Fuzzy Logic
“Mike?”
“Yeah?”
“You know how when you go to a football match, the fans chant ‘You’re going home in a great big ambulance’?”
“Yes…?”
“Well, generally, you don’t, do you? I mean, the role of the ambulance is primarily to transport you to the hospital.”
“That’s quite true.”
“So it’s wrong.”
Jessica looks up from her proofreading with a wry smile. “What you need to do is go to a football match and then get up halfway through and quietly explain that.”
“No, it’s just something that’s bugged me for years. I do appreciate the dual usage of the ambulance, and concede that an ambulance might be taking you home after a stay in hospital, at which point you will be fully recovered and once more fighting fit. But that’s not what it means here. What it in fact means is that you, the heathen scum who support the opposing side, will suffer righteous fury at the hands of the rest of us, thereby necessitating hospital treatment and the need for an ambulance.”
Mike thinks for a second. “I remember Alan Smith breaking his leg. The fans sang ‘You’re going home in a great big ambulance’.”
“Except he wasn’t. He was going to hospital.”
I'm not going to write yet another rant about poor grammar (except to say that I recently noticed that the children’s classic, ‘Me And My Teddy Bear’, contains a tremendous clanger. It opens with the lines “In the house right next to me / a little boy lives there”, which simply doesn’t work as a sentence or even as a coherent lyric – it’s like someone just jotting down random thoughts on paper). No, I’m more interested today in lyrics that simply don’t make any sense.
Before we discuss this, we ought to differentiate between lyrics that don’t work and lyrics that don’t sound right. The songs of Abba are a good example of the latter: Benny and Bjorn wrote fantastic, melodious pop that’s lasted for over thirty years, survived any number of tribute acts and covers and spawned a smash West End musical that eventually became a blockbuster movie (even if Pierce Brosnan did sound like something rather precious to him had been caught in his zip). I’d imagine that their lyrics read quite well in Swedish, but the English translations (constructed with more than a little help from Stig Anderson, at least early on) are a frequent source of amusement. As well as having to rhyme “Glasgow” with “last show” in the well-meant but whiny ‘Super Trouper’, Frida and Agnetha were also forced to stumble through some extremely awkward English in ‘Fernando’, as the two girls admit that “Now we’re old and grey, Fernando / Since many years I haven’t seen a rifle in your hand”. The word ‘since’ would only work, in this context, if it implied that the duo’s pipe-and-slippers state of affairs was directly connected with the state of the rifle, which is almost certainly not true, unless we’re talking about a magic Winchester that rejuvenates and prolongs life in the style of Bilbo’s ring or Dorian Gray’s hideous portrait. As it stands, it’s just an unfortunate enjambment of two phrases that don’t really go very well together, written and delivered by musicians who are having to construct tourist English, in the absence of having it as a first language. At least they don’t ask if we would like to go back to their place, bouncy-bouncy.
There are some songs that make the hairs of your neck stand up for entirely the wrong reasons. The violin-obsessed farmer of John Martin Sommers’ ‘Thank God I’m A Country Boy’, for example, begins his fourth verse with “I fiddled with my daddy ‘til the day he died”. At least, that’s how it sounded the first (and subsequently every) time I heard it – a quick Google reveals that it’s actually “My fiddle was my daddy’s ‘til the day he died”, but Denver storms through the song at such a breakneck pace that the damage is already done. (When I pointed this out to Emily, she reasoned that it would have been far worse if Denver had sung “My daddy fiddled with me”.)
I’m not advocating a Gold Standard of songwriting, nor am I suggesting that every lyric should read like a scientific paper. I’m just baffled by some of the things I hear. Alanis Morisette, for example, rhetorically asked “Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?” before the rest of us were forced to cry in one voice “No!”. (Alanis, quick English lesson: Rain on your wedding day, as you’ve already been told by a thousand comedians and bloggers who forget to name their sources, is only ironic if you’re a weatherman who predicted a dry spell. A traffic jam when you’re already late is Sod’s law. And a black fly in your Chardonnay is a clear sign you’re in the wrong restaurant.) I don’t care if it was supposed to be funny or light-hearted or if the irony was that there was very little irony in there at all. It’s still sloppy writing.
I’d also point out that I’m deliberately excluding nonsense songs, mystical acid-themed trips or anything by Genesis (pre-1975, anyway). Some songs are just not meant to make sense, and I can live with that. (Others are purposefully stupid, their apparent contradictions delivered with a knowing wink to the listener: ‘I Remember It Well’ is an obvious example.) I don’t think that there’s a single person who’s ever managed to adequately explain ‘I Am The Walrus’ – the late Ian MacDonald’s conviction that it was a rant against the establishment, through its use of compromised authority figures, simply doesn’t wash with me. As far as I’m concerned it’s just an effort on Lennon’s part to avoid yet more analysis by concocting a melee of images that are so abstract you can’t possibly explain them.
Others, however, can be explained, but they still make no sense. I can remember hearing ‘You’re So Vain’ a whole bunch of times, across a period many years, before suddenly realising that Carly Simon was in complete denial. Having spent the first verse describing a conceited gentleman who enters the home of a soiree like he was “walking onto a yacht”, complete with light linen suit (tailored), tasteful scarf and all the right moves, she then goes on to detail his womanising tendencies and various mistresses, at least one of which is “the wife of a close friend”. Simon’s understated rant about a man who may or may not be James Taylor is eloquent, thoughtfully constructed with some beautiful imagery (it really doesn’t get much better than “I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee”) and not a little bitter. That’s the coffee, you understand.
But it’s in the chorus where she screws up. After copious physical descriptions of an egotist who is so self-obsessed he could give Jennifer Lopez a run for her money, our dear Carly makes her fatal slip, as she sings “You’re so vain / you probably think this song is about you”. Well, who else was it about? I’m sorry, Carly, but I’ve spent hours analysing this and I don’t think you’re singing about yourself. I can only assume that you’re directing your narrative at a set of egotistical men who are standing in front of you (Ms. Simon has admitted more than once that “the song is a composite of three people”) and you’re goading your victim into giving himself away through simple narcissism. All hail the power of suggestion, but you really do need to make these things more obvious.
Abandoning horses in Saratoga and heading for hippos in the Serengeti, we end up instead in the middle of a jungle, where we find a lion, apparently having a snooze. Except he isn’t, surely? I’m no biologist, but the last time I checked, there was a general dearth of Panthera Leo in the jungle. They tend to restrict themselves to grassland, except in parts of India, where they live in scrub forests, which is not the same thing. And yet we’re supposed to believe Solomon Linda’s assertion that “in the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight”. I mentioned this over dinner one evening to Emily’s friend Kirsten, and was swiftly rebuffed: “He’s lost! All right? He’s lost. He made a wrong turn and wound up in the jungle. Deal with it.”
The second verse begins
“In the village, the peaceful village
The lion sleeps tonight…”
That’s better. Now we’re getting somewhere. I can certainly envisage a big cat taking a nocturnal stroll through a settlement right next to the pride lands, and deciding it would be as good a place as any to bed down for the night. Having said all that it does remind me of the old joke about two lions who escape from Blackpool Zoo and decide to take a walk along the beach, whereupon one of them remarks to the other, “Not many people about for a bank holiday”. Perhaps it would have been better of Solomon had rewritten his second verse so that it read “In the village, the peaceful village / The lion sleeps tonight / but the villagers probably won’t.”
Perhaps the most jaw-dropping example of poor logic in lyric writing that I’ve encountered occurs in an excruciating 1969 recording by Pat Campbell, who also recorded T. Texas Tyler’s ‘Deck of Cards’. In that, a young soldier is arrested for starting a round of patience during a church service, but rather than admit his crime, he pulls off a dazzling ruse, managing to convince his commanding officers that the cards symbolise days of the week, months of the year and assorted Biblical types. (In some versions of the song the charge against the soldier is dropped, while in others it’s left somewhat ambiguous, although Wink Martindale’s rendition concludes, sickeningly, with the words “And friends, the story is true. I know…I was that soldier.”)
A quick sniff of his biography – such as it is, the details on the web are scant – shows that this sort of rubbish is perfect for Campbell. The back cover of his 1970 album, Just A Quiet Conversation, reads “Pat Campbell was born in Ireland, but it might just as well have been Nashville. He’s been there many times and he’s welcomed as a friend by the biggest names in the world of country music. On each visit he brings a little piece of Nashville home with him, but also leaves a little of Pat Campbell there in return.” He was trying to avoid passport control, then. (For those of you who are interested or particularly sadistic / masochistic, the whole album is available for download, gratis, from WFMU’s 365 Days project.
If ‘Deck of Cards’ is twee, sentimental claptrap of the highest order, it does at least have some semblance of common sense about it, which is more than you could say for ‘The Deal’, our song of choice this afternoon. On this occasion, dear old Patrick assumes the persona of a young man in a hospital waiting room, who is placed into an appalling moral dilemma when doctors tell him that because of “complications” (and because this is the 1960s), lives are at stake and he will have to choose between saving his wife and his unborn child. Devastated, he stumbles into the chapel, whereupon he offers himself as a substitute – “If you gotta take one, please, please let it be me”. Back in the corridor, he finds his legs giving way, and he shuffles off this mortal coil just as the doctors come rushing through from surgery to inform him that against all the odds, both wife and child have survived.
Campbell delivers the song in the form of a spoken monologue, with a vague sense of cadence at the end of what you might consider to be ‘verses’. A chapel organ – perhaps the very one keeping him company in the hospital – drones in the background. It’s all very cheap and cheerless, but it’s the subject matter that really grates. The concept of Campbell’s dilemma is akin to the episode of The Simpsons where Ron Howard, in an obvious parody of his real life persona, pitches a movie to a bored executive by suggesting that there’s “this robot, he’s got a heart-breaking decision to make about whether his best friend lives…or dies.” When the executive appears nonplussed, Howard swiftly adds “His best friend is a talking pie!”, which gets him a huge bag of cash and a reprise of the Happy Days theme.
Even before this, things are pretty grim: left alone in the waiting room while his wife goes through the labour without him (this was the 60s, don’t forget) Campbell (yes, I know he’s only playing a character, but his delivery is so revolting I am going to permanently weld him to the song) describes his nerves about the impending arrival of his “long-awaited son”, before allowing himself a chuckle with the realisation that “it could be an old girl”. (A very young one, actually, but let’s not go there.) You can almost visualise his thought process: “Ooh, it’s going to be a boy! Except I don’t actually know.” It’s like Carousel’s ‘Soliloquy’ condensed into fifteen seconds, with none of the emotion.
It’s in the chapel that things get much worse. It’s worth noting, purely as an aside, that none of my whinging about this would amount to anything if the song had been delivered with even a trace of irony, but that’s not the case – the implication throughout is that we’re supposed to take ‘The Deal’ absolutely seriously The pleading, heartfelt anxiety of Campbell’s prayer to his heavenly father is undermined somewhat by the fact that this whole thing makes no sense at all. I really don’t want to get too theological here, but in the first instance I take great issue with his assertion that “You must love them an awful lot, Lord…because you can’t make up your own mind which one to extend your loving hand to”. What, there wasn’t room for both? That’s not evidence of a loving God. That’s evidence of a sadistic bastard who delegates to avoid the guilt. Why Campbell isn’t pacing the floor shouting at the ceiling in his hour of need is frankly beyond me, but I’m willing to let that go, because he’s undergoing emotional trauma. That being said, his crowning moment of stupidity is his decision to offer himself in order to save his family.
Now, I’m all for the idea of laying down your life for your friends. I’m not sure I’d ever be able to go through with anything quite so unselfish, but there can’t be many more noble ways to go out. If you do it well enough, they name a high school after you. Nonetheless, Campbell’s actions here aren’t an act of glorious self-sacrifice akin to Ryan Chappelle’s untimely execution in 24, or the guy who chucks the wounded colleague over the lava, destroying himself in the process, halfway through Volcano. Because his decision to save his wife and child and ask for himself to be taken in exchange entirely fails to take into account the fact that he’s leaving them to manage on their own. It could be that it’s actually a blessing in disguise for Campbell’s wife, given that she can presumably now raise their boy / old girl in comparative peace without the threat of one of his mawkish monologues every time they experience a momentous event, or even worse, a trivial one. “Look, Celia, these are playing cards. Did I ever tell you the story about the time I was caught playing cards in church…?”.
But still. It’s the principle here. If you really want to strike any sort of deal with the Almighty, you don’t offer yourself in exchange. This isn’t Watership Down. You say “Dear Lord, if you have to take someone…take Oscar, who I know has been embezzling the company for months even though I can’t prove anything. Or take my mother-in-law. No, please, take her. Or the chap who cut me up on the A46 this evening.” But oh no. Not good enough for our Pat. Far better to say “It’s fine, God, I don’t mind the pain of the sudden coronary and the inevitable blast of guilt that will catch me in my final moments, with the realisation that I’ve left my wife as sole breadwinner and my baby boy / old girl without a father. I’d rather go out knowing I’ve made the supreme sacrifice. And widow’s benefits really aren’t that bad these days.” Campbell isn’t a Captain Oates, he’s a frigging idiot.
Pedantry comes very naturally to me, largely because being able to pick out the details is one of the few things I’m good at. Details are important, but not in the grand scheme, and over the years I’ve got used to the fact that people care about this sort of thing far less than I do. Besides, you can’t analyse art the same way you would a piece of A-Level coursework, because that’s not its purpose. I do wish that ‘Angels’ (a song about nothing, even if it is supposed to be about dead babies) had not been held up as a shining example of good writing to the extent that it won Best Song of the Past 25 Years at the Brits, but I guess some people go for style over substance. Which means that confusing songs will continue to be written, and as a result of this I’m guessing that poor logic will, ultimately, be an inevitability – although I don’t think it could get much worse than ‘The Deal’.
I was thinking about all this, albeit in a far more truncated form, over the course of about three or four seconds, in the middle of our conversation about football, and the thought of men collapsing and requiring ambulances brought me back to the football chant we’d been discussing. Perhaps at the end of the day it’s how you look at the song, rather than what it was supposed to represent. Maybe songs are no longer the creative property of their owners once they’ve been unveiled, at least not really: the way in which the artist relates to his work is always going to be unique and as such that relationship will always be special, but perhaps there needs to be room for another set of views – the people who will hear the song, and claim its subject matter as their own, and to all intents and purposes own it for themselves.
“The thing is,” said Mike, “I could see one interpretation – as in we’re going to beat you up so badly that the hospital will now become your new home.”
“I’d not thought of it that way.”
Mike takes another contemplative pause, and then adds:
“But I don’t think that’s what it means.”
“Neither do I.”
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