1974). The song came to Denver in 1974 while
he was on a ski lift. “In the ten minutes it took to reach the top of the moun-
tain, the song was there. I skied back down, drove home, went up to my office,
and learned the song on the guitar,” he recalls in his memoir.
ZZ Top, “Tush” (1975). Dusty Hill wrote “Tush” in ten minutes on tour during
a soundcheck.
The Clash, “48 Hours” (1977). Mick Jones recalls how he and Joe Strummer
composed the song: “We went upstairs and wrote ‘48 Hours’ in about ten min-
utes flat,” Jones recalls. “Joe always called it hacking or tailoring.”

Elvis Costello and the Attractions, “Everyday I Write the Book” (1983).
Costello was shocked to see this song, which he had “written for a lark in ten
minutes,” finding success on the Billboard charts. It was his first hit in the
United States.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “Southern Accents” (1985). “It’s a funny
song,” Petty told Bill Flanagan. “I didn’t think about it when I was writing it.
It’s one of those that just came in very quickly, almost word for word, in min-
utes. I remember it was real late and this song came down. I turned on my
cassette and just played it on the piano and the lyr ics were just off the top of
my head.”
Young Thug, “Danny Glover” (2013). “I did a song in eight minutes,” Young
Thug told Dazed. “I thought everybody could write songs that fast. But work-
ing with a lot of them, they don’t. Wayne and Drake, it takes them so long to
do a song. I understand why, because they want it to be perfect. But I think I
can do a perfect song in ten minutes . . . I did ‘Danny Glover’ in eight minutes.”

CHAPTER THREE: LISTENING

Seven Salient Oddities
The poetry scholar Helen Vendler asks her students to identify salient oddities when
reading poems. A salient oddity is some feature of the composition that at once com-
pels attention and defies initial understanding. Identifying such moments often pro-
vides a valuable point of critical and conversational departure. With song lyrics and
recordings, spotting salient oddities is one way of coming to terms with the mysteri-
ous and ineffable qualities in the music. The following examples are drawn from my
own listening life. I hope that they’ll prompt your own curiosity, too.

The Coasters, “ Little Egypt (Ying-Yang)” (1961). The Rock & Roll Hall of
Famers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller scored a string of hits with the Coast-
ers, most notably “Yakety Yak” in 1958. On the lesser-known “ Little Egypt”
they pulled out all the lyric and production stops on what Stoller called their
“comic playlet,” which includes a carnival barker and the sounds of “seven kids”
singing “gitchy-gitchy.” The “kids,” whose high-pitched voices we hear from
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

2:20 until the song’s close, were actually all voiced by Stoller himself. “[Sound
engineer] Tommy Dowd slowed the tape down to half speed,” he revealed in
his joint autobiography with Leiber. “I recorded over the last refrain so, played
at normal speed, my voice was an octave higher. I sounded like one of the Chip-
munks.”
The Beatles, “I Am the Walrus” (1967). “Walrus” is pastiche. Resolved to con-
found even the most committed overanalyzers, John Lennon set out to layer
the recording with so many sounds, so many shards of lyric language, that no
one could possibly conceive a coherent reading of the song. The song contains

many salient oddities, from the lyric (“Sitting on a cornflake, waiting for the
van to come”) to the sonic (Lennon’s distorted vocal tone, the result of sound
engineer Geoff Emerick’s suggestion that Lennon use a poor-quality micro-
phone). Lennon later revealed that “I Am the Walrus” was one of his favorite
tracks “ because it’s one of those that has enough little bitties going to keep you
interested even a hundred years later.” One of those little bitties comes near
the recording’s end, when strange voices push through the mix. A keen ear will
discern lines from Shakespeare’s King Lear, which were recorded directly from
a BBC radio broadcast as Ringo Starr tuned the dial.
Crosby, Stills & Nash, “Marrakesh Express” (1969). David Crosby mumbles
something indiscernible at the beginning of the song. It would seem to be gib-
berish, though it effectively conjures a certain sense of exoticism in a song that
marvels at the sights and sounds of an unfamiliar place.
Guns N’ Roses, “Paradise City” (1987). A minute and nineteen seconds into
the original studio recording of the song a whistle blares out, igniting a blis-
tering guitar riff. It works. It’s something that one learns to anticipate after a
few listenings. But why does it work?
Oasis, “Wonderwall” (1995). At last count, the group “Noel Gallagher’s Cough
at the Start of ‘Wonderwall’ ” boasts some 340 followers on Facebook. Undoubt-
edly, many more of the millions who purchased (What’s the Story) Morning
Glory?, the band’s 1995 album on which the song appeared, have paused to
puzzle over the small moment as well. On Morning Glory, the cough actually
comes at the end of the previous track, “Roll with It,” though on subsequent
compilation albums it appears at the beginning of “Wonderwall” instead. Why
does it matter? Because it’s just the sort of detail— seemingly casual, offhand—
that is likely the result of certain care on someone’s part.
Foo Fighters, “Everlong” (1997). What sounds like a telephone conversation—
muted, crackling, and mostly incomprehensible— breaks into the song just
after the second-to-last pass through the chorus (3:03–3:25). The words, low
in the mix, create a pleasing dynamics in a song that spends so much of its
time so loud. The whispered words, especially conspicuous for half of the
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

twenty-two-second span when the only supporting instrument is an electric

guitar, have confounded attentive listeners since the album’s release. Some of
the mystery was lifted, however, when the band revealed that lead singer Dave
Grohl scrambled three recordings of his voice: reading a love letter, a techni-
cal manual, and a story about the father of a studio technician. Of course, lis-
teners are still left to puzzle over the work that section does in the song.
D’Angelo and the Vanguard, “ Really Love” (2014). The first voice we hear
isn’t D’Angelo’s but that of an unidentified woman speaking Spanish. Her
voice is set low enough in the mix that not all her words are clearly discern-

ible. Enough are clear, though, to spark one’s curiosity, and to evoke a sense
of her complicating counternarrative to D’Angelo’s lithe love lyric. The mys-
tery woman, it turns out, is Gina Figueroa, a Nuyorican artist whom the
website remezcla.com tracked down for an interview. “I sat face-to-face with
him and recited my spoken word to him,” Figueroa recalls. “I told him about
our love story. That was like my poem and my story to him.” Her spoken
contribution adds texture, meaning, and feeling to the Grammy-winning
song.

CHAPTER FOUR: RHYTHM

Five Songs with Dummy Lyrics That Became Actual Lyrics
Often songwriters fashion dummy lyrics as rhythmic, syllabic, and melodic place-
holders for the finished words of the recorded song. For most songwriters— and cer-
tainly for most Billboard hit songwriters—it is imperative that the lyrics sound
right before one troubles about what they mean. A list of songs follows in which all
or part of the recorded lyric is retained from the dummy lyrics. Such lyrics provide
us with an occasion to explore just how much or how little sense a pop song must
make to be appealing. What do the dummy lyrics do, what emotions do they gener-
ate, that other words might otherwise fail to achieve?

Irving Caesar, “Tea for Two” (1924)

Paul Anka, “Diana” (1957)

The Crystals, “Da Doo Ron Ron” (1963)

Burt Bacharach, “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” (1969)

Common, “The Light” (2000)

What the Silence Said: Twenty-Six Pauses in Pop Songs

Silence can say the song has ended, or that it is about to commence. It can signal
that something’s gone wrong, or that something irrepressible is coming back to life.
One of the most memorable chapters in Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize–winning
2010 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad consists entirely of a PowerPoint presenta-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

tion entitled “ Great Rock and Roll Pauses” put together by one of her characters,
the twelve-year- old Alison Blake. She identifies thirteen songs, from the Zombies’
“Time of the Season” to Garbage’s “Supervixen,” that employ some kind of a pause
in the music and the singing. About Jimi Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady,” she writes: “An-
other great early pause: 2 seconds long, coming 2:23 seconds into a 3:19-minute-long
song. But this one isn’t total silence; we can hear Jimi breathing in the background.”
What’s so evocative about this passage, both in and out of the context of the novel, is
the manner in which it displays the fundamental spirit of fandom: a joyous obses-
sion over the details.

Inspired by Egan and her character, I offer some additions to Alison’s list. In some
of these songs, the silence serves as a sonic surprise— catching things up in mid-
sequence. In others, it marks a false ending, a makeshift dam that the music soon
floods through. I’ve only included songs that come to rest in complete silence for a
second or more. Therefore, I’ve not listed EMF’s “Unbelievable” or Van Halen’s “Loss
of Control,” where the silence is too short; or the famous pause in Whitney Houston’s
rendition of “I Will Always Love You,” where one still hears the decay of the synthe-
sized strings in the space where her voice builds up for its triumphant return. Here
are the thirteen songs from Goon Squad followed by thirteen of my own selections.

The Four Tops, “Bernadette” (1967)

Jimi Hendrix, “Foxy Lady” (1967)

The Zombies, “Time of the Season” (1968)

Led Zeppelin, “Good Times, Bad Times” (1969)

The Doobie Brothers, “Long Train Runnin’” (1973)

David Bowie, “Young Americans” (1975)

The Police, “Roxanne” (1978)

George Michael, “Faith” (1987)

NOFX, “Please Play This Song on the Radio” (1992)

Garbage, “Supervixen” (1995)

Semisonic, “Closing Time” (1998)

The Frames, “Mighty Sword” (2001)

An Horse, “Rearrange Beds” (2009)

The Young Rascals, “Good Lovin’” (1966). An extended pause (1:58–2:00) and
an emphatic return to song promise that the band is irrepressible. They’ll be
with you all night, or for two minutes, thirty-one seconds—whichever comes
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

first.
INXS, “Never Tear Us Apart” (1987). The first two times coming out of the
chorus, Michael Hutchence’s title words give way to silence, at 00:49–00:51 and
again at 1:48–1:50.
Roxette, “The Look” (1988). “And I go la la la la la. . . .” A suffocating silence
(3:09–3:11) is relieved by the hook.
Fugazi, “Waiting Room” (1988). Twenty-two seconds in, things go silent for
more than three seconds (00:22–00:25.5)—the song seems over as soon as it

starts. Soon sound comes rushing back. This gambol sets us up for the sur-
prise of the song’s close, where the music stops just as abruptly, but this time
never to return.
Ween, “Captain Fantasy” (1991). What sounds like an acoustic demo for the
actual song stops playing, the bass lagging behind for a pulse, then the song
proper begins after a protracted span of silence (00:19–00:22). With twenty
seconds left, the song fades out and the acoustic demo/rehearsal returns to close
the song in symmetry.
Lyle Lovett, “I’ve Been to Memphis” (1992). In this song, silence signals
copia— the band’s incessant urge to play on. An extended pause (2:35–2:38)
opens into a series of jazz-inflected solos, then Lovett returns at 3:11 for an-
other round of singing. Things seem to be wrapping up around the four-minute
mark, and we get a two-second pause before the song continues with a piano
solo that fades but never resolves into silence again. The band plays on into
infinity.
Aerosmith, “Livin’ on the Edge” (1993). Steven Tyler tells us he “would rather
be hangin on,” but the music does not, stopping abruptly on that final word.
From 3:26 to 3:30 we get a silence that is not silence, like the echoing white
noise of a seashell cupped to the ear, before the bass drum strikes four times,
signaling a return to screeching sound.
Nine Inch Nails, “March of the Pigs” (1994). “Now doesn’t that make you feel
better?” Trent Reznor asks us, his voice trailing off on the last syllable until
1:20, when a piano chord holds on four seconds longer before giving into two
seconds of silence (1:24–1:26), which can no longer hold back the explosion of
sound that follows it. At 2:32, Reznor returns to the same line, but this time
the song gives way to silence for good.
Green Day, “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” (1997). We encounter two
stops and starts at the very beginning of the track. I suppose this studied im-
perfection suggests the band’s DIY sincerity, a pose more than a fact of life.
The Strokes, “Hard to Explain” (2001). The frenetic jam cuts out just long
enough (2:06–2:08) for you to glance down to see if your earbuds got discon-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

nected.
Bright Eyes, “False Advertising” (2002). “Now all anyone’s listening for are
the mistakes,” Conor Oberst sings before silence that seems to give his critics
just what they want. At 2:07 a woman’s voice breaks in—“Oh, I’m sorry”—to
which Oberst replies, “No, it’s ok. It’s ok.” At 2:12, he counts the song back in
(“1-2-3-1-2-3”). The break, a planned mistake, compounds the song’s irony: it’s
meant to sound spontaneous and unadorned, but the whole thing is planned
and composed.

Queens of the Stone Age, “You Think I Ain’t Worth a Dollar, but I Feel Like
a Millionaire” (2002). A textbook example of the false ending, going silent from
2:38 to 2:42 of a 3:13 song before the music uncoils itself again in a frenzy of
churning bass, guitar, drums, and Nick Oliveri’s guttural “uh!” My friend
Douglas Kearney prefers their false ending a few tracks later on the same
album, on “Song for the Dead,” where the band pulls up short from 5:09 to 5:12
before coming back for forty seconds more.
The Distillers, “Drain the Blood” (2003). At 2:02 the background vocals and
chugging instrumentation cease, leaving only Brody Dalle singing “I’ll make
it yours, so here we go” (2:02–2:04). The silence that follows (2:05–2:06) is
enough to make us believe the song has ended, but back come voice and in-
struments at 2:07 with the chorus.

CHAPTER FIVE: RHYME

Fifteen Lyrics That Effectively Rhyme “Moon” with “June”
Since Tin Pan Alley days, the perfect rhyme pair of “moon” and “June” has come to
stand for the path of compositional least resistance. In fact, the lyrics written to
disparage the rhyme pair as clichéd are now far more familiar than the ones that
invoked the rhyme in the first place. The songs below follow another strategy. Each
lyric has unlocked some way to employ the rhyme pair in a way that is still invigo-
rating and thoughtful. Sometimes this means embracing the cliché. With others
it means imagining the words’ relation outside of a rhymed couplet. In still others
it means rendering their rhyme relation almost inaudible by enlisting the words in
other poetic functions. Together, these lyrics demonstrate that even exhausted rhymes
can find a second wind if the song is right.

Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Suzie Q” (1968). From 2:30 to 2:47 the band
repeats the words “moon” and “June,” though it sounds more like a mantra
than a lyric. “I was kind of poking fun at Tin Pan Alley, how they’d use all
these simple words that rhymed,” the singer and songwriter John Fogerty
recalls.

Now many moons and many Junes

Have passed since we made land

Procol Harum, “A Salty Dog” (1969)

They fell asleep in the sand underneath the Florida moon

In June
Lola counted rainbows; Frankie counted sheep
Jimmy Buffett, “Frank and Lola” (1985)

Sister killed her baby ’cause she couldn’t afford to feed it

And we’re sending people to the moon

September my cousin tried reefer for the very first time

Now he’s doing horse—it’s June
Prince, “Sign o’ the Times” (1987)

Ain’t gonna give ya no moon in June

Never see you, it’ll be too soon
Motörhead, “Shut You Down” (1991)

Bye, June
I’m going to the moon
It better be by June
Because I’m going to the moon
Smashing Pumpkins, “Bye June” (1991)

Ooh, sneaky moon, ooh, sneaky moon

June bug buzzin on the front porch light
Tanya Tucker, “Sneaky Moon” (1993)

Underlying depression
Have to crawl into my room
Underlying depression
Don’t want to know about the moon in June
Van Morrison, “Underlying Depression” (1995)

Moons in June, I’ve given up on that stuff

Arms have charms, but I’ve no hope of falling in love
The Magnetic Fields, “With Whom to Dance?” (1995)

The piercing, radiant moon

The storming of poor June
System of a Down, “Spiders” (1998)

Or maybe I should get a farm in southern France

Where the winds are wispy and the villagers dance
And you and I, we’d sleep beneath a moon
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Moon in June, and sleep ‘til noon

Lou Reed, “Modern Dance” (2000)

Was he worried we might go too far

Maybe wind up rhyming “moon” and “June”
Elton John, “Tinderbox” (2006)

It’s a man on the moon and fireflies in June

And kids selling lemonade
Rodney Atkins, “It’s America” (2009)

The new June moon shootin on a blue lagoon

Shoo, as DOOM zooms in on a platoon
MF DOOM on J. Dilla, “Sniper Elite” (2009)

So once you’ve approved and the money shifts

You and your band on the moon June twenty-fifth
Open Mike Eagle, “Jon Lovitz
(Fantasy Booking Yarn)” (2014)

Seven Ghost Rhymes

In a ghost rhyme the songwriter leads the listener to anticipate a particular rhyme
word (often an explicit one) only to substitute another word or sound in its place. I
call them ghost rhymes because the rhyming word our mind conjures hovers unex-
pressed over what we actually hear. On her 2010 song “Cherry Red,” for instance,
the Norwegian rocker Ida Maria threads a ghost rhyme throughout the chorus, re-
peating it a half dozen times in under three minutes. “I’m gonna wear my cherry
red / I’m gonna give you lotsa . . .” She never completes the rhyme as our ear expects
it, by turns letting the music fill the space of the unexpressed word, or interjecting
the anodyne phrase “room in my bed,” or breaking off into a strange spoken interlude.
Below you’ll find songs that exploit the potentialities of ghost rhyme. Some singers
provide a sanitized rhyme alternative to the rhyme the lyrics imply. Others devise
some other element of sound to take the rhyme’s place.

Every time I sing, you say I’m off key

Why can’t you see how much this hurts me?
With your perfect beauty and your perfect pitch
You’re a perfect . . . terror
Antonio Carlos Jobim (Lyrics by Gene Lees), “Desafinado
(Off- Key)” (1967)

So, as this rap is winding down

It’s plain to see we wear the crown
You know Anthrax is number one
But we don’t care, we just wanna have . . . a festival!
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Anthrax, “I’m the Man” (1987)

Well, I took my baby uptown

Well, to show her that I had some class
The drink tab, I could not pay
You know, I ended the date with a foot up my . . . [horn squeal]
Royal Crown Revue, “Datin’ with No Dough” (1996)

Held you when you were sick; even . . . [drum hit]

Kelis, “Caught out There” (1999)

If you save yourself for marriage you’re a bore

If you don’t save yourself for marriage you’re a horr . . . ible person
Kacey Musgraves, “Follow Your Arrow” (2013)

I’ll be sleeping on the left side of the bed

Open doors for me and you might get some . . . kisses
Meghan Trainor, “Dear Future Husband” (2015)

I would never go and chat what we talkin about

You the only one I know could fit it all in her . . . Man!
Drake on DJ Khaled, “For Free” (2016)

Eight Triple (and Two Quadruple) Rhymes

Triple rhymes—that is, rhymes of words with three syllables— are a far more varied
practice in song lyrics than in page-born poetry, where they are usually reserved only
for light or comic verse. Because song lyrics live primarily in sound, the strangeness
and artificiality of triple rhymes on the page are often normalized. To complete such
rhymes, poets and songwriters sometimes pair a multisyllabic word with phrases
comprised of two or more shorter (often monosyllabic) words, a practice known as mo-
saic rhyme. In per formance, triple rhymes— and the occasional quadruple rhymes,
and more— marry rhyme with rhythm, dominating the pattern of the line. As a
consequence, the tone of such rhymes can run from the slightly sardonic to the clever
to the downright somber. On Rush’s “Digital Man,” for instance, Neil Peart leads
listeners through a series of multisyllabic rhymes that together shape the sound of
the song, rhyming “observation” with “conversation,” “anesthetic” with “and syn-
thetic,” “information” with “adaptation,” and more. Below are a few examples of the
varied uses of multisyllabic rhymes in pop lyrics.

On that famous thoroughfare

With their noses in the air
Irving Berlin, “Puttin’ On the
Ritz” (1929)
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Funny how my memory skips

While looking over manuscripts
Of unpublished rhyme
Drinking my vodka and lime
Simon & Garfunkel, “Hazy
Shade of Winter” (1966)

So happy together
And how is the weather?
The Turtles, “Happy Together” (1967)

He starts to shake and cough

Just like the old man in
That book by Nabokov
The Police, “ Don’t Stand So Close to Me” (1980)

You consider me a young apprentice

Caught between the Scylla and Charybdis
The Police, “Wrapped around Your Finger” (1983)

Music can be such a revelation

Dancing around, you feel the sweet sensation
Madonna, “Into the Groove” (1985)

The landlord says your rent is late

He may have to litigate
Bobby McFerrin, “ Don’t Worry, Be Happy” (1988)

Dead in the middle of Little Italy

Little did we know that we riddled two middlemen who didn’t do diddly
Big Pun, “Twinz (Deep Cover ’98)” (1998)

What are we to Heart Huckabee, art fuckery suddenly

Aesop Rock, “None Shall Pass” (2007)

Thought that you were in it for the paper

Never thought I’d take you serious
Now I need you, not a moment later
Losing it, I’m so delirious
Justin Bieber, “No Pressure” (2015)

Twenty Songs without Rhyme

When songs don’t contain rhyme, it’s usually for a reason. Sometimes it is out of
specific design— a way, for instance, for songwriters to test their skills by imposing
an artificial formal constraint. At such times, the lyricist often devises means of
compensating for the loss of rhyme by inventing other kinds of sonic patterns and
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

repetitions to satisfy the ear’s desire for rhyme’s ordering pleasure. Other times
the absence of rhyme is a direct consequence of per formance style— the more con-
versational and stream-of-consciousness the lyric, the less likely it is to display pat-
terned rhyme. We don’t miss rhyme as much here because our ears hear the lyrics as
something akin to speech. Still other times rhyme is absent because, well, the songs
are undisciplined or just aren’t very good. Rhyme’s absence here is a sign of the
lyricist’s resignation in the face of the challenge of craft.
Rhyming effectively and naturally is a difficult thing to do. As difficult as rhym-
ing is, though, not rhyming while still writing a good song might be the most diffi-

cult thing of all. Some of the songs listed below use other forms of repetition to take
up the work that rhyme has abandoned. Dashboard Confessional uses a heavy
dose of anaphora, repeating “And she” at the beginning of successive lines
throughout the song. Songs can also capture a conversational tone, like Tracy
Chapman’s “Fast Car” or Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner,” which render the ear less
likely to hear the strangeness of rhyme’s absence. Many songs employ identity, such
as Kate Bush’s “ Under the Ivy,” which includes the lines “Go right to the rose / Go
right to the white rose.” Others use alliteration. Some songs verge on rhyme, but
refuse the comfort of the couplet, like Sonic Youth’s subtle subversion in “Skip Tracer”
when Kim Gordon sings “L.A. is more confusing now than anywhere I’ve ever been
to / I’m from New York City, breath it out and let it in,” the “to” denying our ears an
easy end rhyme (been/in). In the fleeting seconds of a 4:28 song that otherwise ab-
jures rhyme, R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe offers these simple, playful rhymes in “Losing
My Religion”: “Try, cry / Why try?”

John Blackburn, “Moonlight in Vermont” (1944)

Woody Guthrie (with Martin Hoffman), “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los

Gatos)” (1961)

Simon & Garfunkel, “America” (1968)

The Velvet Underground, “Stephanie Says” (1968)

The Beatles, “Across the Universe” (1970)

Suzanne Vega, “Tom’s Diner” (1987)

R.E.M., “Losing My Religion” (1991)

Björk, “The Anchor Song” (1993)

Sonic Youth, “Skip Tracer” (1995)

Dar Williams, “The Pointless, Yet Poignant, Crisis of a Co- Ed” (1996)

Ben Folds Five, “Cigarette” (1997)

Kate Bush, “ Under the Ivy” (1997)

Radiohead, “Karma Police” (1997)

Tracy Chapman, “Another Sun” (2002)

Kelly Clarkson, “ Because of You” (2004)

Rise Against, “The Approaching Curve” (2006)

Radiohead, “Jigsaw Falling into Place” (2007)

Bon Iver, “For Emma” (2008)

PJ Harvey, “In the Dark Places” (2011)

Coheed and Cambria, “You Got Spirit, Kid” (2015)

Six Transformative Rhymes

Transformative rhymes are one response to rhyme’s constraint— born of resignation
or inspired invention. The singing or rapping voice has the capacity to bend syllables
and sounds, making two words sound like rhymes when they actually aren’t. I call
these transformative rhymes because the performer reshapes the sound of one or
more of the words to make them meet in rhyme. Transformative rhymes go further
even than standard wrenched rhymes where, for instance, a poet might rhyme “lie”
with “poetry” as W. H. Auden does in “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” Rap may be the most
familiar domain for such a practice, but it is widespread across genres. Here are a
handful of examples in which lyricists respond to rhyme’s challenge by breaking
words apart and refashioning them to fit their own sense of sound.

Well, you wanna be loved? Huh. Hey, that’s okay

’Cause it falls in line right with my sexuali-tay
TLC, “Baby- Baby- Baby” (1992)

Don’t want to be your mama

Just want to make you come-a
Andre 3000 of OutKast, “Hey Ya!” (2003)

Good does not come without pain

Meaning, before it gets better, it’s gon get worse
Like my homies on the sick side still dyin over turf
That don’t belong to urse, I mean us. . . .
Khujo Goodie from OutKast, “Reset” (2003)

When they see him, whips be European

If you’re a ten chances you’re with him
If you’re a five you know you riding with them
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Sick with the pen . . .

Jay Z, “La- La- La (Excuse Me Miss Again)” (2003)

Don’t ever fix your lips like collagen

And say something when you gon end up apologin’
Kanye West, “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” (2007)

I say you the bestest, lean in for a big kiss

Lana del Rey, “Video Games” (2011)

CHAPTER SIX: FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE

Twelve Acts of Alliteration
In the poet’s toolbox, alliteration is more ax than scalpel. The repetition of an initial
consonant across several words can often lead to hackneyed lyrics. Nonetheless, when
done with a certain restraint or conscious abandon it can prove a pleasing means of
patterning. Joanna Newsom takes the latter course on “The Book of Right- On,”
where she embraces alliteration’s artifice in a playful run of six: “My fighting fame
is fabled / And fortune finds me fit and able.” In the instances that follow, the songs
harness the small music of consonant repetition, often yoking it with rhythmic
stress to create moments of sonic interest.

And I’d let that lonesome whistle

Blow my blues away
Johnny Cash, “Folsom Prison Blues” (1955)

The savage soldier sticks his head

In sand and then complains
Bob Dylan, “Gates of Eden” (1965)

It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day

Bobbie Gentry, “Ode to Billie Joe” (1967)

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot

Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi” (1970)

Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be

Whisper words of wisdom, let it be
The Beatles, “Let It Be” (1970)

The shifting shafts of shining weave the fabric of their dreams

Rush, “Jacob’s Ladder” (1980)

And when she shines she really shows you all she can
Duran Duran, “Rio” (1982)

He’s got a force field and a flexible plan

He’s got a date with fate in a black sedan

He plays fast forward just as long as he can
Rush, “Digital Man” (1982)

Picture perfection, pursuing paper with a passion

2Pac, “If I Die 2Nite” (1995)

Picture perfect, I paint a perfect picture

2Pac, “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted” (1996)

So I take it for a ride on a sunny summer Sunday afternoon

The Presidents of the United States of America,
“Mach 5” (1996)

Said I’m so sick of love songs, so sad and slow

Ne-Yo, “So Sick” (2006)

Eight Instances of Double Entendre to Satisfy Your Dirty Mind

Double entendre is not simply a matter of a lyric carry ing multiple meanings; one of
those meanings must be suggestive, usually of a sexual nature. It is not a matter of
a clean surface meaning and dirty hidden meaning, either. Double entendre rarely
sets out to deceive; rather, like a burlesque show, the artful concealment is part of
the titillating appeal. Given that so many pop songs are about sex anyway, it should
come as no surprise that they are also about sex when they suggest double mean-
ings. Here are some instances in which the lyric’s playful double entendre shines a
light on both sexual text and subtext.

I need a little steam-heat on my floor

Maybe I can fix things up so they’ll go
What’s the matter, hard papa?
Come on and save your mama’s soul
Bessie Smith, “I Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl” (1931)

When everybody’s tryin to sleep

I’m somewhere makin my midnight creep
Every mornin the rooster crow
Something tell me I got to go
Howlin’ Wolf, “Back Door Man” (1961)

Squeeze me, baby, ’til the juice runs down my leg

The way you squeeze my lemon, I’m gonna fall right out of bed, bed, bed,
be—yeah!
Led Zeppelin, “The Lemon Song” (1969)
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Last night I tried to tease her

I gave my love a little pinch
She said now stop that jivin
Now whip out your big ten inch
Aerosmith, “Big Ten Inch Record” (1975)

Oh my God, here you are

Prettiest thing in life I’ve ever seen

Close my eyes, what’s it like?

What’s it like inside your tamborine?
Prince, “Tamborine” (1985)

Let me know when we’re getting close

You can slide on out or we can head on down the road
Alan Jackson, “Country Boy” (2008)

Are you brave enough to let me see your peacock?

What you’re waiting for, it’s time for you to show it off
Don’t be a shy kinda guy; I’ll bet it’s beautiful
(Come on, baby, let me see what you hidin underneath)
Katy Perry, “Peacock” (2010)

It’s a stick up, no more makeup

Get that ass on the floor
Ladies, put your lipstick up
Double entendre, double entendre
Flo Rida feat. LooKas and Sage the Gemini,
“Goin’ Down for Real (GDFR)” (2015)

Repetition and Difference in the Chorus:

Third Time Breaks Your Heart
The chorus in popular music is usually defined by its constancy. Verses head off in
any number of directions, but the chorus brings us back. Some choruses, however,
change even as the words stay pretty much the same. They generate their dynamism
by the transformation that occurs around them, the new point of entry that the verse
takes back into the chorus. In this list, the novelist and diehard country music fan
Stephen Graham Jones presents songs that use this technique to elicit strong emo-
tional responses. I’ll let Stephen take it from here:

This isn’t local only to country, and certainly isn’t restricted to just the
country I grew up with, but this era of country did seem custom-fitted for
songs that use this trick. It’s that time-honored shift where a line is gone
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

through twice, more or less innocently, so you think you have the full weight
of it. But then that third verse, it wraps that line in a slightly different
context— one you should have seen coming, but are happy you didn’t, as
it allows that release any good punchline does. Except this punch, it’s in
the heart, or at least in the jar where you keep your tears. And in each of
these cases, the songwriter named the song with that line. There’s upbeat
versions, too, of course—from George Jones’s “Corvette Song” to Earl
Thomas Conley’s “Somewhere between Right and Wrong,” and clever

examples all across pop, but the Harry Chapin- esque ambush-
sentimentality paired with the “ruggedness” of steel-guitar country is ap-
parently some sort of chocolate-and-peanut-butter situation (crunchy shell,
soft center?), judging by how far each of these songs got to go. Or, how far
they took each of these artists.
Instead of quite chronological, these are ordered more from those
needing the least unpacking to those that take the form to its next level.
Note too the absence of the Highwaymen from these proceedings: no
Kris, no Waylon, no Johnny, no Willie. No Merle, either, and no Roger
Miller, no Townes van Zandt. Would this be because this format for a
song is closer to pop than “real” country— Conway Twitty is here—or was
this just a fad that passed while all these songwriters were either lost in
or kicking dope? Again, not sure, but it’s fun to think about, and a good
playlist to cue up if you’re alone in the cab, and have your darkest sun-
glasses on.

Kathy Mattea, “Where’ve You Been?” (1989)

John Conlee, “Old School” (1999)

Tim McGraw, “ Don’t Take the Girl” (1994)

Ricky Van Shelton, “Keep It between the Lines” (1991)

Confederate Railroad, “When You Leave That Way You Can Never Come
Back” (1992)

The Oak Ridge Boys, “Come On In (You Did the Best You Could Do)”
(1978)

Conway Twitty, “That’s My Job” (1987)

George Strait, “Love without End, Amen” (1990)

Collin Raye, “Love, Me” (1991) [The rare two-verse configuration]

Sawyer Brown, “The Walk” (1991) [Lots of these are dad songs, yeah]
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Martina McBride, “Independence Day” (1993) [Even this one]

Trisha Yearwood, “She’s in Love with the Boy” (1991) [Note the change of
person]

Alan Jackson, “Drive (for Daddy Gene)” (2002) [Note the leap into the
subjunctive]

Jamey Johnson, “In Color” (2008)

Eight Similes (Well, One’s a Metaphor) Gone Wrong

Similes sometimes give songwriting a bad name. They often occasion cringeworthy
comparisons, because they are obvious (see “Like a Rock”), nonsensical (see “Stay
Beautiful”), or bizarre (see “Aqualung”). Of course, one suspect simile doesn’t doom a
song. Witness Chuck Berry’s 1958 classic “Johnny B. Goode,” a veritable pop magna
carta, which describes a country boy who could play a guitar “just like a-ringin’ a
bell.” That’s either the worst pop simile ever or the best—there’s no in-between. As you’ll
see from the examples that follow, even similes that seem to go wrong can help the
song go right.

Feeling like a dead duck

Spitting out pieces of his broken luck
Jethro Tull, “Aqualung” (1971)

My mama loves me, she loves me

She get down on her knees and hug me
Oh, she love me like a rock
Paul Simon, “Loves Me Like a Rock” (1973)

I’m a shooting star leaping through the sky

Like a tiger defying the laws of gravity
I’m a racing car passing by like Lady Godiva
I’m going to go go go. There’s no stopping me
Queen, “ Don’t Stop Me Now” (1978)

Got shiny diamonds

Like the eyes of a cat in the black and blue
Something is coming for you
Dio, “Holy Diver” (1983)

Life’s an empty picture

When you’re living alone
Maybe that’s the reason
Every heart needs a home
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Donny Osmond, “Soldier of Love” (1989)

If I could draw a map of a boy

That I would like
Your résumé would shine through like a bright green light
That Dog, “Ms. Wrong” (1995)

I strap on my guitar just like a .45

I pray each night my aim is true

I’m shooting for the heart a looking in your eyes

Singin the cowboy blues
Gary Allan, “Cowboy Blues” (1999)

Corey’s eyes are like a jungle

He smiles, it’s like the radio
He whispers songs into my window
In words that nobody knows
Taylor Swift, “Stay Beautiful” (2006)

Seven Similes (Well, Three Are Metaphors) Gone Right

Figurative language is not simply about adornment. The most captivating similes in
songs appeal to the listener on multiple levels, whether in sound, image, or mean-
ing. Look for the ways that the figurative comparison illuminates some quality of
thought or feeling in its subject.

Love is a burning thing

And it makes a fiery ring
Bound by wild desire
I fell into a ring of fire
Johnny Cash, “Ring of Fire” (1963)

But my words like silent raindrops fell

And echoed in the wells of silence
Simon & Garfunkel, “The Sound of Silence” (1966)

Oh, you are in my blood like holy wine

Joni Mitchell, “A Case of You” (1971)

Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog
Where no one notices the contrast of white on white
And in between the moon and you, angels get a better view
Of the crumbling difference between wrong and right
Counting Crows, “Round Here” (1993)
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

I’m harder than me tryna park a Dodge

When I’m drunk as fuck, right next to a humongous truck
In a two- car garage
Eminem, “Forgot about Dre” (1999)

Now I’m a fat house cat

Nursing my sore blunt tongue
Watching the warm poison rats
Curl through the wide fence cracks
Iron & Wine, “Flightless Bird, American Mouth” (2007)

All of my thoughts of you

Bullets through rotten fruit
Come apart at the seams
Now I know what dying means
The National, “Graceless” (2013)

Six Examples of Antanaclasis

Antanaclasis is a rhetorical figure that works on the principle of the mirror image:
repeating a word but shifting its meaning to create a pun based in homonym— two
words that sound alike but mean different things. Most often, lyrics that employ
antanaclasis are playful and self- consciously clever. They are moments in which
the songwriter foregrounds wordplay.

I’m a man of means, by no means

King of the road
Roger Miller, “King of the Road” (1965)

But just because a record has a groove don’t make it in the groove
Stevie Wonder, “Sir Duke” (1976)

And, hey, barkeep, what’s keeping you?

Keep pouring drinks
For all these palookas
Hey, you know what I thinks?
Tom Waits, “A Sight for Sore Eyes” (1977)

I’m from the murder capital where they murder for capital
Jay Z, “Lucifer” (2003)

I ain’t as good as I once was

But I’m as good once as I ever was
Toby Keith, “As Good as I Once Was” (2005)

I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man

Jay Z on Kanye West’s “Diamonds from
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Sierra Leone (Remix)” (2005)

CHAPTER SEVEN: VOICE

Some Whispers, Some Screams
The voice is often most compelling at its extremes, the whisper and the scream. A
whisper invites intimacy and commands close attention. In sound recording, it is
often a stylized effect— something that can’t be readily reduplicated in live per for-
mance. The scream opens up a connection to the animal in woman and man, to the
primal urges and angst. It renders the listener more acutely aware of the body from

which the voice emerges. Screams are different from shouts. John Lydon ( formerly
Johnny Rotten) has been shouting for decades. AC/DC, under the vocal administra-
tions of both Bon Scott and Brian Johnson, made the scream a basic element of their
style. Paul McCartney shouts the lyrics on the Beatles’ “Twist and Shout”; he doesn’t
scream until the end (1:33–1:36). Screams can be sensual and scary; they can be
downright rock ’n’ roll and deeply soulful. You’ll find screams in obvious places—in
thrash metal, in gospel and R&B, in rock of all types. You’ll also find it in unexpected
places where the scream builds energy out of the contrasting quiet that surrounds
it. Scream’s opposite, the whisper, also holds a vital place in pop, though it is less
common. Together, whispers and screams mark out a territory of voice that reaches
below and beyond language to a register of expression otherwise unattainable.

Whispers
John & Yoko and the Plastic Ono Band, “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” (1971).
Before the music begins, Yoko Ono whispers “Happy Christmas, Kyoko”—
Kyoko is her daughter— and John Lennon whispers “Happy Christmas,
Julian”— Julian is his son.
The Rolling Stones, “Angie” (1973). Jagger sings “Let me whisper in your ear”
and then he does just that between 1:56 and 2:00, repeating Angie’s name
twice. The whisper is intimate, even invasive. It extends the mood of the
recording as a whole, which is closely mic’d and stripped down to acoustic
instruments.
The Clash, “Straight to Hell” (1982). After singing the opening two verses, Joe
Strummer begins panting into the microphone at 3:53, quickening the pace
of his breathing before spitting out “Straight to hell” (4:03–4:04) in a harsh
whisper.
The Cure, “Lullaby” (1989). Robert Smith slowly whispers “I spy / Something
beginning with an s” (00:13–00:18), luxuriating in the sibilance. We don’t hear
his voice again until 1:01.
Madonna, “Justify My Love” (1990). Madonna essentially delivers the entire
song in an amplified whisper.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Guns N’ Roses, “Estranged” (1991). Whispers are not always quiet. In this in-
stance, the whisper is actually louder than the main vocal. Its amplification
underscores Axl Rose’s desperation at this moment of the lyric on one of Guns
N’ Roses’ longest songs (9:24). Rose sings “Still talking to myself and nobody’s
home” (2:57–3:03). Then in a stage whisper, he gasps “alone” (3:05).
Michael Jackson, “In the Closet” (1991). Jackson invites one of his famous
friends, Princess Stephanie of Monaco, to whisper these lines: “ There is some-
thing I have to say to you. If you promise, I’ll understand. I cannot contain
myself when in your presence. I’m so humbled. Touch me. Don’t hide our love,

woman to man” (00:05–00:28) before producer Teddy Riley’s new jack swing
track sets in. The princess returns at 2:04–2:19, then Michael whispers back to
her at 2:35–2:42. It’s all starting to get a little uncomfortable . . . Several more
whispered exchanges follow, which I’ll let you track for yourself should you so
desire.
PJ Harvey, “Down by the Water” (1995). PJ Harvey caps a macabre narra-
tive, in which she sings as a mother who for unknown reasons seems to
have drowned her daughter, with eight repetitions of the whispered lines,
“ Little fish, big fish swimming in the water / Come back here, man. Give me
my daughter” (2:03–3:08). These whispers complicate an already ambigu-
ous plot.
Mariah Carey, “Bliss” (1999). Listeners know Carey’s voice best when it is high
and loud, reaching into the whistle register. She flaunts that here from 0:52 to
1:24, from 2:01 to 2:35, and finally from 2:54 to 4:10. The balance of the song
is comfortably in her middle register, much of it pitched as a whisper.
Ying Yang Twins, “Wait (The Whisper Song)” (2005). The Ying Yang Twins,
Kaine and D-Roc, rap the entire three-minute track in whispers. Their unsub-
tle seduction—really sexual provocation—is rendered all the more audible for
the whispered tone.
Janet Jackson, “Rock with U” (2008). Whether echoing a sung word or phrase
or interjecting another, Janet Jackson’s whispers are spoken, slow, and close.
She positions many of these whispered words in between lines and consciously
in tension with the music’s rhythm, lending them an impromptu feel. She whis-
pers “ You’re so sexy” (3:07–3:08) between two sung lines, and you believe it.
Jason Derulo, “Want to Want Me” (2015). Derulo whispers at the very begin-
ning of the song, when he reminds us of his last name—uttering it like an au-
ral graffiti tag.

Screams
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “I Put a Spell on You” (1956). This song is a 2:24
master class in all manner of grunting, hollering, wailing, whooping, and, yes,
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

screaming. Cue it up at 1:46, for instance, or at 2:17, and you’ll realize how
Hawkins earned his moniker.
Little Richard, “Jenny, Jenny” (1957). Richard’s signature “whoo” punctuates
nearly every other line in this song, which was a top-ten hit from Richard’s
debut album, though it is now overshadowed by such classics as “Tutti Frutti”
and “Long Tall Sally.” At the center of the two-minute song he lets out a
protracted scream (from 00:53 to 00:56), which melts into a sax solo. A year
later, on “Good Golly Miss Molly,” Richard reprises the pattern— accenting
his vocal delivery with wailing “whoos” and letting out one ecstatic scream

near the middle of the song, this time between 1:09 and 1:11, again ushering
in an instrumental solo.
James Brown, “I Got You (I Feel Good)” (1964). The song begins with one of
the iconic screams in recorded music. You’ll hear Brown’s scream across his
discography, from “Cold Sweat” (1967) to “The Payback” (1974), and you’ll hear
its influence in the vocal styles of other artists on this list, from Mick Jagger
to Michael Jackson, Robert Plant to Steven Tyler.
Wilson Pickett, “Land of 1000 Dances” (1966). Just after Pickett, in unison
with his background singers, belts out his now-ubiquitous “Naa na-na-na-naa
na-na-na-naa na-na-naa-na-na-naa na-na-na-naa” (00:47–00:53), he lets out a
“wow!” that stretches across a full measure (00:54–00:57).
The Doors, “The End” (1967). Jim Morrison was fond of screaming. You can
hear him doing it on “Backdoor Man” and “Light My Fire” as well, which, like
“The End,” are songs from the group’s self-titled debut LP. On “The End,” Mor-
rison interrupts a protracted, rhythmically spoken riff about a son who tells
his father that he wants to kill him to utter the following: “ Mother, I want
to . . .” (7:25–7:40). His voice trails off and then gives way to screaming, near-
indecipherable words at first, then just noise, before resolving in a melodic lilt
(7:41–7:47). The song still has four minutes remaining.
The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, “Fire” (1968). “I am the god of hellfire,”
Arthur Brown proclaims at the top. The rest of the track confirms it, building
up to the following sequence: “ You’re going to burn, burn, burn, burn, burn,
burn, burn, burn, burn, burn, . . .” then Brown’s cackle from 2:05 to 2:07, then
his scream from 2:07 to 2:16. A few final screams close the under-three-minute
track, just for good measure.
Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company, “Piece of My Heart”
(1968). Joplin sings “You know you got it” (3:28–3:30), then follows with an
open-mouthed scream (“owww!”) from 3:31 to 3:32, that’s every bit as iconic as
James Brown’s.
The Beatles, “Revolution” (1968). The guitar comes out screaming, then a
drum hit, then the voice lets out a feral wail from 00:06 to 00:08. “After a
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

first reduction,” write Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon in All

the Songs: The Story behind Every Beatles Release, “John recorded his vocal
and right away he double-tracked it and gave the song a screaming intro-
duction.”
Rolling Stones, “Gimme Shelter” (1969). This song has plenty of shouting.
Mick Jagger shouts his lyrics throughout, and background singer Merry Clay-
ton, whose vocals were a late addition to the track, meets and exceeds Jagger’s
passion on the chorus. But this list isn’t about shouting. The scream comes at

3:01 when Clayton’s pitch of emotion makes her voice break on the word “mur-
der”; it’s a sheering sound—a piercing, passing, and unmistakable shriek. Even
Mick seems to recognize it; you can hear him let out an appreciative “whoo”
right after.
The Stooges, “T.V. Eye” (1970). In the song’s first eleven seconds one hears
four varieties of scream: (1) a throaty “Lord!” (2) a shriek, (3) a yip, and (4) a
screamed phrase I can’t make out that’s really just an occasion to holler. Peri-
odically throughout the song, you hear some more screams, mostly from Iggy
Pop. This song also provides a three-second silence, from 3:22 to 3:25, worthy
of a place on another list here as well.
The Who, “ Won’t Get Fooled Again” (1971). Pete Townshend posited that
this track “screams defiance at those who feel any cause is better than no
cause, that death in a sick society is better than putting up with it, or re-
signing ourselves to wait for change.” Roger Daltrey quite literally screams
defiance between 7:45 and 7:48, rending a roughly two-minute instrumental
section.
Deep Purple, “Highway Star” (1972). Ian Gillan’s nine-second scream (00:26–
00:34) opens the track. Over the course of its sonic trajectory, it becomes louder,
fuller with additional voices, and higher in pitch, ending as a sinister siren.
Aerosmith, “Dream On” (1973). Steven Tyler, the self-dubbed Demon of Screa-
min’, may have bigger and badder screams than the ones you’ll encounter on
this classic early track. What makes these stand out, though, is the contrast
between the purity of Tyler’s natural voice here and the evidence of his emer-
gent screaming style. Listen as his pitch climbs as he repeats “dream on” (3:24–
3:33), culminating in a scream that oscillates between high and higher pitches
before thinning and eventually fading in exhaustion (3:34–3:40).
Pixies, “Tame” (1989). Black Francis alternatingly whispers and screams
throughout this short recording. Though he initially launches his vicious and
throaty screams from the word “tame” (1:34–1:35), its repetition and the in-
creasingly raw stress he places on the vowel render his screams less about what
he says and more about how he says it (1:37–1:54).
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Asphalt Ballet, “Hell’s Kitchen” (1991). We hear a good scream right off the
top at 00:04–00:11, and lead singer Gary Jeffries’s voice always seems on the
verge of screaming again.
Nirvana, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night (Unplugged)” (1994). On this
unplugged set for MTV, Kurt Cobain is uncharacteristically restrained through
the first half of the song, but the pressure is building. Between 3:49 and 3:52
he lets a burst of pressure out in a scream that starts as the word “shiver” but
ends in sheer sound beyond words.

Björk, “It’s Oh So Quiet” (1995). Björk’s unexpected, staccato screams are

especially jarring here against the other wise ordered sonic palate— “Wow!
Bam!” (00:49–00:50).
Radiohead, “Climbing Up the Walls” (1997). Thom Yorke closes the track by
repeating the line “Climbing up the walls,” beginning at 3:42. Against squeal-
ing violins, Yorke’s high-pitched melody creates an uncanny sonic atmosphere.
The word “wall” distorts into tormented screams at 4:01.
Kanye West, “I Am a God” (2013). Recent vintage Kanye likes to scream. Hear
him on 2016’s “Facts.” But his best screams, to my ear, come on Yeezus, spe-
cifically on “I Am a God.” Two screams occur between 2:11 and 2:19, becoming
choppy as they fade out and the beat returns, and four occur between 2:51
and 3:19, each of them succeeded by rapid, heavy breathing.
Alabama Shakes, “ Don’t Wanna Fight” (2015). Lead singer Brittany Howard’s
voice slides into a scream just as the singing begins, from 00:37 to 00:40. The
scream was improvised in the studio on the first take. “I didn’t think we’d
keep it,” Howard recalls. “It’s like a velociraptor scream,” says drummer Steve
Johnson. “When I first heard it, it was kinda shocking.”

And a Few Laughs . . .

Laughter in song can signal a number of things: joyful exuberance, or the staging
of such; off-the- cuff reaction, or the staging of such; a response to something hys-
terical, or just plain hysterics. “Laughing into tracks represents momentary
authority— one passed from the musician to the listener and shared by both. Laugh-
ter is a denial of artiness,” writes the critic Ben Ratliff. In several of the songs below,
one can hear what Ratliff means. With others, however, the laughter sounds less
like a denial of artiness than the thing itself— a conscious construction, a gesture of
spontaneity that is actually the product of considerable calculation. Sometimes
laughter is as light as it seems, and sometimes it portends something deeper, some-
thing darker. As Ralph Ellison reminds us, quoting Charles Baudelaire, “The wise
man never laughs but that he trembles.” In these songs, one can at times hear the
wise man, the wise woman, trembling behind the laughter.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Joe Cuba, “El Pito (I’ll Never Go Back to Georgia)” (1965). Neuyorican king
of the Boogaloo, Joe Cuba scored a crossover hit with this rowdy dance number.
Cuba borrowed the song’s signature phrase, “I’ll never go back to Georgia,”
from jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie’s “Manteca” (1947), and the anti-racist
vow captured black and brown sentiment in both eras even as it knitted per-
fectly with Cuba’s clave rhythm pattern. Raucous laughter breaks out at times
throughout the song, celebrating the groove and staving off the blues.
The Velvet Underground, “Temptation inside Your Heart” (1968). Lou Reed
giggles at 2:21 and 2:23 of a 2:30 track.

Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi” (1970). She laughs from 2:10 to 2:13 of this
2:14 track, laughing at her own play with the chorus where she sings “paved
paradise” in falsetto and “put up a parking lot” in bass.
Janis Joplin, “Mercedes Benz” (1971). Hear her famous cackle at the song’s
end, from 1:41 to 1:43.
The Gap Band, “I Don’t Believe You Want to Get Up and Dance (Oops
Upside Your Head)” (1979). If you ever want to hear a grown man giggle,
listen to this. It’s lead singer Charlie Wilson’s signature sound, and he un-
leashes it throughout this song and many others to follow. It became so
closely associated with Wilson’s style that on 1992’s “It’s Gonna Be Al-
right,” a duet between then A-list R&B crooner Aaron Hall and a down-but-
not- out Wilson, it occasions a joke. The song begins with Hall offering
heartfelt reflections over a new jack swing track: “Yo, I fi nally got a song
with my mentor. Yeah, you, Charlie.” Wilson lets out one of his hiccupped
giggles, then Hall playfully tells him, “ Don’t do that no more, man.” They both
laugh.
Ozzy Osbourne, “Crazy Train” (1980). “All aboard,” Ozzy hollers, then he guf-
faws from 00:02 to 00:04. Pitch-shifted laugher from 4:38 to 4:40 brings the
song to a close.
Yazoo, “Situation (U.S. 12- Inch Mix)” (1982). You hear a woman’s bubbling
laughter at the beginning (00:02–00:05), then a bit more to close the track
(2:26–2:30).
Michael Jackson, “Thriller” (1982). Vincent Price’s iconic eleven-second laugh
(5:44–5:55) at the close of his song-ending monologue evokes classic film hor-
ror and kitsch in equal measure.
New Order, “ Every Little Counts” (1986). This laugh (0:17–0:24) plays like
Bernard Sumner’s spontaneous reaction to the cringeworthy lyr ics he’s
singing (“I think you are a pig / You should be in a zoo”). He loses it once he
reaches “you” and fi nally gets it together a couple bars later. He almost loses
it again at 2:34, but keeps his composure. This song also includes a dra-
matic pause, from 2:46 to 2:48, that renders it worthy of a list a few pages
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

back.
Metallica, “Master of Puppets” (1986). You need to listen to more than eight
minutes of this 8:36 track to hear the laughter, a demonic, distorted laugh at
8:14–8:15, then a tormented chorus of them from 8:17 to 8:27.
Neneh Cherry, “Buffalo Stance” (1989). Cherry, affecting dif ferent voices,
laughs at her own playfulness from 3:12 to 3:15.
Nicki Minaj, “Anaconda” (2014). Minaj’s rollicking cackle runs from 3:08 to
3:11, and then another peal sounds from 3:36 to 3:41.

Ten Recordings That Move between Speaking and Singing

One of the most striking vocal effects a performer can achieve comes in moving be-
tween speaking and singing. For certain artists this is a common practice. Barry
White, for instance, uses words spoken in his buttery bass-baritone as a method of
seduction. Taylor Swift often speaks in her songs as a way of enacting another kind
of intimacy, inviting a sense of friendship with her listeners. Of course, the line be-
tween speech and song is often blurry. Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and Johnny Cash all
variously collapse the distance between speech and song in their conversational de-
liveries. By contrast, the songs listed here call attention to the difference between
the registers, highlighting sharp sonic ascents from speaking to singing. To illustrate
this contrast, consider Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros’ “Home,” where the
simple melody of the verses blends the shape of singing with the directness of speech,
the chorus fully embraces song, and a conversational interlude is simply spoken. The
song finds its balance in the blending of these disparate parts. In the list below you’ll
hear the pre-song patter of B. B. King, the R&B interludes of the Ink Spots and
Boyz II Men, the distorted sounds of R.E.M. and Pavement, and more. In each, speech
is a distinctive sonic register that opens up new expressive range for the songs.

The Ink Spots, “If I Didn’t Care” (1939). “If I didn’t care, honey chile, more than
words can say,” Hoppy Jones begins in his “talking bass” interlude, which runs
from 1:38 to 2:17. Moving from Bill Kenny’s honied chorus to Jones’s plainspo-
ken restatement of the lyrics lends solidity to the song’s sweet seduction.
The Supremes, “Love Is Here and Now You’re Gone” (1967). Over the cho-
rus, Diana Ross interjects dramatic overdubs—at 00:41–00:48, 1:24–1:30,
and 2:05–2:11—that the song’s producers make little effort to integrate into
the recording. It is as if we can hear someone turning one knob to bring the
music down and another to bring Ross’s voice up. The result is jarring, but
somehow compelling.
The Velvet Underground, “I Found a Reason” (1970). The song derives its rich
harmonies from its obvious doo-wop influences. Those same soulful sounds
likely inspired Lou Reed’s spoken interlude (“Honey, I found a reason to keep
livin’ ”), which runs from 1:43 to 2:18.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

The Chi- Lites, “Have You Seen Her” (1971). “Have You Seen Her” is a melo-
drama of lost love. Lead singer Eugene Record mourns his lover: “Why, oh,
why did she have to leave and / Go away? Oh yeah. / Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, I’ve been
used to having someone to lean on / And I’m lost. Baby, I’m lost.” Another drama
plays out in the voice: the song moves from Record’s spoken introduction, de-
livered in his natu ral voice, to a falsetto choral section, then to Record’s solo
falsetto singing. The vocal pattern then mirrors itself, ending with a final spo-
ken section that leads back to singing once more.

Barry White, “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe” (1974). In 2010, Psy-
chology Today featured an article on the “Barry White Effect,” which posits
that “generally speaking, women are attracted to men with deep voices in part
because this is an auditory cue linked to testosterone, a hormone that is as-
sociated with male phenotypic quality.” White himself seems to have known
this intuitively. On this song and many others he plays to his vocal strengths
by beginning with his seductive speech before leading into equally seductive
song.
R.E.M., “Belong” (1991). Michael Stipe speaks every word of the song through
distortion; the only singing comes with his strings of melodic “ohs,” which serve
as a kind of chorus. “The vocal on ‘Belong,’ I sang that directly into a Walk-
man,” Stipe told Rolling Stone in a 1992 interview, explaining how he sought
to degrade the quality of his vocal sound. “I don’t like the clarity,” he con-
tinued, “ because it doesn’t allow me as much latitude to just flail, to just be a
melody and let the words, the meaning, flow out.”
Boyz II Men, “End of the Road” (1992). The writer Sam Greenspan precedes
me in celebrating Boyz II Men’s bass voice, Michael McCary, and McCary’s spo-
ken interludes. On Greenspan’s website, 11points.com, he gathers the “11 Best
Deep-Voiced Boyz II Men Monologues,” beginning, of course, with the spoken
portions of this song. “End of the Road” presents two monologues, a brief one
at the beginning of the song (00:07–00:19) and a longer one that marks the
song’s climax (3:34–4:22). Speech opens a space to particularize the terms of
the vulnerability that the singing puts on display.
Pavement, “Conduit for Sale!” (1992). Channeling another talky-song, Fall’s
“New Face in Hell” (1980), Stephen Malkmus delivers seemingly cut-and-paste
lyrics over a lo-fi groove. The blank affect of the spoken verses sits in contrast
to the urgency of Malkmus’s repeated cries of “I’m tryin’.”
Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, “Home” (2009). Alex Ebert and
Jade Castrinos engage in a playful conversation between 3:14 and 3:48, which
is eventually swallowed up by the triumphant chorus.
Taylor Swift, “Blank Space” (2014). Swift has several songs that exploit
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

the expressive capacities of the spoken interlude. Famously, there’s her

“this sick beat” monologue on “Shake It Off.” On “Blank Space,” she uses
her spoken register more sparingly, but nonetheless affectingly. On the last
line of the second verse, she cuts off the lilting melodic line and instead
speaks the final line: “ ’Cause, darling, I’m a nightmare dressed like a day-
dream” (2:07–2:10). The effect is something akin to what happens when the
beat drops out from under a rapper’s dopest line— Swift’s swaggering coup
de grâce.

Adam Bradley’s “Black, White, or Prince” Playlist

Below is a list of some of the actual songs that I’ve played for my students during my
Black, White, or Prince game. As you’ll recall, it’s a quiz in which I ask my students
to code by race the singing voices that they hear. After getting a sense of the class’s
collective opinion through a show of hands, I unmask the performer by projecting a
picture on the screen. The goal is to unsettle my students’ assumptions about what
a “white” or “black” person can sound like while also opening up useful discussions
about the singing practices common to certain genres.

The Ink Spots, “My Prayer” (1939) [Black group that students might think
“sounds white”]

Charley Pride, “Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone” (1970) [Black country
singer who sounds like . . . a black country singer, but the students might be
tricked by assumptions of genre]

Teena Marie, “Square Biz” (1981) [White soul singer]

Bobby Caldwell, “What You Won’t Do for Love” (1978) [White soul singer]

Prince, “I Wanna Be Your Lover” (1979) [Prince]

Earth, Wind & Fire, “Let’s Groove” (1981) [Robot—special bonus round . . . ]

CHAPTER EIGHT: STYLE

Twenty-Six Cross-Genre Covers
Cover recordings were the norm in early rock ’n’ roll, when it wasn’t out of the ordi-
nary for the same song to chart for multiple artists, even during the same week. For
listeners, the appeal of the cover is that it simultaneously satisfies our desire for fa-
miliarity and for novelty. Hearing a familiar song performed in an unfamiliar way
can make for great listening, particularly when that cover also transforms the stylis-
tic context of the original. The examples that follow are compelling for the ways they
reinvent the source songs and also for how they provide a means of measuring the
stylistic contours of a given artist and even genre.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

“All Along the Watchtower,” Jimi Hendrix (1968); original by Bob Dylan
(1967)

“Piece of My Heart,” Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company
(1968); original by Erma Franklin (1967)

“Walk On By,” Isaac Hayes (1969); original by Dionne Warwick (1964)

“Hey Jude,” Wilson Pickett (1969); original by the Beatles (1968)

“Black Magic Woman,” Santana (1970); original by Fleetwood Mac (1968)

“Proud Mary,” Ike & Tina Turner (1971); original by Creedence Clearwater
Revival (1969)

“Just the Way You Are” by Barry White (1978); original by Billy Joel (1977)

“Take Me to the River,” Talking Heads (1978); original by Al Green (1974)

“Got to Get You into My Life,” Earth, Wind & Fire (1978); original by the
Beatles (1966)

“Tainted Love,” Soft Cell (1981); original by Gloria Jones (1976)

“Higher Ground,” Red Hot Chili Peppers (1989); original by Stevie Wonder
(1973)

“Downtown Train,” Rod Stewart (1990); original by Tom Waits (1985)

“I Will Always Love You,” Whitney Houston (1992); original by Dolly Parton
(1974)

“Live and Let Die,” Guns N’ Roses (1991); original by Wings (1973)

“The Man Who Sold the World (Unplugged),” Nirvana (1994); original, “The
Man Who Sold the World” by David Bowie (1970)

“Cruisin’,” D’Angelo (1995); original by Smokey Robinson (1979)

“Killing Me Softly,” The Fugees (1996); original, “Killing Me Softly with His
Song” by Lori Lieberman (1972)

“Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,” Lauryn Hill (1998); original, “Can’t Take My
Eyes Off You” by Frankie Valli (1967)

“Feeling Good,” Muse (2001); original by Nina Simone (1965)

“I Wanna Be Your Dog,” Uncle Tupelo (2002); original by The Stooges

(1969)

“Hurt,” Johnny Cash (2002); original by Nine Inch Nails (1994)

“Such Great Heights,” Iron & Wine (2003); original by the Postal Ser vice
(2003)

“Make You Feel My Love,” Adele (2008); original by Bob Dylan (1997)

“If I Were a Boy,” Reba McIntire (2010); original by Beyoncé (2008)

“Leopard-Skin Pill- Box Hat,” Beck (2009); original by Bob Dylan (1966)

“Never Gonna Give You Up,” The Black Keys (2010); original, “Never Give
You Up” by Jerry Butler (1968)

CHAPTER NINE: STORY

Twenty Epistolary Recordings
The conceit of the letter— open, absconded, and otherwise—has a long literary lin-
eage. Eighteenth-century European novels like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740)
in England and Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) in
France employed the epistolary form in defining the terms of the novel as a genre.
What remains appealing about the epistolary form for pop-song lyrics today is that
it conjures a sense of intimacy and connection between the voices in the work of art
and their audience. Whereas a novel or a poem maintains the letter’s identity as
written document, the song demands another kind of suspension of disbelief: that
the letter is also voiced for listening ears.
When a song—or even an entire album— invokes the epistolary form, it usu-
ally aims for authenticity, openness, and vulnerability. Often, the letter is also a
confession. Sometimes the song-as-letter offers a confession to someone who liter-
ally can’t hear it, as with “Fire and Rain,” which posits the song itself as a physi-
cal thing (“I walked out this morning and I wrote down this song / I just can’t
remember who to send it to”). Sometimes it is a letter to someone whom the nar-
rator knows won’t be able to hear it, like 2Pac’s “Letter 2 My Unborn.” When song
lyr ics are couched as letters it allows for communication that regular conversation
might not, as with Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” and Dar Williams’s “If
I Wrote You.”

The Beatles, “P.S. I Love You” (1963)

James Taylor, “Fire and Rain” (1970)

Leonard Cohen, “Famous Blue Raincoat” (1971)

Rod Stewart, “You Wear It Well” (1972)

John Prine, “Dear Abby” (1973)

Bill Withers, “I Can’t Write Left- Handed” (1973)

Tom Waits, “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis” (1978)

Kate Bush, “Babooshka” (1980)

Michelle Shocked, “Anchorage” (1988)

Nas feat. Q-Tip, “One Love” (1994)

Dar Williams, “If I Wrote You” (1997)

Alanis Morissette, “Unsent” (1998)

2Pac, “Letter 2 My Unborn” (2001)

They Might Be Giants, “Renew My Subscription” (2004)

Dropkick Murphys, “Last Letter Home” (2005)

Joell Ortiz feat. Dante Hawkins, “Letter to Obama” (2008)

They Might Be Giants, “My Brother the Ape” (2009)

R. Kelly, Love Letter (2010)

Lil Wayne, “Dear Anne (Stan Part 2)” (2011)

Mary Lambert, Letters Don’t Talk (2012)

Thirteen Dramatic Monologues

In poetry dramatic monologues are sustained first-person utterances in the voice of
characters (that is, speakers other than the poet him- or herself, often drawn from
history), expressing psychological complexity and intense states of being and feeling.
The best-known examples from the literary tradition include Robert Browning’s “My
Last Duchess” (1842) and “Fra Lippo Lippi” (1855), along with Alfred, Lord Tenny-
son’s “The Lotos-eaters” (1832). Dramatic monologues stand out in the history of song
lyric because they enshrine the character above the singer him- or herself. The dra-
matic monologue places the singer in the role of the bard, inhabiting an experience
that the audience is to understand as separate and distinct from the singer’s own. The
form thrives in folk music and rock music, with Bruce Springsteen—represented here
three times—being perhaps the greatest master of the form.

Bob Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s A- Gonna Fall” (1963)

Bobby Gentry, “Ode to Billie Joe” (1967)

Tammy Wynette, “D- I-V- O- R- C- E” (1968)

Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town”
(1969)

Johnny Cash, “A Boy Named Sue” (1969)

Simon & Garfunkel, “The Boxer” (1970)

The Rolling Stones, “ Sister Morphine” (1971)

Bruce Springsteen, “Nebraska” (1982)

Townes Van Zandt, “Sanitarium Blues” (1999)

Immortal Technique, “Dance with the Devil” (2001)

Bruce Springsteen, “Paradise” (2002)

The Decemberists, “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” (2005)

Bruce Springsteen, “Matamoros Banks” (2005)

Twelve Songs That Use the Second Person

The first person predominates in popular song. It is the most naturalistic: a voice is
communicating to us, so it makes sense that it would claim the “I” in doing so. The
second person announces its artifice. The “you” can come across as presumptuous, even
domineering. It can be a way of speaking the “I” at a plausibly deniable distance. When
handled right, however, as in Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” it is a subtle form of
coercion that invites us to participate in the action of the song’s story. In songs like this,
the first person melts away, and all that exists is the “you” that we might imagine is us.
In other songs, the intended “you” is clearly defined, as in Paul Simon’s song for his
daughter, “Father and Daughter.” In other instances, the second-person address works
in conjunction with the ever-present first-person voice, explicit or implied, of the singer.
In Juvenile’s “Ha,” for instance, the rapper is speaking decidedly to a specific you—
whether a particular person or a class of people or both. Unlike “Ballad of a Thin Man,”
“Ha” does not extend an invitation for the listener to claim the subject position of the
“you.” Quite the contrary, we are witnessing an exchange between the first-person
voice of the singer and the second-person “you” that the speaker is addressing.

Frank Sinatra, “(Love Is) The Tender Trap” (1955)

Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man” (1965)

The Beatles, “For No One” (1966)

Leonard Cohen, “Suzanne” (1967)

Billy Joel, “Captain Jack” (1973)

ABBA, “Dancing Queen” (1976)

Dire Straits, “Sultans of Swing” (1978)

Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime” (1980)

U2, “A Sort of Homecoming” (1984)

Juvenile, “Ha” (1998)

Paul Simon, “ Father and Daughter” (2006)

The Hold Steady, “You Can Make Him Like You” (2006)

Five Songs (and One Album) That Disrupt Narrative Chronology

The conventional plot arc of beginning, middle, and end describes the majority of
story-songs in the popular musical tradition. In such instances, a fixed (or slightly

shifting) chorus serves to underscore the dynamic changes enacted in the verses.
From time to time, however, songwriters consciously subvert listeners’ narrative
expectations. This narrative displacement happens when artists embrace the inher-
ent circularity of the typical song form, flashing back or forward, or other wise re-
ordering chronology. “And oh, my god, look, you’ve just discovered / The way that
one thing can lead to another,” the Pet Shop Boys sing on “One Thing Leads to
Another,” their narrative of a man’s demise told in reverse. The songs below all call
attention to those nodes of narrative where one thing leads to another. Together,
they testify to the restless drive to imagine new ways of telling old stories in song.

Bob Dylan, “All Along the Watchtower” (1967)

Pet Shop Boys, “One Thing Leads to Another” (1993)

Nas, “Rewind” (2001)

Nas, “Blaze a 50” (2002)

The Roots, Undun (2011)

SomeKindaWonderful, “Reverse” (2014)

INTRODUCTION
“If, as now seems” Eric Weisbard, Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 1–2.

“to encompass just about” Quoted in Carl Wilson, Let’s Talk about Love: Why Other
People Have Such Bad Taste (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 171.

CHAPTER ONE: LYRIC AND SONG

“bested only by” “Rihanna’s ‘Diamonds’ Shines Atop Hot 100,” by Gary Trust, Bill-
board, http://www.billboard.com /articles /news/474056 /rihannas-diamonds-shines-
atop-hot-100 (accessed May 11, 2016).

“said to have composed in fourteen minutes” “How a Song Written by Sia Furler
Becomes a Hit,” by Steve Knopper, New York Times, April 21, 2014, http://6thfloor
.blogs.nytimes.com /2014 /04 /21 / how-a-song-written-by-sia-furler-becomes-a-hit / ?_ r = 0
(accessed May 11, 2106).

“characterizes as ‘insipid’” “Rihanna, Icy Hot and Steely- Strong: Rihanna’s Album
‘Unapologetic’ Makes Most of Her Talent,” by Jon Caramanica, New York Times, No-
vember 20, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com /2012 /11 /21 /arts/music/rihannas-album
-unapologetic-makes-most-of-her-talent.html (accessed May 11, 2106).

“I don’t exactly know how poetry” Joanna Newsom, interviewed by Marc Maron,
WTF, Episode 709, May 23, 2016, http://www.wtfpod.com /podcast/episode-709-joanna
-newsom (accessed May 24, 2016).

“a piece of writing ” “poem, n.,” OED Online, September 2015, Oxford University
Press, http://0 -www.oed.com.libraries.colorado.edu /view/ Entry/146514?redirected
From=poem (accessed September 12, 2015).

“despite their differences” Lawrence M. Zbikowski, Conceptualizing Music: Cog-

nitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002),
Kindle edition.

“In music, some notes” Daniel J. Levitin, The World in Six Songs: How the Musi-
cal Brain Created Human Nature (New York: Dutton, 2008), 23.

“noise too is part of meaning” Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice:
Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (London: New
Beacon Books, 1984), 17.

“I respect poetry” David Ritz, Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1985), 164.

“Lyrics by definition lack something” Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat: Col-
lected Lyrics (1954–1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges,
Whines and Anecdotes (New York: Knopf, 2010), xviii.

“Good song lyrics” Simon Frith, Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 181.

“A completed poem” Sheila Davis, The Craft of Lyric Writing (Cincinnati, OH:
Writer’s Digest Books, 1985), 6–7.

“The other half of every thing” Glyn Maxwell, On Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2013), 13.

“The auditory arts of music” Levitin, World in Six Songs, 121–122.

“ Music is no luxury” Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (New
York: Knopf, 2007), Kindle edition.

“The simple truth” Jimmy Webb, Tunesmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting (New
York: Hyperion, 1998), 48.

“for having created new poetic” “Press Release,” The Nobel Prize for Literature
2016, https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel _prizes/ literature/ laureates/2016/press.html
(accessed October 22, 2016).

“He is a great poet” “Prize Announcement,” The Nobel Prize for Literature 2016,
https://www.nobelprize.org /nobel _ prizes / literature / laureates /2016 /announcement
.html (accessed October 22, 2016).

“Of all the nonsense” Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’
Roll Music (New York: Dutton, 1975), 87.

“I like ‘Across the Universe’” Peter Herbst, The Rolling Stone Interviews: Talking
with the Legends of Rock & Roll, 1967–1980 (New York: St. Martin’s / Rolling Stone
Press, 1981), 145.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

“could stand without the music” Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston, “Bob Dylan
Interview,” in Jonathan Eisen, ed., The Age of Rock 2: Sights and Sounds of the Amer-
ican Cultural Revolution (New York: Random House, 1970), 65.

“It ain’t the melodies” Bob Dylan, The Lyrics: 1961–2012, ed. Christopher Ricks
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), ix.

“I don’t think that” Bill Flanagan, Written in My Soul: Conversations with Rock’s
Great Songwriters (New York: RosettaBooks, 2010), Kindle edition.

CHAPTER TWO: READING

“Like the novel” Kevin J. H. Dettmar, Is Rock Dead? (New York: Routledge, 2006), xvii.

“ Unless the reader happens” Quoted in Sondheim, Finishing the Hat, xvii.

“in the air” Stephen Dobyns, Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 69.

“Back then we didn’t know” Peter Hook, Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division
(New York: It Books, 2013), 172–173.

“As a singer and a writer” Quoted in Flanagan, Written in My Soul, Kindle edition.

“You don’t really need musical notation” Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music & Dis-
appearing Ink (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2015), 294.

“Song lyrics exist independently” Peter Astor and Keith Negus, “More than a Per-
formance: Song Lyrics and the Practices of Songwriting,” in Lee Marshall and Dave
Liang, eds., Popular Music Matters: Essays in Honour of Simon Frith (Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2014).

“A record is” Albin Zak, The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 2001), 44.

“Writing about things” Seth S. Horowitz, The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes
the Mind (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), Introduction, Kindle edition.

“Lyrics are written” Gene Lees, The Modern Rhyming Dictionary (New York: Cherry
Lane Music, 1989), 29.

“From Stevie Won der to Steely Dan” “Pharrell Williams Masterclass with Stu-
dents at NYU Clive Davis Institute,” YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com
/watch?v= G0u7lXy7pDg (accessed March 18, 2016).

“We all wrote to the same” Paul Anka and David Dalton, My Way: An Autobiogra-
phy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014), Kindle edition.

Ring On It).” Genius.com, http://genius.com /5055043 (accessed July 30, 2016).

CHAPTER THREE: LISTENING

“ Music has the power to stop time” Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson and Ben Green-
man, Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove (New York: Grand Central
Publishing, 2013), 272.

“do not pretend their decisions” Bruce Jackson (ed.), Get Your Ass in the Water and
Swim Like Me: African-American Narrative Poetry from the Oral Tradition (New
York: Routledge, 2004), Preface.

“I have often found” Zak, Poetics of Rock, 86.

“in existence, power, favour” “ephemeral, adj. and n.,” OED Online, March 2016,
Oxford University Press, http://0 -www.oed.com.libraries.colorado.edu /view/ Entry
/63199?redirectedFrom= ephemeral (accessed March 31, 2016).

“The best pop songs” Frith, Performing Rites, 182.

“Song lyrics can take” Adrian Matejka conversation with author on August 28,
2014.

“My phrasing is peculiar to me” Willie Nelson and David Ritz, It’s a Long Story:
My Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2015), 145.

“imaginative transformation” M. H. Abrams, “Constructing and Deconstructing,”

in Morris Eaves and Michael Fisher, eds., Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 167.

“essence or shape” “Gestalt | gestalt, n.,” OED Online, March 2016, Oxford Univer-
sity Press, http://0 -www.oed.com.libraries.colorado.edu /view/ Entry/77951?redirected
From=gestalt (accessed March 31, 2016).

“This is the power” Levitin, World in Six Songs, 31.

“Heya @Pharrell” Pharrell Williams, Twitter post, February 5, 2014, 2:12 a.m.,
http://twitter.com / Pharrell.

“Lovin-ughhhhh” MetroLyrics, http://www.metrolyrics.com / loving-you-lyrics-minnie

-riperton.html (accessed September 12, 2015).

“The hook can” “You Ask, We Answer: What’s a Hook?” by Tom Cole, NPR .org,
October 15, 2010, http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord /2010/10/15/130588663/you
-ask-we-answer-what-s-a-hook.

“ There is not one note” Dave Stewart, Sweet Dreams Are Made of This: A Life in
Music (New York: New American Library, 2016), 96.

2015), 202.

As the pianist “Chilly Gonzales’ ‘Pop Music Masterclass’ featuring Taylor Swift’s
‘Shake It Off,’ ” YouTube video, 4:29, posted by “Chilly Gonzales,” January 5, 2015,
https://www.youtube.com /watch?v= 0Wog-34Kbb0.

CHAPTER FOUR: RHYTHM

“If you don’t have the sound” Anthony DeCurtis, In Other Words: Artists Talk about
Life and Work (Winona, MN: Hal Leonard, 2006), Kindle edition.

“nothing but rhythm” Jimi Hendrix and Tony Brown, Jimi Hendrix “Talking”: Jimi
Hendrix in His Own Words (London: Omnibus, 2003), Kindle edition.

“ Music is a foreign language” Stephen Sondheim, Look, I Made a Hat: Collected

Lyrics (1981–2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues,
Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany (New York: Knopf, 2011), xvii.

“The control and perception” Jack Perricone, Melody in Songwriting: Tools and
Techniques for Writing Hit Songs (Boston: Berklee Press, 2000), Kindle edition.

“(that is, like musical notes” Lewis Turco, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poet-
ics (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000), 33.

“They are reinforced” Mark W. Booth, The Experience of Songs (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1981), 8.

“The em-pha -sis is on the wrong” “Searching for Max Martin,” Switched On Pop,
November 20, 2015, http://www.switchedonpop.com / ?p = 489.

“Just like the rising and falling” Greg Allman, My Cross to Bear (New York: Wil-
liam Morrow, 2012), 402.

“relating to a regular repeated pattern” “rhythm, n.,” OED Online, September 2015,
Oxford University Press, http://0 -www.oed.com.libraries.colorado.edu /view/ Entry
/165403?rskey=frgYD1&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed September 12, 2015).

“The word has retained” Derek Attridge, “Rhythm,” in The Princeton Encylopedia
of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 1195.

“the pattern of movement in time” Harold S. Powers, “Rhythm,” in The Harvard

Dictionary of Music, ed. Don Michael Randel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2003), 723.

“Rhythm in music provides” Levitin, World in Six Songs, 50.

“The rhythm section” Walter Everett, The Foundations of Rock from “Blue Suede Shoes”
to “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), Kindle edition.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

“The fundamental unit” Alex James, Bit of a Blur (New York: Sphere Publishing,
2010), Kindle edition.

“ There’s joy in repetition.” Prince, “Joy in Repetition,” Graffiti Bridge (1990).

“In song and in dance” Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York:
Modern Library, 2009), Kindle edition.

“The rhythmic properties” Steven Pinker, Language, Cognition, and Human Na-
ture: Selected Articles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 239.

“Rhythm turns listeners” Sacks, Musicophilia, Kindle edition.

“kinesthetic listening” Charles Keil, “Theory of Participatory Discrepancies: A Pro-

gress Report,” Ethnomusicology 39, no. 1 (1995): 10.

“Across repeated listenings” Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, On Repeat: How Music

Plays the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), Kindle edition.

“The reason why rhythm” Frith, Performing Rites, 143.

“Jazz was originally” “The Dev il’s Music: 1920s Jazz,” PBS, February 2, 2000.

“I think that nothing less” Quoted in Tricia Rose, The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk
about When We Talk about Hip Hop— and Why It Matters (New York: Basic Civitas,
2008), 95.

“using and keeping of drums” Quoted in Daniel Cavicchi, Listening and Longing:
Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,
2011), Kindle edition.

“Rhythmic content means” Quoted in Robert Pinsky, Singing School: Learning to

Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters (New York: Norton, 2014), 75–76.

“The song is layered” Quoted in Michaeleen Doucleff, “Anatomy of a Dance Hit: Why
We Love to Boogie with Pharrell,” NPR, May 30, 2014.

“Knowing when not to play” Shelia E. and Wendy Holden, The Beat of My Own
Drum: A Memoir (New York: Atria, 2014), Kindle edition.

“One can’t have rhythm” Everett, Foundations, Kindle edition.

“Of course it is fundamentally daffy” Stephen Fry, The Ode Less Travelled: Un-
locking the Poet Within (London: Hutchinson, 2005), 61.

“When you put words to a melody” S. Davis, Craft of Lyric Writing, 214.

“Lyrics are ‘married’” Pat Pattison, Songwriting: Essential Guide to Lyric Form and
Structure (Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard, 2007), Kindle edition.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

“It seems that the words” Quoted in DeCurtis, In Other Words, Kindle edition.

“He didn’t have the words” Eric Clapton, The Autobiography (New York: Three Riv-
ers Press, 2008), Kindle edition.

“Riding in a car” Peter Ames Carlin, Paul McCartney: A Life (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2009), 119.

“ They’re good” Quoted in Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon, All The
Songs: The Story behind Every Beatles Release (New York: Hachette Books, 2013),
Kindle edition.

“I use nonsense words” Anka and Dalton, My Way, 145.

“I’m screaming nonsense vowels” John Fogerty, Fortunate Son: My Life, My Music
(New York: Little, Brown, 2015), 163.

“a kind of nonsense thing” Quoted in Stephen Bishop, Songs in the Rough: From
“Heartbreak Hotel” to “Higher Love,” Rock’s Greatest Songs in Rough Draft Form
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 110.

“I kinda knew I had to” “Phil Collins: No Jacket Required Vinyl Icon,” by Johnny
Black, Hi-Fi News & Record Review, April 2011.

“I would listen back” Steven Tyler, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? A Rock
’n’ Roll Memoir (New York: Ecco, 2011), Kindle edition.

“Watching him record” Ritz, Divided Soul, 181.

“from lines to sentences to paragraphs” Quoted in Jim Fricke and Charlie Ahearn,
Yes Yes Y’all: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-Hop’s First Decade
(New York: Da Capo Press, 2002), 79.

“A good MC” Kyle Dargan conversation with author on September 5, 2014.

“So much of his stuff comes” Charles Keil and Steven Feld, Music Grooves: Essays
and Dialogues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 26.

“Say anything” Patti Smith, Just Kids (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), Kindle
edition.

“It is a mark of skill” Lees, Modern Rhyming Dictionary, 12.

“Performers can color” Sondheim, Finishing the Hat, xviii.

“Melody should mirror” Webb, Tunesmith, 178.

“In songwriting, uniformity” Webb, Tunesmith, 90.

“Composers, on the other hand” S. Davis, Craft of Lyric Writing, 216.

“ There is nothing about beginning” Webb, Tunesmith, 49.

“Now, I’ve seen him write” Quoted in DeCurtis, In Other Words, Kindle edition.

“Melodies are the easiest part” Willie Nelson and Bud Shrake, Willie: An Autobi-
ography (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), 137.

“I had an affinity for jazz” Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Holiday: A Memoir (New York:
Grove Press, 2012), 159.

“The metronomic cadences” Webb, Tunesmith, 89.

“A song is a magical marriage” Webb, Tunesmith, 70.

“Words hold meaning” Margulis, On Repeat, Kindle edition.

“Van Morrison is interested” Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor

Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock ’n’ Roll as Literature and Literature as
Rock ’n’ Roll, ed. Greil Marcus (New York: Anchor, 2013), 22.

“I get to a point where I” Quoted in DeCurtis, In Other Words, Kindle edition.

“You know why they sang it” Tyler, Does the Noise, Kindle edition.

“It helps define the meter” http://www.effingham.com / bishop/ DonHenley.htm (ac-

cessed April 1, 2016).

“excessively polysyllabic words” Nile Rodgers, Le Freak: An Upside Down Story

of Family, Disco, and Destiny (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2011), 168–169.

“a reader who silently mouths” David Caplan, Questions of Possibility: Con-

temporary Poetry and Poetic Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), Kin-
dle edition.

“Words are so impor tant to country music” Waylon Jennings, Waylon: An Autobi-
ography (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2012), Kindle edition.

“Some singers like to work” Quincy Jones, Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones
(New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002), Kindle edition.

“A good singer will often” David Byrne, How Music Works (San Francisco: McSwee-
ny’s, 2013), 44–45.

“The three masters of rubato” Jerry Wexler, Rhythm and Blues: A Life in Ameri-
can Music (New York: Knopf, 2012), 41.

“Even though I was writing a country song” Nelson and Shrake, Willie,
140–141.

“I found I could get ahead” Nelson and Shrake, Willie, 141.

“There is something perfectly imperfect” Quoted in “The Shazam Effect,” by Derek

Thompson, The Atlantic, December 2014.

“The lurches and hesitations are internalized” Byrne, How Music Works, 45.

“Perhaps Redding’s most effective tool” Allan F. Moore, Analyzing Popular Music
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Kindle edition.

“According to [Catherine] Clément” Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice:
Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2005), 125–126.

“When I’d sing a lyric” Ronnie Spector and Vince Waldron, Be My Baby: How I Sur-
vived Mascara, Miniskirts, and Madness, or My Life as a Fabulous Ronette (New York:
Harmony Books, 1990), Kindle edition.

CHAPTER FIVE: RHYME

“Seizing a scrap of waste paper” “Dr. Samuel F. Smith Dead,” New York Times,
November 16, 1895, http://query.nytimes.com /mem /archive-free /pdf ?_ r =1&res = 9B
03E6DE1E3DE433A25754C1A9679D94649ED7CF&oref= slogin (accessed August
2, 2016).

“I think that a song should be poetic” Quoted in Loraine Alterman, “The Other
Smokey Robinson— Songwriter,” Detroit Free Press, October 14, 1966.

“a rhyme- drenched era” David Caplan, Rhyme’s Challenge: Hip Hop, Poetry, and
Contemporary Rhyming Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), Kindle edi-
tion.

“One discards rhyme” Ezra Pound, Selected Prose: 1909–1965 (New York: New Di-
rections, 1973), 375.

“And now your kinsfolk” Maxwell, On Poetry, 109.

“the repetition of a vowel” Percy G. Adams and Stephen Cushman, “Assonance,”

in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 94.

“A striking feature of the history” Susan Stewart, “Rhyme and Freedom,” quoted
in Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin, The Sound of Poetry, the Poetry of Sound (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), Kindle edition.

“Parcheesi” Lyrics from the song “ Little Ol’ Tune” (1957), as published in Robert
Kimball, Barry Day, Miles Kreuger, and Eric Davis, eds., The Complete Lyr ics of
Johnny Mercer (New York: Knopf, 2009), 265.

“Who now, in your now” Maxwell, On Poetry, 100.

“Rap—so many words” “Rolling Stones Guitarist Keith Richards Calls Metallica
and Black Sabbath ‘Great Jokes,’ Says Rap Is for ‘Tone-Deaf People’ in Free-Wheeling
Interview,” by Jim Farber, New York Daily News, September 3, 2015.

“How much such recitation” Sacks, Musicophilia, Kindle edition.

“I’m not a big believer in rhyme” Quoted in Bill DeMain, In Their Own Words:
Songwriters Talk about the Creative Process (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), Kindle
edition.

“I hate the tyranny of rhyme” Quoted in DeMain, In Their Own Words, Kindle
edition.

“Rhyme is a play with words” Jeffrey Wainwright, Poetry: The Basics (New York:
Routledge, 2004), 102.

“Songs are made for ears, not eyes” Pat Pattison, Rhyming Techniques and Strat-
egies (Boston: Berklee Press, 1991), Kindle edition.

“We expect lyrics to behave” Webb, Tunesmith, 94.

“Far from a constraint” Quoted in Perloff and Dworkin, Sound of Poetry, Kindle
edition.

“Rhyming, while being a limitation” Sting, Lyrics (New York: Dial Press, 2007),
154.

“We may expect a rhyme sound” Brian Boyd, Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cog-
nition, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2012), 21.

“It is not so much necessary” Lees, Modern Rhyming Dictionary, 39.

“As Ben Blatt pointed out in early 2014” “Justin Bieber and the Beatles: They Both
Liked to Rhyme the Same Words,” by Ben Blatt, Slate.com, February 20, 2104, http://
www.slate .com /articles /arts /culturebox / 2014 / 02 / justin _ bieber _ and _ the _ beatles
_they_both _ liked _to_ rhyme _the _ same _words.html (accessed April 1, 2016).

“Do you know Keith Richards’ theory” Quoted in DeMain, In Their Own Words,
Kindle edition.

“benign violation” Peter McGraw and Joel Warner, The Humor Code: A Global
Search for What Makes Things Funny (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 10.

“Although we were really serious” Scott Ian and John Widerhorn, I’m the Man: The
Story of That Guy from Anthrax (Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2014), Kindle edi-
tion.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

“Staying in the unconscious frame of mind” Quoted in Paul Zollo, Songwriters on

Songwriting (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2003), 81.

“I saw that rhyme register” Costello, Unfaithful Music, 567.

“All rhymes, even the farthest afield” Sondheim, Finishing the Hat, xxvii.

“I’ve gotten to where” Paul Zollo and Tom Petty, Conversations with Tom Petty
(New York: Omnibus Press, 2005), Kindle edition.

“Instead of always making” Pattison, Rhyming, Kindle edition.

“They are really false rhymes” Quoted in Alan Light, The Holy or the Broken:
Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of “Hallelujiah” (New York:
Atria Books, 2012), 25.

“‘Decatur’ was more fun to sing” Jessica Hopper, The First Collection of Criti-
cism by a Living Female Rock Critic (Chicago: Featherproof Books, 2015), Kindle
edition.

“You can rhyme to a fault” Quoted in Flanagan, Written in My Soul, Kindle

edition.

“It started ‘Well, I was borned” Loretta Lynn and George Vecsey, Loretta Lynn: Coal
Miner’s Daughter (New York: Vintage, 2010), Kindle edition.

“Just because it rhymes doesn’t mean” Quoted in Jake Brown, Nashville Song-
writer: The Inside Stories behind Country Music’s Greatest Hits (Dallas: BenBella
Books, 2014), Kindle edition.

“So sometimes writing a song” Quoted in DeMain, In Their Own Words, Kindle
edition.

“Rhyme is the best way” Pattison, Rhyming, Kindle edition.

“Rhyme is in this sense always a showcase” Quoted in Perloff and Dworkin, Sound
of Poetry, Kindle edition.

“I hate most contemporary rhyming poetry” Kyle Dargan conversation with au-
thor in April 2012.

“An identity makes the word clear” Sondheim, Finishing the Hat, xxvii.

CHAPTER SIX: FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE

“awakens and enlarges the mind” Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,”
http://www.bartleby.com /27/23.html (accessed September 12, 2015).

“Rapid movement during development ” “Polaroid Warns Buyers Not to ‘Shake It,’ ”
Reuters /CNN.com International, February 18, 2004, http://edition.cnn.com /2004
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

/ TECH /ptech /02 /17/polaroid.warns.reut/ (accessed April 20, 2016).

“fossil poetry” Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” 1844, http://www.emersoncentral

.com /poet.htm (accessed April 1, 2016).

“to reveal an unexpected likeness” J. V. Brogan and Hallie Smith Richmond,

“Simile,” in The Princeton Encylopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 1306.

“I think that I’m one of the world’s best mumblers” Jim Vallance, “Cuts Like a
Knife,” http://jimvallance.com /01-music-folder/songs-folder-may-27/pg-song-adams
-cuts-like-a-knife.html (accessed March 1, 2016).

“I got too wrapped up” Michael Jackson, Moonwalk (New York: Harmony Books,
2009), Kindle edition.

“They present a comparison” Robert J. Fogelin, Figuratively Speaking (New Ha-

ven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), Kindle edition.

“Indisputably, the effect of crowing images” Alexander Theroux, The Grammar

of Rock: Art and Artlessness in 20th Century Pop Lyrics (Seattle: Fantagraphics,
2013), 268.

“By the middle of the second verse” Quoted in Flanagan, Written in My Soul, Kin-
dle edition.

“Effective metaphor suits the context” Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren,
Understanding Poetry (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), 277.

“Just seeing Kurt write the lyrics” Quoted in Kurt St. Thomas and Troy Smith, Nir-
vana: The Chosen Rejects (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2004), 89.

“To know oh no” Kurt Cobain, Journals (New York: Riverhead Books, 2003), 146–148.

“But what meaning can ” Archibald MacLeish, Poetry and Experience (Cambridge:
Riverside Press, 1961), 68.

“extended metaphor that aligns” Chris Heath, “The Mars Expedition,” Gentlemen’s
Quarterly, April 2013, 201.

“Poetry begins in trivial meta phors” Robert Frost, “Education by Poetry,” 1931,
http://www.en.utexas.edu /amlit/amlitprivate/scans/edbypo.html (accessed April 20,
2016).

“Well, that flow” Quoted in “Drake: The AllHipHop Interview, Part II,” Chuck
Creekmur, Allhiphop.com, June 24, 2010, http://allhiphop.com /2010/06/24 /drake-the
-allhiphop-interview-part-2/ (accessed September 23, 2015).

“ There is poetry in some” Charles Simic, The Life of Images: Selected Prose (New
York: Ecco, 2015), 67.

“The sexual double entendres” Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Invent-
ing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010), Kindle edition.

“He played with the structure” Hook, Unknown Pleasures, 256.

“She can do repetitive phrases” Quoted in DeMain, In Their Own Words, Kindle
edition.

“Redundancy in popular music” Theroux, Grammar of Rock, 65.

“This shift, effected by repetition” Margulis, On Repeat, Kindle edition.

“Miss Bolo” Charles Dickens, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836).

“In his compelling short article” Ben Zimmer, “In Praise of the Rolling Stones and
Their Zeugmoids,” https://www.visualthesaurus.com /cm /wordroutes/in-praise-of-the
-rolling-stones-and-their-zeugmoids/ (accessed September 12, 2015).

“‘I Can’t Make You Love Me’ is no picnic” “Bonnie Raitt Shakes It Up,” interview
by Scott Simon, Weekend Edition Saturday, National Public Radio, May 4, 2002.

“started free-styling some poetry” Anthony Kiedis and Larry Sloman, Scar Tis-
sue (New York: Hyperion, 2004), Kindle edition.

CHAPTER SEVEN: VOICE

“hoarse and insistent” Quoted in Rod Stewart, Rod: The Autobiography (New York:
Crown, 2012), Kindle edition.

“I was blessed with distinctiveness” R. Stewart, Rod, Kindle edition.

“Melodies form a marriage” Jennings, Waylon, Kindle edition.

“sing it again, again, again” Quoted in Jonah Weiner, “Daft Punk: All Hail Our Ro-
bot Overlords,” Rolling Stone, May 21, 2013.

“comped from a hundred different takes” “Ben Allen: Gnarls Barkley, Animal
Collective, Puff Daddy?,” by Alex McKenzie, Tape On Magazine, issue no. 76, March/
April 2010.

“The respiratory system” National Center for Voice and Speech FAQ, http://ncvs.org
/e-learning/faqs.html (accessed September 12, 2015).

“is the particular quality or acoustic richness” Sacks, Musicophilia, Kindle edition.

“The voice is our most primordial and valuable instrument” Amanda Petrusich,
“The Power of the Isolated Vocal Track,” New Yorker, February 3, 2016.

“The ‘grain’ of the voice is not” Roland Barthes and Stephen Heath, Image, Music,
Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 188.

“In the vocal exercise” Cavarero, For More Than One, 134.

“When I sing” Grace Jones (as told to Paul Morley), I’ll Never Write My Memoirs (New
York: Gallery Books, 2015), Kindle edition.

“Singing is such an organic pro cess” Pat Benatar and Patsi Bale Cox, Between
a Heart and a Rock Place: A Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), Kindle
edition.

“My voice wasn’t a naturally loud” Juliana Hatfield, When I Grow Up: A Memoir
(New York: Wiley, 2008), 9.

“thought like a horn” Q. Jones, Q, Kindle edition.

“What they had that I picked up” Quoted in Flanagan, Written in My Soul, Kindle
edition.

“A singer is not like a saxophone” Billie Holiday and William Dufty, Lady Sings
the Blues (New York: Broadway Books, 2011), 197.

“brings the voice energetically ” Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), Kindle edition.

“Onstage it was amazing to see” Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band: A Memoir (New York:
HarperCollins, 2015), Kindle edition.

“many rock vocalists reach out” Everett, Foundations, Kindle edition.

“A lot of people don’t understand” James Brown and Bruce Tucker, James Brown,
the Godfather of Soul (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 138.

“to sign more artists who had performing” Clive Davis and Anthony DeCurtis, The
Soundtrack of My Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013), 375.

“authorship also resides in inventive execution” Emily J. Lordi, Black Resonance:

Iconic Women Singers and African American Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2013), Kindle edition.

“I’d say material is 80 percent of a singer’s career” Lynn and Vecsey, Coal Miner’s,
Kindle edition.

“If you’re gonna sing the song” Zollo and Petty, Conversations, Kindle edition.

Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. (New York: Vintage, 2011), 310.

“The truth is that when a singer likes the tune” Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1989), 76.

“Bessie Smith singing a good blues” Ralph Ellison to Albert Murray, June 2,
1957, in John Callahan, ed., Trading Twelves (New York: Random House, 2001),
166.

“The blues bears witness to” Simic, Life of Images, 69.

“the Poet makes himself a seer” Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works, Selected Letters,
trans., intro., and notes by Wallace Fowlie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1966), 307.

“As a singer you impose” Quoted in Flanagan, Written in My Soul, Kindle

edition.

“So enormously power ful” Alec Wilder, American Popular Song: The Great
Innovators, 1900–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972/1990), Kindle
edition.

“The multiple authorship” “Words About Music, or Analysis versus Performance,” in

Nicholas Cook, Peter Johnson, and Hans Zender, Theory into Practice: Composition,
Performance and the Listening Experience (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University
Press, 1999), 27.

“ People want to hear and feel the emotion” D. Stewart, Sweet Dreams, Kindle
edition.

“Songs are more abstract entities” John Andrew Fisher, “Popular Music,” in The-
odore Gracyk and Andrew Kania, eds., The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and
Music (New York: Routledge, 2011), Kindle edition.

“ People often say that a great singer” C. Davis and DeCurtis, Soundtrack, 194.

“No one has been able to ‘keep up’” Barney Hoskyns, From a Whisper to a Scream:
The Great Voices of Popular Music (London: Fontana, 1991), 90.

“The strongest cut on the album” Aretha Franklin with David Ritz, Aretha: From
These Roots (New York: Villard, 1999), 211.

“In singing styles” Alan H. D. Watson, The Biology of Musical Performance and
Performance-Related Injury (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009), 169.

“ There was a tenderness to his voice” Nelson and Ritz, It’s a Long Story, Kindle
edition.

tember 8, 2015.

“A technique heard frequently since Hoppy Jones” Everett, Foundations, 176.

“I mean, singing is just exaggerated speech” Quoted in Jia Tolentino, “A Chat with
Dionne Osborne, the Vocal Coach Who Changed Drake’s Style,” Jezebel, November 17,
2014.

“It was mind- blowing” Quoted in Kate Sullivan, “Cons,” Spin 18, no. 8 (August
2002): 64.

“When [Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s]” Kiedis and Sloman, Scar Tissue,
102–103.

“When I first tried to synch up” Chilly Gonzales Homepage, http://www.chilly

gonzales.com (accessed September 13, 2015).

“Franklin’s singing stays unusually close” Lordi, Black Resonance, Kindle

edition.

“Song has repetition built into it” Levitin, World in Six Songs, 126.

“I would listen and breathe” Melissa Etheridge, The Truth Is . . . : My Life in Love
and Music (New York: Random House, 2002), Kindle edition.

“When you sing” Lees, Modern Rhyming Dictionary, 18.

“As Houston’s voice approached the high note” Cinque Henderson, “Anthem of
Freedom: How Whitney Houston Remade ‘The Star- Spangled Banner,’ ” New Yorker,
January 27, 2016.

“It is a mark of skill in a lyricist” Lees, Modern Rhyming Dictionary, 12.

“I just wanted to come up with something unique” Quoted in Paul Edwards, How
to Rap: The Art and Science of the Hip-Hop MC (Chicago: Chicago Review Press,
2009), 251–252.

“a ‘bed of sound’ upon which” Moore, Analyzing Popular Music, Kindle edition.

“Certain pairings of singers” Ben Ratliff, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen
in an Age of Musical Plenty (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 163.

“One night we were rehearsing” Quoted in Stuart L. Goosman, Group Harmony:

The Black Urban Roots of Rhythm and Blues (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press, 2005), 187.

“As Stephen launched into the intro” Nash, Wild Tales, Kindle edition.

“voice was rough, husky” Nash, Wild Tales, Kindle edition.

“It was a conversation we were having” Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a

Modern Girl: A Memoir (New York: Penguin, 2015), Kindle edition.

“I worried that if they had already sung” Q. Jones, Q, Kindle edition.

“The truth is, everyone was given special treatment” Kenny Rogers, Luck or Some-
thing Like It (New York: William Morrow, 2012), Kindle edition.

“The vocal solos on ‘We Are the World’” Stephen Holden, “The Pop Life: Artists
Join in Effort for Famine Relief,” New York Times, February 27, 1985.

“Even today my voice is hard to categorize” Ray Charles and David Ritz, Brother
Ray: Ray Charles’ Own Story (New York: Dial Press, 1978), 87.

“He knew from the first second he heard me” Spector and Waldron, Be My Baby,
Kindle edition.

“I’ve spent my life listening to singers” Tyler, Does the Noise, Kindle edition.

“like a teething infant” “The Virile Man’s Guide to Liking Joanna Newsom,” by An-
drew Wagner, Vanity Fair, February 23, 2010, http://www.vanityfair.com /culture
/2010/02 /the-virile-mans-guide-to-liking-joanna-newsom.

“When I listen back to those first EP’s” Quoted in Brad Buchanan, ed., Visions of
Joanna Newsom (Sacramento, CA: Roan Press, 2011), 40.

“Performers adapted to this new technology” Byrne, How Music Works, 24.

“I would sometimes comp the vocal” Shawn Colvin, Diamond in the Rough: A
Memoir (New York: William Morrow, 2012), 118.

“Recording technology had advanced” Shania Twain, From This Moment On

(New York: Atria, 2012), Kindle edition.

“(D’Angelo harmonizing with himself” Sasha Frere- Jones, “D’Angelo Reborn,” New
Yorker, January 12, 2015.

“The ‘Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ on the river’” Fogerty, Fortunate Son, 160.

“The juxtaposition of vocal tones” Lou Reed, “Lou Reed Talks Kanye West’s Yee-
zus,” The Talkhouse, September 3, 2014.

“I don’t think Future gets the technology” Quoted in “T-Pain: Future Is Not Us-
ing Auto-Tune Correctly,” BET, February 14, 2013, http://www.bet.com /news/music
/2013/02 /14 /t-pain-future-is-not-using-auto-tune-correctly.html.

“ Future’s voice is often likened to an android” “The Music Club, 2015—Entry 13:
Why Future’s DS2 might be the album of the year, whether or not you like Future
the person,” by Jack Hamilton, December 23, 2015, http://www.slate.com /articles/arts
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

/the _ music _ club/features /2015 /music _ club_ 2015 /future _ s _ds2 _ might _be _the _best
_ album _of _the _ year_whether_or_ not _ you _ like.html.

“In the beginning there was feedback” Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carbure-
tor Dung, 156.

“We used computer- altered vocals more and more” George Clinton and Ben
Greenman, Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard On You? A
Memoir (New York: Atria Books, 2014), 129.

“Curtis Mayfield recorded New World Order ” Fred Moten, “Post in Three Parts,
Goodbye, Hello,” Harriet (blog), Poetry Foundation, February 23, 2010, http://www
.poetryfoundation.org/ harriet/2010/02 /post-in-three-parts-goodbye-hello/.

“the coke was fucking up my voice” Ozzy Osbourne, I Am Ozzy (New York: Grand
Central Publishing, 2010), 140.

“ There is no voice without a body” Dolar, A Voice, Kindle edition.

“The historical concept that black people” Miller, Segregating Sound, Kindle
edition.

“It is here on the level of culture” Ralph Ellison, “The Little Man at Chehaw Sta-
tion: The American Artist and His Audience,” in John F. Callahan, ed., The Collected
Essays of Ralph Ellison (New York: Random House, 1995), Kindle edition.

“ People would listen to my songs and ask” Fogerty, Fortunate Son, 5.

“Yes, I changed my voice” Aerosmith and Stephen Davis, Walk This Way: The Au-
tobiography of Aerosmith (New York: Dey Street Books, 2003), 161/175.

“His insecurity was forcing him” Joe Perry and David Ritz, Rocks: My Life in and
out of Aerosmith (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), Kindle edition.

“I used an exaggerated black-speak voice” Tyler, Does the Noise, Kindle edition.

“I just want her to stop doing” Quoted in “The Playboy Conversation: Jean Grae
on Iggy, Taylor, and Her New EP of Baby-Making Music,” by Neil Drumming, Play-
boy, November 7, 2014, http://www.playboy.com /articles /playboy- conversation-jean
-grae-interview.

“I think it’s really impor tant we all feel free” Quoted in “Iggy Azalea: The Low End
Theory,” by Justin Monroe, Complex, September 16, 2013, http://ca.complex.com/music
/2013/09/iggy-azalea-interview-complex-cover-story.

“So it is not just a matter of the outsider boning up” “Authenticity, or The Les-
sons of Little Tree,” by Henry Louis Gates Jr., New York Times Book Review, No-
vember 24, 1991.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

“white people are the only ones” Marc Lamont Hill, appearance on Huffington
Post Live, March 27, 2013, http:// live.huffingtonpost.com /r/archive/segment/51531
a8478c90a38a20000b6.

“There’s a sonic preference for blackness” Imani Perry, appearance on Huffington

Post Live, March 27, 2013, http:// live.huffingtonpost.com /r/archive /segment /5153
1a8478c90a38a20000b6.

“Falsetto itself represents another manner” Everett, Foundations, Kindle edition.

“In the kinesthetic sensorium” Timothy E. Scheurer, American Popular Music:

Readings from the Popular Press, vol. 2, The Age of Rock (Bowling Green, OH: Bowl-
ing Green University Popular Press, 1989), 43.

“What singles out the voice” Dolar, A Voice, Kindle edition.

“Even when it renders” Cavarero, For More Than One, 127.

“When I heard Janis Joplin” LP, Guitar Center Sessions, http://sessions.guitarcenter

.com / lp/.

“When I sing a note” Quoted in Ian Gittins, “Diamanda Galás: ‘My Performance Is
Catharsis,’ ” The Guardian, April 10, 2009.

“asked me to delay” Ann Wilson, Nancy Wilson, and Charles R. Cross, Kicking and
Dreaming: A Story of Heart, Soul, and Rock and Roll (New York: It Books, 2012),
Kindle edition.

“For some” Grace Slick and Andrea Cagan, Somebody to Love? A Rock- and-Roll
Memoir (New York: Warner Books, 1998), 223–224.

CHAPTER EIGHT: STYLE

“My music—and most music” James Brown and Bruce Tucker, The Godfather of
Soul: An Autobiography (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1986), 149.

“His dances, his language, his music” James McBride, Kill ’Em and Leave:
Searching for James Brown and the American Soul (New York: Random House,
2016), 5.

“I was hearing every thing” Brown and Tucker, The Godfather of Soul, 158.

“Style, of course, is every thing” Jerry Lieber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz, Hound
Dog: The Leiber & Stoller Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks,
2010), Kindle edition.

“Style is a replication of patterning” Leonard B. Meyer, “ Toward a Theory of Style,”

quoted in Berel Lang, ed., The Concept of Style (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1987), 21.

“A musical style is a finite array” Keil and Feld, Music Grooves, 112.

“a constellation of styles” Fabian Holt, Genre in Popular Music (Chicago: Univer-

sity of Chicago Press, 2007), 18.

“American popular music” Weisbard, Listen Again, 4.

“Genre is always collective” Holt, Genre, 3.

“the totality of social space” Holt, Genre, 7.

“radio’s version of what orga nizational theory” Gabriel Rossman, Climbing the
Charts: What Radio Airplay Tells Us about the Diffusion of Innovation (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 71.

“A radio field structured by format” Rossman, Climbing, 80.

“The fact that the album” Twain, From This Moment, 338–339.

“Everyone has a taste biography” C. Wilson, Let’s Talk about Love, 17.

“can make us physically well” Byrne, How Music Works, 321.

“One reason race has remained” Diane Pecknold, Hidden in the Mix: The Afri-
can American Presence in Country Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2013), 12.

“We try to break down every dimension” Quoted in Sarah McBride, “Pandora’s
Radio Head,” Wall Street Journal Magazine, March 11, 2010.

“[The classifications] essentially cover ” http://www.tinymixtapes.com /features/tim

-westergren-music-genome-project-founder.

“His musical vocabulary is outside” McBride, “Pandora’s Radio Head.”

“As labels have gotten more adept” Thompson, “Shazam Effect.”

“ People listen to Top 40” Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What
We Do in Life and Business (New York: Random House, 2014), Kindle edition.

“when you refuse to accept the world” Paul D. Miller, Twitter post, January 21,
2016, 6:30 a.m., https://twitter.com /djspooky/status/690179650165714945.

“a slick, black, technologically advanced” Jon Kirby, “Something in the Water,”

in Purple Snow: Forecasting the Minneapolis Sound (Chicago: Numero Group,
2013).

“A lot of pop music” Costello, Unfaithful Music, 33–34.

“We actually found that the songs” Noah Askin. “The Recipe of a Hit Song,” TEDx-
INSEADSingapore, YouTube video, 11:48, posted [December 20, 2015], https://www
.youtube.com /watch?v=R3UnZBpcF1o.

“The Largest Vocabulary in Music” http:// lab.musixmatch.com / largest _vocabu

lary/.

“The Largest Vocabulary in Hip Hop” http://poly-graph.co/vocabulary.html.

“the words or phrases chosen” Eleanor Cook, “Diction,” in The Princeton Encylo-
pedia of Poetry and Poetics, 358.

“finding a great-sounding word” Fogerty, Fortunate Son, 163.

“I sort of have a little library of phrases” Quoted in DeMain, In Their Own Words,
Kindle edition.

“Words in all pop genres” Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Pol-
itics of Rock ’n’ Roll (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 36.

“Given the relationship of redundancy” Booth, Experience, 13.

“Take some ordinary, everyday expression” Lees, Modern Rhyming Dictionary, 41.

“If you don’t speak English” Quoted in “Darling Nicki: The Many Moods and Manic
Genius of Hip-Hop’s Killer Diva, Nicki Minaj,” by Jonah Weiner, Rolling Stone, Jan-
uary 15, 2015, 41.

“The foreign tongue is first a kind” Don Ihde, Listening and Voice Phenomenolo-
gies of Sound (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), Kindle edition.

“The brilliance of rock lyrics” David Kirby, Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll
(New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009), 144.

“sounds like a cliché” Andrew Marantz, “Kacey Musgraves, Harper Lee, and the
Home-Town Dilemma,” New Yorker, July 22, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com /culture
/cultural-comment/ kacey-musgraves-harper-lee-and-the-home-town-dilemma.

“I was trying to figure out” Quoted in Flanagan, Written in My Soul, Kindle

edition.

“It’s a huge song musically” D. Kirby, Little Richard, 4.

“All the good pop clichés” Quoted in Flanagan, Written in My Soul, Kindle edition.

“Right now, I am instructed” Billboard, August 2015, 76.

thor on July 25, 2014.

“ There are a lot of people listening” Reba McEntire and Tom Car ter, Reba: My
Story (New York: Bantam, 2015), Kindle edition.

“Dave Eggers has a theory” Nick Hornby, Songbook (New York: Riverhead Books,
2003), Kindle edition.

“the basic melody or” A. Bruce Strauch, ed., Publishing and the Law: Current Legal
Issues (New York: Routledge, 2013), 34.

“We were almost Jesuits” Keith Richards, interviewed by Marc Maron, WTF, Epi-
sode 639, September 21, 2015, http://www.wtfpod.com /podcast/episodes/episode _639
_-_ keith _ richards.

“Epidemic of Second Thought” C. Wilson, Let’s Talk about Love, 14–15.

“Shuffled in with sappy late-’80s cuts” Will Sheff, “Okkervil River Responds to Don
Henley: Copyright Laws Kill Art,” Rolling Stone, June 4, 2014, http://www.rolling
stone .com /music /news /okkervil-river -responds -to - don-henley- copyright -laws -kill
-art-20140604 (accessed April 30, 2015).

“They don’t understand the law” “Don Henley of the Eagles Accuses Frank Ocean
of ‘Stealing’ His Song,” Daily Telegraph, June 2, 2014.

“[Henley’s] song is saying” “Cover Songs,” Episode 15, Pitch (podcast), July 1, 2015.

“(Honestly I think copyright law is garbage” Okkervil River, Twitter post, June
4, 2014, 7:08 a.m., https://twitter.com /okkervilriver/status /474190886335938560
(accessed September 13, 2015).

“ Every pop musician is a thief” Quoted in Flanagan, Written in My Soul, Kindle

edition.

“Popular music as an industry” Tara Brabazon, Popular Music Topics, Trends and
Trajectories (Los Angeles: Sage, 2012), 195.

“The copyright of a musical composition” Byrne, How Music Works, 161.

“‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ works” Anka and Dalton, My Way, 331.

“preemptive irony” Jake London, “Sucking in the Seventies: Paul Westerberg, the
Replacements, and the Onset of the Ironic Cover Aesthetic in Rock and Roll (It’s Only
Rock and Roll but I Like It),” May 27, 2010, http://www.jawjawjaw.com /2010/05/27
/sucking-in-the -seventies -paul-westerberg-the -replacements -and-the - onset - of-the
-ironic-cover-aesthetic-in-rock-and-roll-its-only-rock-and-roll-but-i-like-it/.

CHAPTER NINE: STORY

“When you’re writing a song” Quoted in Flanagan, Written in My Soul, Kindle

edition.

“I know from writing lyrics” Byrne, How Music Works, 126.

“narrates without narrative” Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), Kindle edition.

“Like stories, music is said” Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, “Narrativiz-
ing the End: Death and Opera,” in James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, eds., A
Companion to Narrative Theory (New York: Wiley, 2008), 442.

“the logic, principles, and practices of narrative representation” Marie-Laure

Ryan, “Narration in Various Media,” in Peter Hühn et al., eds., The Living Hand-
book of Narratology (Hamburg: Hamburg University, 2014), http://www.lhn.uni
-hamburg.de/ (accessed September 13, 2015).

“is somebody telling somebody else” David Herman, James Phelan, Peter J. Rabi-
nowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn R. Warhol, Narrative Theory: Core Concepts
and Critical Debates (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2012), 3.

“a multidimensional purposive communication” Herman et al., Narrative Theory, 3.

“Remember, the artist is telling a story” Rodgers, Le Freak, 228–229.

“Bruce Springsteen averages” Graham English, “Average Words per Song and the
80/20 Rule,” December 26, 2007, http://i.grahamenglish.net/1163/average-words-per
-song-and-the-8020 -rule/.

“a song is written for the story” Quoted in Flanagan, Written in My Soul, Kindle
edition.

“ There’s a theory that really” Quoted in Flanagan, Written in My Soul, Kindle edi-
tion.

“Then there’s my point of view” Quoted in Flanagan, Written in My Soul, Kindle

edition.

“ We’re now conditioned to expect nothing” Quoted in Flanagan, Written in My

Soul, Kindle edition.

“His songs are deceptively simple” Quoted in Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), Kindle edition.

“love has been a dominant theme” Ted Gioia, Love Songs: The Hidden History (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 2015), Kindle edition.

“One of the great legacies of the Beatles” Steve Turner, A Hard Day’s Write: The
Stories behind Every Beatles Song (New York: It Books, 2005), 12.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

“But were the songs that originally” Dominic Pedler, The Songwriting Secrets of
the Beatles (London: Omnibus Press, 2001), Kindle edition.

“a revelatory distillation of experience” Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” in

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 36.

“It can really be challenging” Quoted in DeCurtis, In Other Words, Kindle edition.

“ There are five things” Quoted in DeMain, In Their Own Words, Kindle edition.

“The three minute pop song” Brabazon, Popular Music, 72.

“When we are being told” Leo Widrich, “The Science of Storytelling,” Lifehacker,
December 5, 2012.

“allows someone to identify with another” Quoted in Daniel A. Gross, “When You
Listen to Music, You’re Never Alone,” Nautilus, March 10, 2016.

“Works of art need to attract and arouse” Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories:
Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2009), Kindle edition.

“We must accomplish our aims” Webb, Tunesmith, 37–38.

“Oh, God” Quoted in Barbara Charone, “The Eagles: One of These Nightmares,”
Crawdaddy!, April 1977.

“In life, things don’t simply start” Herman et al., Narrative Theory, 76.

“the Boy- Girl Other Half strip” William S. Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded:
The Restored Text (New York: Grove Press, 2014), 53.

“When drafted effectively a lyric” Webb, Tunesmith, 177.

“I don’t think I’ve ever written” Zollo and Petty, Conversations, Kindle edition.

“Singing is George” Jennings, Waylon, Kindle edition.

“The song is about a man” George Jones, I Lived to Tell It All (New York: Villard,
1996), Kindle edition.

“didn’t anyone bother” Philip Bailey and Keith Zimmerman, Shining Star: Brav-
ing the Elements of Earth, Wind & Fire (New York: Plume, 2014), Kindle edition.

“Most of the time” Peter Szendy, Hits: Philosophy in the Jukebox (New York: Ford-
ham University Press, 2012), 80.

“The funny thing about ‘Together Again’” Buck Owens and Randy Poe, Buck ’Em!:
The Autobiography of Buck Owens (Winona, MN: Backbeat Books, 2013), Kindle edi-
tion.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

“Well, songs are just thoughts” Quoted in Flanagan, Written in My Soul, Kindle
edition.

“mediated reality” Quoted in Flanagan, Written in My Soul, Kindle edition.

“Narration reveals the finite” Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling

and Selfhood (London: Routledge, 2000), 3.

“A song is a short story” Nelson and Ritz, It’s a Long Story, Kindle edition.

“Most of our songs told a story” Lynn and Vecsey, Coal Miner’s, Kindle edition.

“It is in the Scots, Irish and English” Webb, Tunesmith, 11.

“a story told in song” Webb, Tunesmith, 105–106.

“First, in these kinds of ballads” Rogers, Luck, Kindle edition.

“ They’re all emotionally yours” Bruce Springsteen, Songs (New York: Avon Books,
1998), 47.

“the melodies were uncomplicated” Springsteen, Songs, 274.

“When I’d write rock music” Quoted in Jeff Burger, ed., Springsteen on Springs-
teen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2013),
249.

“In Bruce Springsteen songs” Nick Hornby, High Fidelity (New York: Riverhead
Books, 1996), 136.

“The majority of popular songs express” S. Davis, Craft of Lyric Writing, 11.

“Usually, it’s not my own voice” “Valerie June on Learning to Love ‘Perfectly Im-
perfect’ Voices,” interview by Melissa Block, All Things Considered, National Public
Radio, August 9, 2013.

“The way that a persona becomes” Moore, Analyzing Popular Music, Kindle edi-
tion.

“With each record I’ve done so far” Joanna Newsome, interviewed by Marc Ma-
ron, WTF, Episode 709, May 23, 2016, http://www.wtfpod.com /podcast /episode-709
-joanna-newsom (accessed May 24, 2016).

“ There are songs I will never sing” Judy Collins, Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in
Music (New York: Crown Archetype, 2011), Kindle edition.

“Most of my songs were” Lynn and Vecsey, Coal Miner’s, Kindle edition.

“This is why we have defined” Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 34.

“Like many writers who present an autobiographical” Richard Tillinghast, Poetry

and What Is Real (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 41–42.

“ People often think the lyrics” Jackson, Moonwalk, Kindle edition.

“I used to believe that you” McEntire, Reba, Kindle edition.

“we tell ourselves our individual stories” Quoted in Maryemma Graham and Am-
ritjit Singh, eds., Conversations with Ralph Ellison (Jackson: University Press of Mis-
sissippi, 1995), 370.

“The effect—or, perhaps, the empathetic motive” Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 91.

“It departs from being anything like” Quoted in Flanagan, Written in My Soul,
Kindle edition.

“It felt invasive” Quoted in DeCurtis, In Other Words, Kindle edition.

“Marilyn Manson was the perfect story protagonist” Marilyn Manson and Neil
Strauss, The Long Hard Road out of Hell (New York: ReganBooks, 1998), Kindle edi-
tion.

“A lot of people like to pass me” Quoted in DeCurtis, In Other Words, Kindle
edition.

“For Hi Infidelity, we’d made four videos” Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum, I
Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution (New York: Dut-
ton, 2011), 43.

CONCLUSION
“I often lament that true songwriting” Rosanne Cash, ed., Songs without Rhyme:
Prose by Celebrated Songwriters (New York: Hyperion, 2001), ix–x.

APPENDIX
“I wasn’t coming up with anything specific” “Watch Wilco’s New ‘Born Alone’ Video
and Read the Story Behind Its Lyrics,” by Alex Hoyt, Atlantic, September 7, 2011,
http://www.theatlantic.com /entertainment /archive /2011 /09 /watch-wilcos-new-born
-alone-video-and-read-the-story-behind-its-lyrics/244656/.

“the rare capacity to articulate” Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 210.

“When a song comes to you” Steven Tyler, Does the Noise, Kindle edition.

“‘Take out the papers and the trash!’” Leiber, Stoller, and Ritz, Hound Dog, Kin-
dle edition.

by Robert Hillburn, Los Angeles Times, April 4, 2004, http://articles.latimes.com

/2004 /apr/04 /entertainment/ca-dylan04.

“Two decades later, Jagger” http://www.rollingstone.com /music / lists /the- 500

-greatest -songs - of-all-time -20110407/the -rolling-stones -i- cant -get -no -satisfaction
-20110516.

“Vincent [Youmans] and I” Quoted in Max Wilk, They’re Playing Our Song: Con-
versations with America’s Classic Songwriters (New York: Perseus Books, 2008), Kin-
dle edition.

“In the ten minutes it took” John Denver, Take Me Home: An Autobiography (New
York: Crown Archetype, 1994), 95.

Dusty Hill wrote “Tush” “ZZ Top,” by Sylvie Simmons, Kerrang!, 1995.

“We went upstairs and wrote” Quoted in Daniel Rachel, The Art of Noise: Conver-
sations with Great Songwriters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014), 150.

“written for a lark in ten minutes” Costello, Unfaithful Music, 398.

“It’s a funny song” Quoted in Flanagan, Written in My Soul, Kindle edition.

“I did a song in eight minutes” “Young Thug: Eccentric in Chief,” by Patrick Sand-
berg, Dazed, Autumn 2015, http://www.dazeddigital.com /music /article /25802 /1
/young-thug-eccentric-in-chief.

“[Sound engineer] Tommy Dowd” Leiber, Stoller, and Ritz, Hound Dog, Kindle
edition.

“because it’s one of those that has enough” Quoted in Margotin and Guesdon, All
The Songs, Kindle edition.

“I sat face-to-face with him” “Meet Gina Figueroa, the Nuyorican Co-writer of
‘Really Love,’ ” by Isabelia Herrera, remezcla.com, February 15, 2016, http://remezcla
.com/features/music/gina-figueroa-d-angelo-really-love-interview/.

“Another great early pause” Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (New
York: Knopf, 2010), Kindle edition.

“I was kind of poking fun” Fogerty, Fortunate Son, 141.

“screams defiance at those” Pete Townshend, letter to the editor of It magazine,

no. 112 (September 1971): 9–13, quoted in John Atkins, The Who on Record: A Crit-
ical History, 1963–1998 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press, 2009), 157.

“It’s like a velociraptor scream” “American Rockers Alabama Shakes Throw

Every thing into the Musical Stew for Sound & Color Album,” by Kathy McCabe,
News Corporation Australia Network, April 15, 2015, http://www.news.com.au
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

/entertainment /music /american-rockers -alabama-shakes -throw- everything-into

-the-musical-stew-for-sound-amp- color-album /news-story/723a112b75575262d6da
38aabf49bd87.

“Laughing into tracks represents momentary” Ratliff, Every Song Ever, 133.

“The wise man never laughs” Quoted in Ellison, “An Extravagance of Laughter,”
in Callahan, Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, Kindle edition.

“generally speaking, women” “The Barry White Effect: Men with Deep Voices Have
More Children,” by Gad Saad, Psychology Today, July 16, 2010, https://www

.psychologytoday.com / blog / homo -consumericus /201007/the-barry-white-effect-men

-deep-voices-have-more-children.

“The vocal on ‘Belong’” “Michael Stipe: The Rolling Stone Interview,” by David
Fricke, Rolling Stone, March 5, 1992, http://www.rollingstone.com /music /news
/michael-stipe -the -rolling-stone -interview-19920305.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

I
couldn’t seem to get the opening lines to the Beatles’ “Paperback Writer” out of my
head when writing these acknowledgments: “Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my
book? / It took me years to write, will you take a look?” That supplication seems a
fitting place to start because this book took far more years to write than I ever
could have imagined. No one knows this better than my patient editor, Sarah Miller,
who is well acquainted with the unpredictable rhythms of working and family life.
Her support for me and for this book never wavered. I wish to thank her and the rest
of the amazing team at Yale University Press, especially Ash Lago and Ann-Marie
Imbornoni, as well as Barbara Goodhouse and Brian Ostrander of Westchester Pub-
lishing Services. Thanks also go to Robert Guinsler, my agent at Sterling Lord Liter-
istic; Robert is a stalwart collaborator and a trusted friend.
My students at the University of Colorado, Boulder, are a source of inspiration for
all the work that I do. Thanks in particular to the members of my Poetics of Ameri-
can Song Lyrics graduate seminar who prompted many of the ideas that I develop in
this book. The Laboratory for Race & Popular Culture, which I founded in 2013, has
been this book’s incubator. Over the past several years, many of the lab’s affiliates
have contributed research, conversation, and timely critique: Jack Hamilton, Alex
Corey, Caroline Rothnie, Anna Eissenberg, Hector Ramirez, Grace Rexroth, Brian
Casey, Christopher Haynes, Andrew Daigle, Carlos Snaider, Adam Schuster, Nasif
Islam, Israel Kalombo, Veronica Penney, Ari Gagne, Josette Lorig, Jonina Diele, and
Kristina Mitchell. Particular thanks go to Dillon Mader, who helped me sift through
a massive number of songs as I compiled the appendix.
This book benefited from the academic leave provided through a generous
grant from the Center for the Humanities and the Arts at the University of Colo-
rado. I am also fortunate to have the support and friendship of my colleagues here in
Boulder. Thanks especially to Jeff Cox, David Glimp, Cheryl Higashida, Ruth Ellen
Kocher, William Kuskin, Warren Motte, Helmut Muller-Sievers, and Paul Youngquist.
Stephen Graham Jones was particularly generous, sharing his loving knowledge of
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

country music with me during long lunchtime discussions and contributing a marvel-
ous song list to the Appendix. My colleagues Julie Carr, Noah Eli Gordon, and Raza
Ali Hasan each contributed brilliant short reflections on particular song lyrics to the
appendix.
Taking my time to complete this book meant that I had ample opportunity to cir-
culate parts of it to trusted readers. I am grateful to the following people for reading
and commenting on drafts: Jane Bradley, Brian Buckley, Timothy Anne Burnside,
Ed Dimendberg, Jack Meyer, Paul D. Miller, Peter Reiss, and Andy Schneidkraut.
Thanks especially to the poets Kyle Dargan, Douglas Kearney, Chris Martin, and

Adrian Matejka, whose timely suggestions and kind critiques proved their great
friendship.
Friendship played a significant part in the writing of this book. In that spirit,
thanks to two brothers-from-another-mother, Michaeljulius Idani and Dimitry Elias
Léger, for being down to roll to so many shows with me back in the day, and for read-
ing the book in draft with such care and insight. Thanks to my friend who’s known
me the longest, Justin Francis, for modeling the exacting craft required to achieve
excellence and for designing a remarkable book cover. Thanks to my friend and
trainer Jason Hoff for our weekly lifts, which always seemed to involve extensive de-
bates on everything from the best Van Halen lead singer (Hint: not Hagar) to the
songwriting strengths and weaknesses of Whitesnake and many other discussions
prompted by the songs pumped into the weight room on any given Friday morning.
Thanks as well to Rhidale Dotson and the 3KP guys at AVCF for inspiring my work
by keeping up the spirit in the face of adversity.
I owe a par ticular debt to three more readers. Ann Stockho’s keen eye and care-
ful attention to matters of structure and style helped me to transform this book
into something far greater than it might otherwise have been. Jon Speese, my former
student and a gifted musician, read the book as he would his own; I appreciate his
numerous song suggestions and his enthusiastic support for the book’s animating
idea. John Callahan, my dear friend and mentor, initiated me into the conservatory of
writing when I was still a teenager. Just like the jazz piano virtuosos they used to call
“professors,” John teaches by making music with his words. I thank him for another
lesson.
Even before I knew what shape the book would take, I knew that I wanted Le-
land Chapin to illustrate it. Leland’s wonderful compositions provide a fuller dimen-
sion to the book’s themes, offering a pen-and-ink analog to the poetry of the lyrics
and the music of the songs. I am inspired by his passion for art and for teaching.
Finally, I thank my family for their love and support during the long and often
challenging time of writing this book. Thanks especially to my wife, Anna. Her care-
ful and compassionate criticism of the book’s early drafts prompted me to put more
of myself into its pages. During the book’s five-year gestation, things changed dra-
matically for us—particularly with the birth of our two daughters, Ava and Amaya.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

I dedicate this book to them and to their phenomenal mother. Oh, and thanks to the
Frozen soundtrack for giving me a way to think about my book even while I was play-
ing Anna and Elsa for hours with my own little princesses.

“ Because I Could Not Stop for Death” The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum
Edition, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Har-
vard University Press, copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard
College. Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha
Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson.

“Black Hole Sun” Words and music by Chris Cornell, copyright © 1994 You Make
Me Sick I Make Music. All rights administered by BMG Rights Management (US)
LLC. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal
Leonard LLC.

“Final Hour” Words and music by Lauryn Hill and Christopher Martin, copyright ©
1998 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC and Gifted Pearl Music, Inc. All rights on
behalf of Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC administered by Sony/ATV Music Pub-
lishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219. All rights on be-
half of Gifted Pearl Music, Inc. administered worldwide by Kobalt Songs Music
Publishing. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by per-
mission of Hal Leonard LLC.

“I Got Rhythm” Music and lyrics by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin, copyright ©
1930 (Renewed) WB Music Corp. and Ira Gershwin Music. All rights administered
by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music.

“Sugar, Sugar” Words and music by Andy Kim and Jeff Barry, copyright © 1969
Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC and Steeplechase Music, copyright renewed. All
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

rights on behalf of Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC administered by Sony/ATV

“Love Is Like a Bottle of Gin” Words and music by Stephin Merritt, copyright ©
1999 Gay and Loud Music (ASCAP). All rights controlled and administered by
House of Hassle Publishing (ASCAP). All rights reserved. Used by permission.

“Cuts Like a Knife” Words and music by Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance, copyright
© 1983 Irving Music, Inc., Adams Communications, Inc., Almo Music Corp., and Tes-
tatyme Music. All rights for Adams Communications, Inc. controlled and adminis-
tered by Irving Music, Inc. All rights for Testatyme Music controlled and administered
by Almo Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Reprinted by permis-
sion of Hal Leonard LLC.

“She’s Out of My Life” Words and music by Tom Bahler, copyright © 1979 Fiddle-
back Music Publishing Co., Inc. (BMI), Kidada Music, Inc. (BMI), and Universal
Music-Careers (BMI). All rights administered by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing
Corp. (BMI). All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music. Copyright ©
1983 by Universal Music-Careers, Fiddleback Music Publishing Co., Inc., and Ki-
dada Music, Inc. All rights for Fiddleback Music Publishing Co., Inc. administered
by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. International copyright secured. All rights
reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

“My Heart Belongs to Daddy” (from “Leave It to Me!”) Words and music by Cole
Porter, copyright © 1938 by Cole Porter, copyright renewed and assigned to John F.
Wharton, Trustee of the Cole Porter Musical & Literary Property Trusts. Publica-
tion and allied rights assigned to Chappell & Co., Inc. All rights reserved. Used by
permission of Alfred Music.

“Glad You Came” Words and music by Edward Drewett, Wayne Hector, and Steve
Mac, copyright © 2011 Warner/Chappell Music Publishing Ltd. and Rokstone Music.
All rights in the U.S. and Canada for Warner/Chappell Music Publishing Ltd. ad-
ministered jointly by WB Music Corp. and Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. All
rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music.

“ Under the Bridge” Words and music by Anthony Kiedis, Flea, John Frusciante,
and Chad Smith, copyright © 1991 Moebetoblame Music. All rights reserved. Used
by permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

“Small Town” Words and music by John Mellencamp, copyright © 1985 EMI Full
Keel Music. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permis-
sion. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

“All Gold Every thing” Words and music by Devon Gallaspy and Nicholaus
Williams, copyright © 2012 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, EMI Blackwood
Music Inc., and Songs Music Publishing, LLC o/b/o Trinlanta Publishing and
TIG7 Music Publishing c/o Songs MP. All rights on behalf of Sony/ATV Music Pub-
lishing LLC and EMI Blackwood Music Inc. administered by Sony/ATV Music
Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219. International
copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

“ Uptown Funk!” Words and music by Bruno Mars, Jeff Bhasker, Philip Lawrence,
Devon Gallaspy, Mark Ronson, Nicholaus Williams, Lonnie Simmons, Ronnie Wilson,
Charles Wilson, Rudolph Taylor, and Robert Wilson, copyright © 2014 WB Music
Corp., Thou Art the Hunger, Mars Force Music, BMG Chrysalis, Way Above Music,
Sony/ATV Songs LLC, Imagem Music LLC, TIG7 Publishing LLC, Trinlanta Pub-
lishing, and Taking Care of Business Music (BMI) for USA & Canada/New Songs
Administration for the rest of the world. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Copyright © 2014 Imagem CV (BMI)/Songs of Zelig (BMI), Songs of Zelig adminis-
tered worldwide by Imagem CV. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.
Used by permission. Copyright © 2014 WB Music Corp., Thou Art the Hunger, Mars
Force Music, BMG Chrysalis, Way Above Music, Sony/ATV Songs LLC, Imagem
Music LLC, TIG7 Publishing LLC, Trinlanta Publishing, and Minder Music. All
rights on behalf of itself and Thou Art the Hunger administered by WB Music Corp.
All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music. Copyright © 2014 by Songs
of Zelig, Imagem CV, BMG Gold Songs, Mars Force Music, WB Music Corp., Thou
Art the Hunger, ZZR Music LLC, Sony/ATV Songs LLC, Way Above Music, Sony/
ATV Ballad, TIG7 Publishing, Trinlanta Publishing, and Taking Care of Business
Music, Inc. All rights for Songs of Zelig and Imagem CV administered by Songs of
Imagem Music. All rights for BMG Gold Songs and Mars Force Music administered
by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC. All rights for Thou Art the Hunger admin-
istered by WB Music Corp. All rights for ZZR Music LLC administered by Universal
Music Corp. All rights for Sony/ATV Songs LLC, Way Above Music, and Sony/ATV
Ballad administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite
1200, Nashville, TN 37219. All rights reserved. Used by permission—interpolates
“All Gold Everything” performed by Trinidad James, copyright © 2015 Songs Music
Publishing, LLC o/b/o Trinlanta Publishing, TIG7 Publishing LLC, and Songs MP,
used with permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

“Stan” Words and music by Marshall Mathers, Paul Philip Herman, and Dido Arm-
strong, copyright © 2000 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 8 Mile Style Music,
Champion Management and Music Ltd., Cheeky Music, and WB Music Corp. All
rights on behalf of Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC and 8 Mile Style Music admin-
istered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nash-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

permission of Hal Leonard LLC. Copyright © 2000 by Submarine Music Ltd. Peer-
music III, Ltd. administers on behalf of Submarine Music Ltd. Used by permission.
All rights reserved. (Subject to co-publisher approval and credit.)

AABA form, 39 Amos, Tori, 117

ABABCB form, 39–41 amygdala, 51–52
Abbey Road (album), 279 anadiplosis, 170–171
Abrams, M. H., 51 analysis of lyrics, 26–41; characteris-
acute listening, 53–57 tics of, 26–27; determining the
Adams, Bryan, 149–150 object of analysis, 29; isolation as
Adams, Ryan, 59–60 method of, 26–27, 31; process of,
Adele, 122, 217 27–29; purpose of, 27, 313–314;
Adorno, Theodor, 277 song structure and, 38–41; suitabil-
Aerosmith, 125, 219–220, 269, 309 ity of songs to, 37–38; transcription
Aesop Rock, 245 as factor in, 32–37
“Africa,” 89–90 anaphora, 171, 289
African Americans, 216–222, 236 Anderson-Lopez, Kristen, 124–125
Afrojack, 270 Anka, Paul, 38, 81, 268
Aguilera, Christina, 15, 180, 187, 225 Anthrax, 125
“Ah! Vous Dirai- Je, Maman,” 35 antimetabole, 171
“Alison,” 251 Archies, 142–143
“Alive,” 56 Arlen, Harold, 131
“All about the Benjamins,” 158 Arnold, Eddy, 99
“All Along a Watchtower,” 259 Arrested Development, 202
Allen, Ben, 180 “Art Lover,” 293
Allen, Steve, 271–272 A$AP Rocky, 178
“All Gold Every thing,” 266–267 Ashbery, John, 20
“All Is Full of Love,” 305 Askin, Noah, 243
alliteration, 165 associative similes, 156
Allman, Gregg, 69 assonance, 113
“All of Me,” 234 Astaire, Fred, 73
“All Star,” 249 Astor, Peter, 30
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

“All You Need Is Love,” 173–174 Atkins, Chet, 96

“Almost Persuaded,” 280 Atkinson, Brooks, 161–162
“Alone,” 227 Attridge, Derek, 70
“The Alphabet Song,” 35–36 Audi 5000, 161
“Always on My Mind,” 99 authenticity, 220–221
Alzheimer’s disease, 18 autobiography, 300–304
“America,” 110 Auto-Tune, 210–214
“American Girl,” 126, 291 Axel, Ian, 15
“American Pie,” 26 Azalea, Iggy, 220–221

“Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,” 35–36 “Biscuits,” 250

“Baby,” 242 “Bitches Ain’t Shit,” 268
Baby Bash, 142 Björk, 305
Bacharach, Burt, 83, 116–117 “Black Diamond,” 269
“Back on the Map,” 122 Black Eyed Peas, 244, 246
“Bad Blood,” 67–69 “Black Hole Sun,” 105–107
“Bad Romance,” 55 Black Keys, 238
Bahler, Tom, 150, 206 Black Lily (musical happening), 85
Bailey, Philip, 294 “Black Swan,” 56
Baker, Chet, 211 Blake, William, 21
ballads, 296–297 Blanco, Benny, 12
“Banana Boat Song (Day-O),” 75 “Blank Space,” 309
“Bang a Gong (Get It On),” 151 Blatt, Ben, 120–121
Bangles, 227 Blige, Mary J., 194
Bangs, Lester, 93, 215 blindfold tests, 218
Barnett, Courtney, 117 Blondie, 169
Barthes, Roland, 184 “Blood on the Leaves,” 213
Beach Boys, 203 bluegrass, 232–233
Beastie Boys, 125 blues, 189. See also Delta blues;
Beatles, 37, 47, 111, 120, 167–168, rhythm and blues
173–174, 190, 279, 283–284 Blues Traveler, 57
“Be-Bop-A-Lula,” 271–272 “Blurred Lines,” 265
Beck, 37, 237–238 body, 44, 73–74, 183–187,
Beghelli, Marco, 183 216–217
Belafonte, Harry, 75 Bogan, Lucille, 162–163
“Believe,” 212 Bomb Squad, 17
“Be My Baby,” 104, 207–208 Bon Iver, 213
Benante, Charlie, 125 “Book of Right-On,” 13
Benatar, Pat, 148, 184, 308 Boone, Pat, 258
Ben l’Oncle Soul, 259 Booth, Mark, 247–248
Bennett, Veronica. See Spector, Ronnie “Born in the U.S.A.,” 145–147
Bennett, William, 75 “Born on the Bayou,” 82
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Benson, George, 269 Bosch, Hieronymus, 241

Berlin, Irving, 73 “Both Sides Now,” 112
Berry, Chuck, 242, 258, 279 Bowie, David, 187
Beyoncé, 41, 73–74, 231 Boyd, Brian, 119, 286
Big Boi, 158 “A Boy Named Sue,” 142
Big Data, 238 “The Boys of Summer,” 260
Biggie Smalls, 155, 186 Brabazon, Tara, 264, 285
Big Sean, 156–157 Bradlee, Scott, 272
biology, 181–182 Bradley, Bill, 209

brain function, 18, 51–52, 119, Carey, Mariah, 208

193–194, 285 Carlin, Peter, 81
Brathwaite, Kamau, 17 Carmichael, Hoagy, 33
“Bridge over Troubled Water,” 51 “Carolina Drama,” 278
bridges, 38–41 Cash, Johnny, 80, 142, 208, 286,
Brill Building, 39 303–304
“Bring the Pain,” 161 Cash, Rosanne, 313
Brontë, Charlotte, 110 “Cat’s in the Cradle,” 296
Brooks, Cleanth, 153 Cavarero, Adriana, 103, 184, 225,
Brooks, Gwendolyn, 100 295, 301, 302–303
Brown, Bobby, 225 censorship, 75, 160
Brown, Chris, 270–271 “Champagne Supernova,” 144
Brown, James, 51, 84, 186–187, 220, Chance the Rapper, 256–257
230–231, 240, 242, 265 Chapin, Harry, 296
Brown, Jay, 57–58 Charity, Justin, 195
Browne, Jackson, 128, 261 Charles, Ray, 67, 98–101, 205, 207
Brownstein, Carrie, 204–205 Charlie Daniels Band, 296
Buckingham, Lindsay, 167 Cher, 212
Buckley, Jeff, 127 chest voice, 199
Buffett, Jimmy, 56, 166 Chic, 95, 282
Buggles, 308 choruses, 12, 34, 38–41, 56, 165–166
“Bullet with Butterfly Wings,” 145 Chuck D, 17
Burns, Robert, 152 Clapton, Eric, 80
Burroughs, William S., 289 Clarkson, Kelly, 187
Busta Rhymes, 270–271 Clément, Catherine, 103
Byrne, David, 97–99, 211, 235–236, Clemons, Clarence, 192
264–265, 276, 289, 301–302 clichés, 149–150, 248–251
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 127 Cline, Patsy, 50
Clinton, George, 215
cacemphaton, 164 “Clocks,” 57
cadence, 267 close listening, 44–46
Cake, 238 “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” 128
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Caldwell, Bobby, 217 Cobain, Kurt, 153–154, 186

Callahan, John, 287 “CoCo,” 159–160
Cameo, 240 “Cocoa Butter Kisses,” 256–257
“Candle in the Wind,” 152 “Coconut,” 282
“Can I Be Your Tennis Ball?,” 123 Cohen, Leonard, 13, 22, 127–128
Cantrell, Blu, 131 Coldplay, 57
“Can’t Stop,” 197–198 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 101
Caplan, David, 96, 112 Collins, Judy, 300
Caramanica, Jon, 12 Collins, Phil, 83

Coltrane, John, 185 curated musical selections, 235, 237

Colvin, Shawn, 211, 261, 290–291 Curtis, Ian, 29–30, 166
“Come Fly with Me,” 97 “Cuts Like a Knife,” 149–150
“Come Together,” 284 Cyrus, Miley, 280
“Coming Into Los Angeles,” 130
Commodores, 240 “Da Doo Ron Ron,” 250
composition: dummy lyrics in, 81–84; Daft Punk, 179–180, 209, 214
lyrics’ role in, 30–31; melody as D’Angelo, 211–212, 308
factor in, 86–90; recording in “Dangerous,” 238
relation to, 29; rhyme’s role in, 116, Dargan, Kyle, 84
118–119; singing as, 187–191; “Darkness at the Edge of Town,” 146
word-music relationship and, 80–91. data analytics, 239
See also songwriting craft David, Hal, 83, 116–117
“Computer Love,” 215 Davies, Ray, 94
consonants, 200–201 Davis, Clive, 187, 191
“Constantly Hating,” 202 Davis, Mac, 285–286
Cook, Nicholas, 190 Davis, Miles, 185
Cooke, Sam, 186, 201 Davis, Sheila, 18, 80, 87–88, 299
Copperman, Ross, 251 Dayne, Taylor, 187
copyright, 257, 264–268 “Deadweight,” 238
Corgan, Billy, 145 Dean, Ester, 152
Cornell, Chris, 105–107 “Dear Mama,” 202
Costello, Elvis, 30, 126, 153, 242, 251, “Death Letter,” 258
264, 284 “Decatur, Round of Applause for Your
country music, 236, 251–252, 292 Step-Mother!,” 127–128
Coverdale, David, 153 “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da,” 250
cover songs: copyright and, 257, Def Leppard, 148, 157, 305
264–268; cross-genre, 268–273; Delfonics, 55
ironic, 269–270; rationales for, Delta blues, 162–164
258–259; style and, 257–263 Derulo, Jason, 271–272
Coward, Noël, 28 Dettmar, Kevin, 27
craft. See songwriting craft “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,”
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

“Crazy,” 50 296
Creedence Clearwater Revival, 82, “Diamonds,” 12–13
212, 218–219 Diana, Princess, 152
Cronin, Kevin, 308 Dickens, Charles, 168–169
Crosby, David, 203–204 Dickinson, Emily, 51
Crosby, Stills & Nash, 90, 118, 165, diction, 246–248
203–204 DiFranco, Ani, 283
Crystals, 250 Dion, Celine, 184
“Cupid,” 201 Diplo, 270

disco, 73, 75 Elliott, Joe, 148

Dixon, Willie, 258, 276 Ellison, Fanny, 287
Dø, 255–257 Ellison, Ralph, 189, 218, 233,
“D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune),” 202, 286–287, 302
213 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 144
Dobyns, Stephen, 29 Eminem, 244, 245, 253, 278, 291–292
Dolar, Mladen, 186, 216–217, 225 emotion: brain function and, 51–52;
“ Don’t Know Why,” 129 close listening and, 44–45; evoked by
“ Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” 104–105 lyr ics, 48–49, 52–53; evoked by
“ Don’t Stop Believing,” 55 music, 14, 45, 48; in recording a song,
“ Don’t Worry about the Government,” 30; singing and, 188–191, 225–227;
294 storytelling and, 279, 289–290
“ Don’t You Want Me,” 293 empathy, 51
“ Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing,” 32 “The End,” 47
Doors, 47 “The End of the Innocence,” 260–263
double entendre, 161–164, 168 “End of the Line,” 171–172
“Do Wah Diddy,” 250 end rhymes, 121–122
“Downtown,” 129–130, 157 “The Engineer’s Child,” 254–255
Drake, 64, 157, 196 Ephron, Nora, 22
Dr. Dre, 268 epistrophe, 172
“Dream On,” 219–220 EPMD, 161
drums, 75 “Eternal Flame,” 227
Duhigg, Charles, 240 Etheridge, Melissa, 200, 301
dummy lyrics, 81–84 euphemism, 160–164
Duran Duran, 145–147 Eurythmics, 57
“Dust It Off,” 255–257 Eve, 220
Dylan, Bob, 20, 21, 22, 34, 47, “Even Flow,” 49, 56
125–126, 128, 142, 169, 185, 187, Everett, Walter, 72, 76–77, 186,
190, 205, 244, 257, 259, 261, 278, 195–196, 223
283, 295, 302 “Everlasting Light,” 238
Everly Brothers, 203
Eagles, 26, 287–288 “Everyday,” 178
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

earworms, 54 “Every thing She Wants,” 53

Echo Nest, 243 Exile on Main Street (album), 253
EDM. See electronic dance music expectation and the unexpected,
The Ed Sullivan Show (television 122–123, 171; brain function and,
show), 280 51–52; bridges and, 38–39; in
eight-bar units, 33 phrasing, 93, 98, 100; in rhyme,
Eldridge, Roy, 218 114, 116–123; in word-music
electronic dance music (EDM), 73, 75 relationship, 90. See also novelty;
“Elevator Operator,” 117 predictability; surprise

extemporization, 156. See also “Flightless Bird, American Mouth,”

improvisation 143–144
Flowers, Brandon, 123
Fallon, Jimmy, 271–272 Fogelin, Robert J., 151
false rhymes, 120, 127 Fogerty, John, 82, 212, 219, 246
falsetto, 222–224 Folds, Ben, 268
familiarity and the unfamiliar, 120, Foo Fighters, 170–171
140–141, 144–151, 178, 248–252. forced rhymes, 128–130
See also predictability format, 234–235
Faulkner, Ann Shaw, 75 Foster the People, 238
Feather, Leonard, 218 Four Bars of Rhythm, 203
Federal Bureau of Investigation Foxx, Jamie, 123
(FBI), 26 Frampton, Peter, 209
Feemster, Alphonso, 203 Francis, Justin, 305
Feld, Steven, 85, 232 Frankie J., 142
“Female$ Welcomed,” 161 Franklin, Aretha, 95, 101, 192, 193,
Fetty Wap, 194–195, 268–270 199
50 Cent, 202 freestyling, 37–38, 84. See also
“Fight the Power,” 17 improvisation
figurative language, 140–174; “Freeway of Love,” 192, 193
alliteration, 165; anadiplosis, Frere- Jones, Sasha, 212
170–171; anaphora, 171; antime- Frey, Glenn, 288
tabole, 171; defined, 143–144; double Frith, Simon, 18, 49, 247
entendre, 161–164; epistrophe, 172; Frost, Robert, 18, 21, 155
euphemism, 160–164; making the Frozen (movie), 124–125, 290
familiar unfamiliar through, Fry, Stephen, 78
140–141, 144–151; metaphors, 151, “Fuck Up Some Commas,” 214
153–155, 159; metonymy, 159–160; “Fuck You,” 160
prevalence of, 142–143; repetition, Fugees, 32
164–174; schemes, 164–174; similes, full rhymes. See perfect rhymes
140, 145–153, 156–158; songwriting “Funky Drummer,” 51, 265
craft, 146, 151, 154; zeugma, Future, 213–214
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

168–170
“Final Hour,” 13 Gad, Josh, 124
“Firework,” 152 Galas, Diamanda, 226
Fisher, John Andrew, 191 Gallagher, Noel, 144
Fitzgerald, Ella, 17, 185, 186 “Game of Love,” 214
Five Stairsteps, 201 Gap Band, 265
Flack, Roberta, 31, 165 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 221
Flanagan, Bill, 280 Gaye, Marvin, 17, 84, 194, 200, 265
Fleetwood Mac, 279 gender, 222–225

genre, 232–234, 236–239, 268–273 Guthrie, Arlo, 130

Gershwin, Ira, 113 Guthrie, Woody, 282
gestalt listening, 53, 56–57
“Get Lucky,” 179–180 Hall, Daryl, 207
ghost rhymes, 123–125 “Hallelujah,” 13, 127
Gilberto, João, 211 Hamilton, Jack, 214
Gillespie, Dizzy, 76 Hammer, Jan, 179
Gilstrap, Jim, 225 “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,”
“Gin & Juice,” 268 149
Gioia, Ted, 283 “Happy,” 54, 76
“Give It Away,” 197 Harburg, E. Y., 131
“Give Me the Night,” 269 Harding, Charlie, 67
“Glad You Came,” 171 harmony, 203–208
Glaser, Will, 237 Harris, Emmylou, 120
“Gloria,” 85, 257 Harris, Jesse, 129
Godrich, Nigel, 190 Harrison, George, 207
Goffin, Jerry, 39 Harry, Debbie, 169
“Gold Digger,” 131 Hartman, Johnny, 97
Gonzales, Chilly, 59, 198 hashtag rap, 157
“Good Times,” 95, 282 “Hater’s Anthem,” 155
Gordon, Kim, 186 Hatfield, Juliana, 184–185
“Got to Give It Up,” 265 head voice, 199
Gourds, 268 Heap, Imogen, 213
Gowers, Bruce, 308 Heart, 227
Gracyk, Theodore, 31 “The Heart of the Matter,” 260
Grae, Jean, 155, 220 Heidemann, Amy, 271
Grande, Ariana, 187 “Hello,” 122, 240
Grandmaster Caz, 84, 129 “Helplessly Hoping,” 165
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Henderson, Cinque, 200
Five, 197 Hendrix, Jimi, 20–21, 65, 166, 259
Grant, Amy, 129 Henley, Don, 94, 260–263, 288
Grant, Horace, 158 Hennig, Holger, 99
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Grant, Ulysses S., 158 “ Here I Go Again,” 153

A Great Big World, 15 “ Here to Stay,” 180
Green, Al, 224 “He Stopped Loving Her Today,”
Green, CeeLo, 160 292–293
“Grenade,” 155 “Hey Jude,” 167
Grohl, Dave, 153 “Hey Ya!,” 141, 240
the groove, 72 Hill, Lauryn, 13, 31
Groves, Lani, 225 Hill, Marc Lamont, 221
Guns N’ Roses, 2, 44, 234–235, 244 hip-hop, 73, 160–161, 244–245

“Hit Em Up Style (Oops!),” 131 “I Know,” 72

Hit Song Science, 240 “I’ll Be There for You/You’re All I
Holden, Stephen, 207 Need,” 194
Holiday, Billie, 103, 104, 185, 188, 190 “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,”
Holland/Dozier/Holland, 258 116–117
Hollies, 114 “I Miss You,” 250
Holt, Fabian, 233–234 improvisation, 84–85, 100. See also
“Honky Tonk Women,” 142, 169 extemporization; freestyling
Honsu, Djimon, 224 “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,”
“Hoochie Coochie Man,” 276 49–50
“Hook,” 56–57 “I’m the Man,” 125
Hook, Peter, 29–30, 166 “I’m Waiting for the Man,” 281
hooks, 12, 17, 38, 40, 56–60 “In a Broken Dream, 178
Hopper, Jessica, 128 India.Arie, 260
Hornby, Nick, 5, 253, 299 “Indoor Fireworks,” 153
Hornsby, Bruce, 260–261, 263 Ink Spots, 195–196, 217
Horowitz, Seth, 32 “Insight,” 166
Horses (album), 202 instrumental music, 179, 277–278
Hoskyns, Barney, 192 “In Summer,” 124
“ Hotel California,” 26, 287–288 “In the Ghetto,” 285–286
“Hotline Bling,” 64 “Into the Mystic,” 92–93
Houston, Whitney, 88, 187, 200–201, inverted similes, 158
222, 259 “In Your Honor,” 170–171
“How Ya Like Me Now,” 230 Iron & Wine, 143
Human League, 293 ironic cover songs, 269–270
human nature, 73–74 “It Is What It Is,” 250
“Hungry Like the Wolf,” 145–147 “It’s My Life,” 308
“Hurricane,” 283 iTunes, 235
“Hurt,” 286, 303–304 “I’ve Come to Wife It Wealthily in
Hutcheon, Linda and Michael, 277 Padua,” 124
“I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm,”
Ian, Scott, 125 103
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

“(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” 77–79 “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” 47,
“I Can’t Make You Love Me,” 170 167–168
“If I Didn’t Care,” 196 “I Was Made to Love Her,” 49–50
“If I Only Had a Brain,” 131 “I Will Always Love You,” 88, 259
“If I Was Your Girlfriend,” 224 “I Won’t Back Down,” 265
“If Only You Knew,” 240
Iggy Pop, 288–289 Jackson, Brian, 89
Ihde, Don, 248 Jackson, Bruce, 45
“I Kissed a Girl,” 259 Jackson, Janet, 149, 224–225

Jackson, Michael, 150–151, 186, Kidz Bop, 64

205, 206, 224–225, 240, 280, 302, Kiedis, Anthony, 172, 196–198
305 Killers, 123
Jackson, Python Lee, 178 “Killing Me Softly with His Song,”
Jagged Edge, 142 31–32, 165
Jagger, Mick, 30, 77–79, 121, 169–170, “Killing the Blues,” 114
190, 224, 242, 253 King, Carole, 39
James, Alex, 72 Kinks, 293
James, Fanita, 208 Kirby, David, 249, 250–251
James, Trinidad, 161, 266–267 Kirby, Jon, 241
“Janie’s Got a Gun,” 309 Kiss, 149, 269
Jay Z, 84, 101, 198, 202, 213, 244, Kitt, Eartha, 208
280 Kool & the Gang, 240–241
jazz, 73, 75, 185, 218 Kool Moe Dee, 129, 198, 230
Jennings, Waylon, 96, 179, 292 Kraftwerk, 215
“Jeremy,” 309 Krauss, Alison, 114, 233
Jewalikar, Varun, 244–246 Kristofferson, Kris, 252, 288
“Joanna,” 240
Joel, Billy, 88, 117, 121 LaBelle, Patti, 240
John, Elton, 36, 52, 88, 152 Lady Gaga, 55
Johnson, Brian, 208 “(La-La) Means I Love You,” 55
Johnson, Guy, 164 Lamar, Kendrick, 304
John Tesh Project, 260–261 Lance, Major, 71
Jones, George, 280, 292–293 “Landslide,” 279
Jones, Grace, 184 language: diction of lyrics, 246–248;
Jones, Norah, 129 familiar and clichéd, 249–252;
Jones, Quincy, 97, 185, 205, 206 salience of, 82; vocabulary of lyrics,
Jones, Stephen Graham, 252 243–246, 278–279; voice and,
Joplin, Janis, 187, 225, 288 185–186. See also figurative
Journey, 55 language
Joy Division, 29–30, 166 Lanois, Daniel, 190
June, Valerie, 299 “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” 279
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Lauper, Cyndi, 205, 227

Karmin, 271 “Lay Lady Lay, 142
“Keep on Loving You,” 308 “Lazy Sunday,” 161
Kelis, 141 Leave It to Me! (musical), 161–162
Kelly, Tom, 227 LeBon, Simon, 145
kenning, 155 Led Zeppelin, 227
Kenny G, 244, 260 Lees, Gene, 33, 86, 119–120, 200, 201,
Keys, Alicia, 30 248
Kid A (Radiohead), 56 Legend, John, 234

Lennon, John, 22, 168 “Love Me Do,” 120

Lennox, Annie, 57 love songs, 55–56, 120, 148–150,
Leoncavallo, Ruggero, 111 240–241, 283–284
“Let It Be,” 279 “Love Will Never Do (Without You),”
“Let It Go,” 290 224–225
Levine, Adam, 30, 193, 223 “Loving You,” 55–56
Levitin, Daniel J., 16, 18, 53, 71, 200 Lowell, Amy, 147
Licensed to Ill (album), 125 LP (singer-songwriter), 225
Lieber, Jerry, 231 “Lucille,” 297
Lieberman, Lori, 32, 165 Ludacris, 157
“Like a Rock,” 147–148 “Lust for Life,” 288–289
“Like a Rolling Stone,” 34 Lynn, Loretta, 128, 188, 296, 300–301
“Like a Virgin,” 280 lyric poetry, 51
Lil Wayne, 157, 198–199, 270 lyr ics: analysis of, 26–41; articula-
Lindley, David, 261 tion of, 36; brain pro cessing of,
liner notes, 34 51–52; composition of, 30–31;
linguistics, 182 copyright on, 264–265; critical
listening: acute, 53–57; close, 44–46; writings on, 21–22; defined, 31;
gestalt, 53, 56–57; states of, 37; to dummy, 81–84; dynamic and
stories in song, 293–296 mutable character of, 30–31;
literary studies, 182 economy of, 87–88; emotion
“ Little April Shower,” 2 associated with, 48–49, 52–53;
Little Richard, 250, 258 experience of hearing, 293–296;
“ Little Wing,” 20–21 listening modes for, 44–46, 53–56;
Loggins, Kenny, 207 melody in relation to, 31, 294;
London, Jake, 269 memorable, 54–55; in per for-
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 101 mance, 91–95; per formance of, 28;
“Look at Me Now,” 270–271 poetic qualities of, 14–16, 20–23,
“Look Good in Blue,” 169 51, 55–56, 155, 312; poetry
Lopez, Robert, 125 distinguished from, 17–18, 20,
Lorde (singer-songwriter), 272 45–47, 112–113, 118; presented as
Lorde, Audre, 284 poetry, 34; reading aloud of, 27–28;
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Lordi, Emily, 188, 199 reading meanings into, 26; rhythm

“Lord Send Me an Angel,” 258 of, 66; rules of, 17, 202; silly,
“Lost in the World,” 213 191–193; storytelling function of,
“Louie Louie,” 26 50; transcription of, 32–37;
Louvin Brothers, 203 unsuccessful, 95; voice in relation
Love, Darlene, 208 to, 182, 191–193. See also word-
“Love Is a Battlefield,” 148 music relationship
“Love Is Like a Bottle of Gin,” lyrics on the page: and analysis of
148–149 voice, 180, 182; analytical value of,

21–22, 37; conditions for analyzing, Medley, Bill, 207

34–37; performance in relation to, Meeropol, Abel, 188
44, 91–93, 105; poetry vs., 22–23, melisma, 100, 201
33, 282; song performance vs., Melle Mel, 129, 197, 198
12–15, 17 Mellencamp, John, 172–173
melody: copyright on, 264–265; lyrics
Macklemore, 129–130, 157 in relation to, 31, 294; in perfor-
MacLeish, Archibald, 154 mance of song, 91–92; in rap, 202;
Madonna, 278, 280 song composition and, 86–90
Magnetic Fields, 148 Melville, Herman, 244
Mahler, Gustav, 277 memory, 18, 115, 293
“Make It Work,” 230 Mendes, Shawn, 149
Mamas and the Papas, 209 Mensa, Vic, 256
Mann, Manfred, 250 Menzel, Idina, 290
Manson, Marilyn, 304–305 Mercer, Johnny, 113
“Many Men,” 202 Merhilati, Olivia, 255
Marantz, Andrew, 250 Merritt, Stephin, 148
Marcus, Greil, 20–21 “The Message,” 197
“Margaritaville,” 166 metaphors, 151, 153–155, 159
Margulis, Elizabeth Hellmuth, 91, 168 meter, 15, 76–80
Marley, Bob, 159, 246 Method Man, 161, 194
“Marrakesh Express,” 90, 118 metonymy, 159–160
Mars, Bruno, 155, 265–267 Meyer, Leonard B., 232
Marsalis, Wynton, 186 “Miami Vice Theme,” 179
Martin, George, 190 Michael, George, 53
Martin, Mary, 161–162 “Michelle,” 111
Martin, Max, 58 Miguel, 178
Matejka, Adrian, 49 “Milkshake,” 141
Maxwell, Glyn, 18, 113, 114–115 Miller, Karl Hagstrom, 164, 218
Mayfield, Curtis, 215–216 Miller, Paul D., 241
McAnally, Shane, 249 “A Milli,” 198–199
McBride, James, 230 Minaj, Nicki, 157, 248–249, 280
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

McCartney, Paul, 80–81, 111, 279, 283 minced oaths, 160

McDonald, Michael, 100 Minor, Ricky, 200
McEntire, Reba, 252, 302 Miranda, Lin-Manuel, 114
McGraw, Peter, 123 Mitchell, Joni, 21, 22, 112, 279
McLachlan, Sarah, 247 “Mixed Emotions,” 121
McLean, Don, 26 mixtapes, 256
MCs, 84, 202, 245, 267 Molnar- Szakacs, Istvan, 285
McTell, Willie, 258 Monk, Thelonious, 185
“Me and Bobby McGee,” 252, 288 Monroe, Bill, 233

Monroe, Marilyn, 152 Nine Inch Nails, 303

“Monster,” 248 “99 Problems,” 198, 280
Moore, Allan F., 102, 202, 300 Nirvana, 13, 153–154, 268
Morissette, Alanis, 169 Nite, Jon, 251
Morrison, Jim, 21, 47 Nitt Da Gritt, 194–203
Morrison, Van, 92–93 Nitzsche, Jack, 77
mosaic rhyme, 127, 157 No Doubt, 308
Moten, Fred, 215–216 Noonan, Nick, 271
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 35 notation, 78
“Mr. Brightside,” 123–124 “Nothing Compares 2 U,” 40
Muddy Waters, 276 novelty, 76, 99, 122. See also expecta-
Murray, Albert, 189 tion and the unexpected; surprise
Musgraves, Kacey, 122, 144, 249–250 *NSYNC, 221
musical rhythm, 65–66, 76–80
Music Genome Project, 237, 243 Oasis, 144
musicology, 182 “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” 192
music videos, 305–309 O’Connor, Sinéad, 40
music-word relationship. See word- Off the Wall (album), 150
music relationship “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” 86–87
Musixmatch.com, 243 Okkervil River, 261–263, 269
Mya, 152 “Once in a Lifetime,” 289
My Bloody Valentine, 56 “One More Chance,” 155
“My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” “One More Molly,” 161
161–162 “One Note Samba,” 17, 186
“My Humps,” 246 “One Way Street,” 220
“My Little Town,” 294 “Only Flame in Town,” 153
“My Prayer,” 196 “Only Shallow,” 56
“On the Road Again,” 88
narrative. See stories “O-o-h Child,” 201
Nash, Graham, 114, 118, 203–204 opera, 103–104
Negus, Keith, 30 Osborne, Dionne, 196
Nelson, Willie, 50, 67, 88, 98–101, Osborne, Josh, 249
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

194, 205, 296 Osbourne, Ozzy, 216

Neptunes, 221 O. T. Genasis, 159–160
Nevison, Ron, 188–191 “Otis,” 280
Newsom, Joanna, 13, 209–210, 300 OutKast, 141, 158, 240
Ne-Yo, 306–307 “Over the Rainbow,” 52
“Nice Work If You Can Get It,” 113 Owens, Buck, 294
Nicks, Stevie, 167, 279
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 73 “Pagliacci,” 111
Nilsson, Harry, 282 “Pancho and Lefty,” 278

Pandora Radio, 235, 237–239, 243 poetry: defined, 14; expanded concep-
“Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” 230 tion of, 47; lyric qualities in common
“Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” 279 with, 14–16, 51, 55–56, 312; lyrics
“Paradise City,” 44 distinguished from, 17–18, 20,
Parsons, Graham, 120–121 22–23, 33, 45–47, 112–113, 118, 282;
Parton, Dolly, 259 meter in, 77; musical foundation of,
Pater, Walter, 4 19; unconventional forms of, 19
pattern, 115, 119–131 Polaroid, 141
Pattison, Pat, 80, 118, 127 Police, 104–105, 250
Pearl Jam, 49, 56, 309 Pollack, Sydney, 88
Pecknold, Diane, 236 pop: consolidation in, 239–240,
Pedler, Dominic, 283 242–43; defined, 4–5; immediacy of,
perfect (full) rhymes, 113–114, 46–47; innovation in, 239–242;
116–117, 120, 122–124, 126, 150 misconceptions about, 48; music and
performance: defined, 31; drumming poetry fused in, 19
and, 94; easy vs. hard songs, 93–94; Popper, John, 57
guidelines for, 96; meaning of songs Porter, Cole, 124, 161–162
conveyed by, 48–49; and storytell- posse cuts, 256
ing, 285–286; vocal phrasing in, 50. “Postmodern Jukebox,” 272
See also phrasing; singing; voice Pound, Ezra, 112–113
performative rhythm, 66–67, 69, 91–95 “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” 148, 157,
Perricone, Jack, 65 305
Perry, Imani, 222 Powers, Harold S., 71
Perry, Joe, 220 predictability, 76, 87, 99. See also
Perry, Katy, 152, 259 expectation and the unexpected;
Perry, Steve, 55, 205, 207 familiarity and the unfamiliar
persona songs, 299–305 Presley, Elvis, 191, 280, 285–286
Peter, Paul & Mary, 26, 203 Pride, Charley, 217
Petrusich, Amanda, 183 Prince, 40, 72, 209, 217, 222, 224,
Petty, Tom, 126–127, 188, 265, 291 241–242, 265
Phelan, James, 278 producers, 190
Phonebook Test, 191–193 production: effect of, on song struc-
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

phrases, 247–248 tures, 40

phrasing, 50, 67, 95–107, 194 pronunciation, 181, 200–201
Pichaske, David R., 21 prosody, 87, 89
Pigeons & Planes (website), 195 “Proud Mary,” 212
pitch, 198–199, 202, 212 Public Enemy, 17
Plant, Robert, 113, 114, 227 Puddles the Clown, 272
“Please Please Me,” 168 Puff Daddy, 158
pleasure, 115–116, 118, 184 “Puff the Magic Dragon,” 26
poetic rhythm, 66, 80–91 “Pumped Up Kicks,” 238

Punchline, 161 Reed, Jimmy, 258

Pusha T, 186 Reed, Lou, 22, 213, 280–281
“Pusherman,” 215 regularity, 72, 99
“Puttin’ On the Ritz,” 73 Reid, Mike, 170
REO Speedwagon, 308
Queen, 120 repetition, 12, 70, 72, 115,
“Queen Jane Approximately,” 169 164–174
Replacements, 269
Rabinowitz, Peter J., 278 “Respect,” 95
race: cover songs and, 268, 270–272; “Return of the Grievous Angel,”
and genre, 233, 236; and voice, 120–121
216–222 “Revolution,” 37
Raconteurs, 278 “Revolution #9,” 37
Radiohead, 56, 190, 253 “The Revolution Will Not Be Tele-
radio programming, 234 vised,” 196
Ragtime Gals, 271–272 Reznor, Trent, 286, 303–304
“Raindrops Keep Falling on My rhetorical figures, 143
Head,” 83 rhetorical forms, 143
Rainey, Ma, 162 rhetorical schemes, 164–174
Raitt, Bonnie, 170, 261 rhyme, 110–137; closed vs. open, 201;
R&B, 240–241. See also rhythm and as component of pop songs, 16,
blues 112–115, 117; defined, 110, 117–119;
rap: lines and bars in, 33; negative end rhymes, 121–122; false rhymes,
view of, 75; persona songs in, 304; 120, 127; forced rhymes, 128–130;
rhyme in, 114–115; rhythm in, ghost rhymes, 123–125; masculine
75, 95; similes and other figurative vs. feminine, 118; meaning in
language in, 56, 155–161; singing relation to, 126–128; melody’s effect
in relation to, 194–203; vocabulary on, 86; mosaic rhyme, 127, 157;
usage in, 244, 245. See also multisyllabic words and, 110–11,
freestyling 127–128; and pattern, 115, 119–131;
“Rap God,” 245 perfect (full) rhymes, 113–114,
“Rapper’s Delight,” 282 116–117, 120, 122–124, 126, 150;
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Ratliff, Ben, 203, 242 pleasure derived from, 115–116,

Ray Noble Orchestra, 102 118; popular instances of, 120–121;
Reagan, Ronald, 260 purposes of, 115–117; in rap,
“Reasons,” 294 114–115; rhythm linked to, 111–
recordings, 29, 31, 180, 191, 210–211 112, 115–116, 118, 131–137; slant
Redding, Otis, 102–103, 285 rhymes, 114, 117, 120, 123, 125–
“Redemption Song,” 159, 246 126, 173; and songwriting craft,
Red Hot Chili Peppers, 172, 197 116–117, 119, 126–131, 201;
redundancy, 167 structural role of, 116, 118–119;

successful, 121; transcription and, Romanek, Mark, 304

36; transformative, 130–131 Ronettes, 104
“Rhythm,” 71 Ronson, Mark, 265–267
rhythm, 64–107; accentual vs. Roots, 85
durational, 71; alienating character Rose, Axl, 2, 44, 181, 208
of, 73; attraction of, 72–73; clashes Rosing, Val, 102
in, 89–90; components of, 65; Ross, Diana, 95, 206
defined, 70–75; evolutionary Ross, Rick, 48, 186
purpose of, 71; features of, 70–71; Rossman, Gabriel, 234
human nature and, 73–74; melody “Royals,” 272
in relation to, 86–87; musical, Run-D.M.C., 125, 269
65–66, 76–80; performative, 66–67, Ryan, Marie-Laure, 277–278
69, 91–95; poetic, 66; poetic
qualities of, 80–91; rhyme linked to, Sabado, Antonio, Jr., 224
111–112, 115–116, 118, 131–137; in Sacks, Oliver, 18, 115–116,
singing and speech, 199–200; in 183
transcriptions, 34–36 “Sad Clown with the Golden Voice,”
rhythm and blues, 73. See also R&B 272
Rich, John, 129 Salley, Rowland, 114
Richards, I. A., 152 Samberg, Andy, 161
Richards, Keith, 22–23, 77, 115, 121, Sandy Vee, 152
190, 242, 258 Santana, 247
Richardson, Brian, 288 Santana, Juelz, 157
Richie, Lionel, 205, 206, 240 “Say Something,” 15
riff, 72 “Say You’ll Be There,” 259
Righteous Brothers, 207 Scheurer, Timothy E., 224
“Right Hand Man,” 114 Schneidkraut, Andy, 101
Rihanna, 12, 101–102, 225, 283 Scott, Jill, 220
Rimbaud, Arthur, 190 Scott-Heron, Gil, 89, 196
Riperton, Minnie, 55 screams, 225–227
Ritz, David, 17, 84 Seabrook, John, 57–58
Ritz, Herb, 224 “The Seductress,” 186
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

“River Deep, Mountain High,” 51, 207 Seeger, Pete, 282

rock and roll, 4, 73, 75 Seger, Bob, 147–148
“Rock Rock Y’All,” 161 self, transformation of, 51
Rockwell, 240 semantic satiation, 166–167
Rodgers, Nile, 95, 278 Sequence, 265
Rodgers and Hammerstein, 86–87 “Seven Nation Army,” 259
Rogers, Kenny, 206, 297 sex, 162–164, 168, 272, 280
Rolling Stones, 30, 77–79, 121, 142, Sexton, Anne, 301
169, 242, 253, 258, 300 “Shake It Off,” 58–60

Shakespeare, William, 77–78, 110, 194; together, 203–208. See also

244, 246 performance; vocals; voice
Shakira, 223 “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It),” 41
Shamblin, Allen, 170 “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay,”
“Shameless,” 283 285
“Shave ‘Em Dry,” 163 slant rhyme, 114, 117, 120, 123,
Sheeran, Ed, 268–270 125–126, 173
sheet music, 31–32, 76, 96 Slash, 2
Sheff, Will, 261–264 Sleater-Kinney, 204–205
Sheila E., 76 Slick, Grace, 227
Shellback, 58 “Small Town,” 172–173
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 140 Smashing Pumpkins, 145
Shelton, Blake, 223 Smash Mouth, 249
“She’s out of My Life,” 150–151 “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” 13,
“She’s Strange,” 240 153–154, 186, 268
“She Won’t Dance with Me,” 308 Smith, Arthur, 230
“Shiny Happy People,” 284 Smith, Bessie, 162–163, 189
“Shipbuilding,” 284 Smith, Patti, 85, 202, 257
Shirelles, 39 Smith, Sam, 198, 211, 265
Shorter, Wayne, 260 Smith, Samuel Francis, 110
“Short Skirt/Long Jacket (Live),” Smiths, 149
238 Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, 111
shuffle function, 235 “Smooth,” 247
Sia, 12 Snoop Dogg, 268
Silverstein, Shel, 142 Snow, Hank, 254–255
Simic, Charles, 163, 189 “Somebody’s Watching Me,” 240
similes, 56, 140, 145–153, 156–158 Sondheim, Stephen, 17–18, 65, 86, 126
Simon, Paul, 65, 206, 294 “Song Cry,” 280
Simon & Garfunkel, 51, 203 “Song for Bob Dylan,” 187
Simone, Nina, 213 Song Reader (Beck), 37
The Simpsons (television show), 230 songs: contributors to, 190–191;
Sinatra, Frank, 67, 97, 98, 101, 188, defined, 31
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

190, 194 song structure, 38–41, 166, 286–293

sing-along function, 38, 39, 56 songwriting craft: drumming and,
singing: brain function and, 193–194; 94; and figurative language, 146,
and emotion, 188–191, 225–227; 151, 154; and narrative, 295,
physical aspect of, 183; and 297–299; repetition and, 167;
pronunciation, 200–201; rap in revealed by lyric analysis, 13, 15,
relation to, 194–203; as songwrit- 38; revealed by transcription, 37;
ing, 187–191; speech in relation to, rhyme and, 116–117, 119, 126–131,
179–181, 183, 193–203; styles of, 201; singing and, 187–191; in

word-music relationship, 15, 28. 289–290; experience of hearing,

See also composition 293–296; lyrics’ role in, 50; modes
“So Sick,” 306–307 of, 279; musical, 277–278; music
Soundgarden, 105–107 videos and, 305–309; performance
South Carolina Slave Code, 75 as component of, 285–286; persona
Spacey, Kevin, 271 songs, 299–305; songwriting craft
Spears, Britney, 309 and, 295, 297–299; spectrum of,
Spector, Phil, 51, 104, 207–208, 250, in pop, 280–286; story-songs,
258 296–299; structure of, 286–293;
Spector, Ronnie, 104 sung vs. spoken, 277; themes of,
Spector, Ronnie (Valerie Bennett), 283–285
207–208 story-songs, 296–299
speech, 179–181, 183, 193–203 Stradlin, Izzy, 2
Speech (rapper), 202 “Strange Fruit,” 188
Spice Girls, 259 “Stressed Out,” 116
Spotify, 243 style, 230–273; case examples of,
Springsteen, Bruce, 93, 145–147, 205, 254–257; commercial influences on,
207, 278, 297–299 239; consolidation in, 239–240,
“Stan,” 291–292 242–243; and cover songs, 257–273;
Stapleton, Chris, 280 defined, 231, 232; diction as aspect
“Stardust,” 33 of, 246–248; format compared to,
StarGate, 12, 152 234–235; genre compared to,
“The Star-Spangled Banner,” 93, 200, 232–234, 236–239; innovation in,
213 239–242; science of, 237–243;
Star Wars (film), 170 vocabulary and, 243–246
“Stay with Me,” 198, 211, 265 “Sugar, Sugar,” 142–143
Steinberg, Billy, 227 Sugar Hill Gang, 282
“Step Off,” 250 “Suga Suga,” 142
Stevens, Sufjan, 127–128 Sun House, 258
Stewart, Dave, 57, 190–191 “Sunny Came Home,” 290–291
Stewart, Rod, 178, 308 “Supa Dupa Lemonade,” 156–157
Stewart, Susan, 113, 119 “Super Bass,” 248
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Stills, Stephen, 165, 203–204 surprise, 118, 121, 171. See also
Sting, 104–105, 119, 250, 281 expectation and the unexpected;
Stipe, Michael, 284 novelty
“Stitches,” 149 “Sussudio,” 83
Stoller, Mike, 231 Swayze, Patrick, 161
Stone, Sly, 220 “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” 181
“Stop Stop Stop,” 114 “Sweet Dreams,” 57
stories, 276–309; brain functions and, Swift, Taylor, 20, 58–60, 67–69, 217,
285; defined, 278; and emotion, 279, 309

“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” 226 timbre, 183

Switched On Pop (podcast), 67, 195, Time (band), 265
250 time signature, 76, 78, 86, 202
Sylvester, 224 Tin Pan Alley, 33, 86, 113, 121, 124
“Sympathy for the Devil,” 121, 224, 300 “Tiny Dancer,” 52
synecdoche, 159 “Together Again,” 294
Szendy, Peter, 294 “Tom Joad,” 297
tone, 199
talk boxes, 210 Tony Rich Project, 158
“Talk Dirty,” 271 Toto, 89–90
talking drums, 75 “Toxic,” 309
Talking Heads, 289, 294 T-Pain, 209, 212–213, 214
Talmey, Shel, 94 transcriptions, 32–37
“Tangled Up in Blue,” 47, 278, 302 transformative rhyme, 130–131
Taupin, Bernie, 88, 152 “Trap Queen,” 194–195, 268–270
Taylor, James, 101, 303 Traveling Wilburys, 171
Taylor, J. T., 240 Tresvant, Ralph, 225
“Tears of a Clown,” 111 T. Rex, 151
Tedder, Ryan, 57 A Tribe Called Quest, 161, 280
tempo rubato, 98–100 Tricky Stewart, 41
Temptations, 279 “Triumph,” 3
“Tenderly,” 94 Troutman, Roger, 215, 265
“Tennessee,” 202 “True Colors,” 227
“Tennessee Whiskey,” 280 “Try a Little Tenderness,” 102–103
“That’s the Way Love Goes,” 149 Tucker, Corin, 204–205
The-Dream, 41 Turner, Ike, 51
Them, 257 Turner, Steve, 283
Theroux, Alexander, 153, 167 Turner, Tina, 51, 207
Thicke, Robin, 265 “Tutti-Frutti,” 250–251, 258
“This Boy,” 284 Twain, Shania, 211, 234
“This Must Be the Place (Naïve 21 Pilots, 116
Melody),” 301–302 “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” 35–36
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Thomas, Rob, 247 Twista, 256

Thompson, Ahmir “Questlove,” 45 “Two Dope Boyz (in a Cadillac),” 158
Thompson, Derek, 99, 239 2Pac, 202, 244
Thompson, Richard, 295 Tyga, 230
“Thriller,” 305 Tyler, Steven, 83–84, 94, 208, 219–220
“Thunder on the Mountain,” 125–126
Tillinghast, Richard, 302 “ Under the Bridge,” 172
Timbaland, 84, 221 “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” 308
Timberlake, Justin, 221, 222 “Upside Down,” 95

“Uptown Funk,” 265–268 179–181, 183, 193–203; singing as

USA for Africa, 205–207 songwriting, 187–191; timbre of,
Usher, 223 183. See also performance; singing;
vocals
Vale, Jerry, 99 vowels, 200–202
Vandross, Luther, 187
Van Halen, Eddie, 231 Wagner, Andrew, 209
Van Zandt, Townes, 278 Wagstaff, Sam, 85
Vaughn, Sarah, 185 Wainwright, Jeffrey, 117–118
Vedder, Eddie, 49, 56 Waits, Tom, 209
Velvet Underground, 281 Walden, Michael, 192
Vendler, Helen, 144, 247, 253, 288 “Walked Outta Heaven,” 142
Vernon, Justin, 213 Walker, Cindy, 99
verses, 38–41 “Walk This Way,” 125, 269
vibrato, 100 “Wall of Noise,” 17
“Video Killed the Radio Star,” 308 Wall of Sound, 51, 104, 207–208
videos, 305–309 Wanted, 171
Vincent, Gene, 271–272 Warner, Joel, 123
vocabulary, 243–246, 278–279 Warren, Robert Penn, 153
vocals: articulation/obscuring of, 36, Watson, Alan H. D., 194
44, 56, 96; phrasing in, 50, 67, Watts, Charlie, 77
95–107, 194; rhythm of, 66–67; “We Are the World,” 205–207
stylistic utterances, 186–187; Webb, Jimmy, 19, 34, 87–89, 91,
untrained impression of, 187. See 118–119, 287, 289, 296–297
also singing; voice “We Found Love,” 283
vocoders, 210, 212, 215 Weisbard, Eric, 4, 233
voice, 178–227; combinations of, “Welcome to the Jungle,” 2, 234
203–208; as communication, “ We’re Going to Be Friends,” 238
225–227; distinctiveness (weird- West, Kanye, 131, 156, 157, 213, 244,
ness) of, 208–216; and emotion, 248, 304
225–227; extreme ranges of, 208, Westergren, Tim, 237
223–224; fields of study relevant to, Wexler, Jerry, 98
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

181–182; gender and, 222–225; as Wham! 53

instrument, 179–180, 184–187, 196; “When Doves Cry,” 241
language and, 185–186; lyrics in White, Barry, 208
relation to, 182, 191–193; physical White, Jack, 258
aspect of, 183–186, 200, 215–216; White, Maurice, 294
and pronunciation, 181, 200–201; Whitesnake, 153
race and, 216–222; registers of, 199; White Stripes, 238, 259, 278
significance of, in pop music, 179, Widrich, Leo, 285
182; in singing, speech, and rap, Wilder, Alec, 190

“Wild Horses,” 30 Wright, Jaguar, 85

Williams, Hank, 49–50 Wu-Tang Clan, 3
Williams, Hype, 307 Wyman, Bill, 77
Williams, Joseph, 90
Williams, Pharrell, 38, 54, 76, 180, “Yellow Ledbetter,” 56
265 “Yesterday,” 80–81
“ Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” 39 Yorke, Thom, 56, 101, 253
Wilson, Ann, 227 “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,”
Wilson, Carl, 235, 260 225
Wilson, Nancy, 227 “You Better Run,” 308
“The Wind Cries Mary,” 166 “You Don’t Have to Cry,” 204
Witek, Maria, 76 “You Don’t Know Me,” 99–100
“With Them,” 158–159 Young, Lester, 185
Wonder, Stevie, 32, 49–50, 205, 206, Young, Neil, 209
225 “Young and Wasted,” 149
“Woods,” 213 Young Thug, 158–159, 202
word-music relationship: craft in, 15, “ You’re All I Need,” 194
28; earworms arising from, 54–55; “ You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling,” 207
and lyric-voice relationship, 182; in
performance, 48–49; phrasing in, Zak, Albin, 31, 46
33; repetition and, 167–168; rhythm Zapp & Roger, 215, 265
in, 65; significance of, 3–4, 13–18, Zbikowski, Lawrence M., 16
20–23; in song composition, 80–91; zeugma, 168–170
tension in, 127 Zimmer, Ben, 169
Wordsworth, William, 158 Zwicky, Arnold, 169
Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Popular Music Genres An Introduction Stuart Borthwick Ron Moy Instant Download
No ratings yet
Popular Music Genres An Introduction Stuart Borthwick Ron Moy Instant Download
90 pages
Balazs Acoustic World PDF
No ratings yet
Balazs Acoustic World PDF
6 pages
The Cambridge Companion To The Singer-Songwriter by Katherine Williams, Justin A. Williams (Editors)
No ratings yet
The Cambridge Companion To The Singer-Songwriter by Katherine Williams, Justin A. Williams (Editors)
722 pages
G Steiner 10 Reasons For Sadness of Thought
No ratings yet
G Steiner 10 Reasons For Sadness of Thought
31 pages
Margie Borschke - This Is Not A Remix - Piracy, Authenticity and Popular Music - Copy, A Briefhistory
No ratings yet
Margie Borschke - This Is Not A Remix - Piracy, Authenticity and Popular Music - Copy, A Briefhistory
21 pages
Cut Out "Into Little Stars"' Shakespeare in Anthologies by Anne Isherwood
No ratings yet
Cut Out "Into Little Stars"' Shakespeare in Anthologies by Anne Isherwood
491 pages
Babel Magazine
No ratings yet
Babel Magazine
19 pages
McPherson Reload
No ratings yet
McPherson Reload
7 pages
Daniel Tiffany - My Silver Planet A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch
100% (3)
Daniel Tiffany - My Silver Planet A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch
312 pages
Gale Researcher Guide for: Metafiction and the New Imaginary of the Twenty-First Century: Rachel Kushner
From Everand
Gale Researcher Guide for: Metafiction and the New Imaginary of the Twenty-First Century: Rachel Kushner
O'Connor
No ratings yet
On Gerontion
No ratings yet
On Gerontion
6 pages
1978 E Catalog
No ratings yet
1978 E Catalog
78 pages
Listado de Puntajes Definitivos Con Ranking - Concurso Médicos EDF 2022 1
No ratings yet
Listado de Puntajes Definitivos Con Ranking - Concurso Médicos EDF 2022 1
35 pages
MU310 - History of Music
No ratings yet
MU310 - History of Music
302 pages
I Poeti Italiani
No ratings yet
I Poeti Italiani
528 pages
MAEL - The Sound of Poetry (Stylistics)
No ratings yet
MAEL - The Sound of Poetry (Stylistics)
14 pages
Ziff Paul The Task 1953
No ratings yet
Ziff Paul The Task 1953
22 pages
Robert Earl Hardy - A Deeper Blue The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
100% (1)
Robert Earl Hardy - A Deeper Blue The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt
322 pages
The Auditory Culture Reader: Berg
No ratings yet
The Auditory Culture Reader: Berg
4 pages
Braut, Christian - The Musician's Guide To MIDI
No ratings yet
Braut, Christian - The Musician's Guide To MIDI
571 pages
Christoph Cox Audio Culture Readings in Modern Music
No ratings yet
Christoph Cox Audio Culture Readings in Modern Music
470 pages
American Hardcore A Tribal History (PDFDrive)
No ratings yet
American Hardcore A Tribal History (PDFDrive)
988 pages
How To Read A Poem: Interact With The Poem
No ratings yet
How To Read A Poem: Interact With The Poem
5 pages
John Sutherland - A Little History of Literature - The Bard
100% (1)
John Sutherland - A Little History of Literature - The Bard
18 pages
Tradition and The Individual Talent - TS Eliot
No ratings yet
Tradition and The Individual Talent - TS Eliot
7 pages
Latour - Bruno - 2014 - Agency at The Time of The Anthropocene
100% (1)
Latour - Bruno - 2014 - Agency at The Time of The Anthropocene
19 pages
Music 2252 Textbook - 8th Edition
No ratings yet
Music 2252 Textbook - 8th Edition
449 pages
Place Music
No ratings yet
Place Music
12 pages
On Modern Poetry - Guido Mazzoni
No ratings yet
On Modern Poetry - Guido Mazzoni
275 pages
The Absent Presence of Progressive Rock in The British Music Press 1968 1974 PDF
No ratings yet
The Absent Presence of Progressive Rock in The British Music Press 1968 1974 PDF
33 pages
Shakespearean Negotiations - Greenblatt - Cap1 PDF
100% (2)
Shakespearean Negotiations - Greenblatt - Cap1 PDF
14 pages
Levi, Primo - Art of Fiction, No. 140 (Paris Review, Spring 1995) PDF
No ratings yet
Levi, Primo - Art of Fiction, No. 140 (Paris Review, Spring 1995) PDF
16 pages
Postmodernism Intertextual Dimensions Course
No ratings yet
Postmodernism Intertextual Dimensions Course
48 pages
McGann-Jerome Postmodern-Poetries Verse 1990 PDF
No ratings yet
McGann-Jerome Postmodern-Poetries Verse 1990 PDF
74 pages
Lives of the Saints
From Everand
Lives of the Saints
David R. Slavitt
4/5 (2)
Adorno - Music and New Music
No ratings yet
Adorno - Music and New Music
13 pages
Fabbri 1982
No ratings yet
Fabbri 1982
14 pages
Morphagene Front Panel Cheat Sheet Alternate Version
No ratings yet
Morphagene Front Panel Cheat Sheet Alternate Version
1 page
Amy Clampitt Paris Review
No ratings yet
Amy Clampitt Paris Review
22 pages
Brahms-Violoncello Sonate F-Dur Op. 99-Piano - Score
No ratings yet
Brahms-Violoncello Sonate F-Dur Op. 99-Piano - Score
10 pages
Draper-Concrete Poetry-1971
No ratings yet
Draper-Concrete Poetry-1971
13 pages
Intro To Grad Writing Text Edited
No ratings yet
Intro To Grad Writing Text Edited
90 pages
Aulsander 2006
100% (1)
Aulsander 2006
7 pages
Aesthetics of Music David Huron
No ratings yet
Aesthetics of Music David Huron
9 pages
Introduction To Electronic Music PDF
No ratings yet
Introduction To Electronic Music PDF
5 pages
Discourse and Social Change by Norman Fa (1) - Searchable
No ratings yet
Discourse and Social Change by Norman Fa (1) - Searchable
269 pages
Nino Pirrotta - Dante Musicus Gothicism, Scholasticism, and Music
100% (1)
Nino Pirrotta - Dante Musicus Gothicism, Scholasticism, and Music
14 pages
Philosophy of Modern Music
No ratings yet
Philosophy of Modern Music
201 pages
Manual Tonica Fugata/pop v.12
No ratings yet
Manual Tonica Fugata/pop v.12
71 pages
Cuddle Up Chords
No ratings yet
Cuddle Up Chords
1 page
Rigney. The Dynamics
No ratings yet
Rigney. The Dynamics
9 pages
Cutler Plunderphonia
No ratings yet
Cutler Plunderphonia
9 pages
Tenzer AAWM Vol 1 1 PDF
No ratings yet
Tenzer AAWM Vol 1 1 PDF
24 pages
Echard PDF
No ratings yet
Echard PDF
527 pages
Tony Conrad RemarksBeforeIBegin PDF
No ratings yet
Tony Conrad RemarksBeforeIBegin PDF
7 pages
Disciplined Listening in Tokyo: Onkyo and Non-Intentional Sounds
No ratings yet
Disciplined Listening in Tokyo: Onkyo and Non-Intentional Sounds
26 pages
Julie Anne Sadie, Stanley Sadie - Calling On The Composer - A Guide To European Composer Houses and Museums-Yale University Press (2005)
No ratings yet
Julie Anne Sadie, Stanley Sadie - Calling On The Composer - A Guide To European Composer Houses and Museums-Yale University Press (2005)
449 pages
Standard Language and Poetic Language
No ratings yet
Standard Language and Poetic Language
4 pages
Introduction To Poetics 0816610118 9780816610112 Compress
100% (1)
Introduction To Poetics 0816610118 9780816610112 Compress
115 pages
Just Being Difficult?: Tciited
No ratings yet
Just Being Difficult?: Tciited
241 pages
New Selected Poems
From Everand
New Selected Poems
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
No ratings yet
Circuits
From Everand
Circuits
Michael Brodsky
No ratings yet
Activities (Verb To Be, Present Continuous, Present Simple)
No ratings yet
Activities (Verb To Be, Present Continuous, Present Simple)
6 pages
Beatles - Hello-Goodbye
0% (1)
Beatles - Hello-Goodbye
2 pages
Basic Music Theory Pt. 3 - Harmonising Scale Worksheet
No ratings yet
Basic Music Theory Pt. 3 - Harmonising Scale Worksheet
1 page
Victor Ntoni - Wikipedia
No ratings yet
Victor Ntoni - Wikipedia
2 pages
2002songsheet Songsandchantsforthegoddess Dragonfest2002
No ratings yet
2002songsheet Songsandchantsforthegoddess Dragonfest2002
12 pages
Steinway&Sons
No ratings yet
Steinway&Sons
20 pages
Grammar Past Continuous Worksheet MMM
No ratings yet
Grammar Past Continuous Worksheet MMM
2 pages
King Crimson Epitaph Chords
100% (1)
King Crimson Epitaph Chords
2 pages
Đề thi Tiếng anh lớp 4 - HKI
No ratings yet
Đề thi Tiếng anh lớp 4 - HKI
6 pages
Analysis and Performance, or Wissen, Können, Kennen
No ratings yet
Analysis and Performance, or Wissen, Können, Kennen
7 pages
Biografia Elvis
No ratings yet
Biografia Elvis
5 pages
Reo Speedwagon: Veterans Memorial Auditorium Des Moines, Iowa 1987 Set List
No ratings yet
Reo Speedwagon: Veterans Memorial Auditorium Des Moines, Iowa 1987 Set List
2 pages
How To Dance The Charleston: Lesson Plan
No ratings yet
How To Dance The Charleston: Lesson Plan
2 pages
Ausencias: Sassofono Contralto
No ratings yet
Ausencias: Sassofono Contralto
2 pages
Line Dancing P.E.
No ratings yet
Line Dancing P.E.
17 pages
Scarborough Fair - Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel Sheet Music For Piano (Piano Duo) Musescore - Com 3
No ratings yet
Scarborough Fair - Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel Sheet Music For Piano (Piano Duo) Musescore - Com 3
1 page
Div. Donner - 10 MEI 2024
No ratings yet
Div. Donner - 10 MEI 2024
2 pages
Verbal Reasoning
No ratings yet
Verbal Reasoning
5 pages
Music Motivation Checklist PDF
100% (1)
Music Motivation Checklist PDF
174 pages
Digital Booklet - Dance (RED) Save Lives (Presented by Tiësto)
No ratings yet
Digital Booklet - Dance (RED) Save Lives (Presented by Tiësto)
6 pages
Unit 6 Test
100% (2)
Unit 6 Test
3 pages
Happy Birthday in Chopin S Style: A Tempo Di Valse (
No ratings yet
Happy Birthday in Chopin S Style: A Tempo Di Valse (
8 pages
2gether เพราะเราคู่กัน by JittiRain
No ratings yet
2gether เพราะเราคู่กัน by JittiRain
538 pages
Criteria Singing
No ratings yet
Criteria Singing
2 pages
Allison Bassett: Graduate Teacher Assistant
No ratings yet
Allison Bassett: Graduate Teacher Assistant
4 pages
Berklee Online Songwriting Degree Handbook
No ratings yet
Berklee Online Songwriting Degree Handbook
89 pages
Recorded Legacy Richter
No ratings yet
Recorded Legacy Richter
170 pages
ISM BRD Priya Final
No ratings yet
ISM BRD Priya Final
3 pages

The Poetry of Pop

Uploaded by

The Poetry of Pop

Uploaded by

Copyright © 2017. Yale University Press. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2017 by Adam Bradley.

Yale University Press books may be purchased in

Designed by Mary Valencia.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956986

A catalogue record for this book is available from

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO

3LISTE NING 43

6F IGUR A TIV E LA NGUAGE 139

I’m a twenty-three-year-old graduate student, about to take a three-hour

music intended for preteens, that it is mass-produced and indifferently

years, to the detriment of my ears and the betterment of my being. Though

ered ephemeral in the firmament of tradition, of underscoring the continu-

does it require preexisting experience with poetics. Instead, it takes a func-

L yric & Song

analysis— a rhyme here, a simile there— the preponderance of its poetic

Take “Diamonds” or Rihanna’s number-one hit from the previous year,

Say something, I’m giving up on you

Say something,/I’m giving/up on you

The entire verse is written in dactylic trimeter, a stressed syllable fol-

be hung,” explains the sound engineer turned neuroscientist Daniel J.

lack something,” writes Stephen Sondheim; poetry is complete unto itself.

by half. But do we stand to gain a clearer understanding of her art, art

One could conceive of other analytic practices, such as listening to a song

in another voice for another time.

to shift shape and reappear as something different, though somehow also

Sometimes I wonder why I spend

Ah! Vous dirai-je maman 7

Twinkle, twinkle, little star 7

Baa, Baa, black sheep, have you any wool? 9

Beck’s Song Reader, a set of sheet music he released in 2012 as an invita-

which extemporization undercuts the kinds of formal patterning that poetic

A fine example of this form is “Nothing Compares 2 U,” a Prince song

part of this is attributable to the modes of pop production. Contemporary pop

Like folk poetry, the poetry of pop exhibits an aesthetics of immediacy.

Much of the mismeasure of pop music is a consequence of misplaced in-

songwriters have selected to help foster a feeling. Williams, for instance,

to contain complex narratives. When song lyrics function as narrative, it re-

Water” means accepting an intimate relationship with an unnamed person

connotations of words rather than their precise denotations. When research

others when there is ambiguity, contradiction, or outright opacity.” Any uncer-

listen, with occasional concessions in the chorus to the audience’s unmet

difference to her detractors. All of this transpires in twenty-three seconds,

Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play

syllables long, but pronouncing “anytime” requires crowding the syllables

ings, however, underscores their differences. A full accounting of the complex

quantifiable—the meter of the composition— and in the ineffable— each in-

As repetition with a difference, the rhythm of a musical composition defines

Did you have to do this?

Did you have to do this? 6/2

Did you have to do this? 6/2

Did you have to ruin 6/2

Did you have to do this? 6/3

Pop is synonymous with rhythm, which is to say it is synonymous with rep-

observes, rhythm can refer to “the recurrence at (normally) regular inter-

What’s that sound? (That rhythm)

There can be no beat (Without rhythm)

Rhythm abounds in these lines and in this recording: in the call-and-

In pop music, repetition asserts itself most apparently in the rhythmic

hip-hop or in electronic music, rhythm carries associations of a Dionysian

experience music as a bodily as well as a mental matter.”

Unpacking the complex interrelatedness of rhythms in pop songs means

When musicians talk about rhythm, it sometimes sounds as if they’re talk-

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun

I can’t get no-oh satisfaction

Scanned as page-based poetry, two lines of trochaic tetrameter (a sequence

ease and elegance of the rhythm.

sonic quality of a given word, or of a cluster of words, is usually of greater

I’m screaming nonsense vowels and consonants—“AEEEE

Fogerty’s compositional practice privileges rhythm and sound as the

tive to reshape those words in performance, using his voice as an instrument

There’s a girl that’s been on my mind

lyrics this way:

is a tone on the in-between. Harm- onics-slash-psychoacoustics-

A song, Tyler asserts, begins with emotion, and emotion communicates in

3LISTE NING 43

6F IGUR A TIV E LA NGUAGE 139