Reading A Lover Sings, a selection of the lyrics of the songwriter, activist and certified national treasure Billy Bragg, I was reminded of one of the most famous stories in the history of pop music. At a 1965 press conference in San Francisco, Bob Dylan (at that moment spokesman for a generation, laureate for the baby boomers and quite possibly the hippest person ever to have lived) was asked to name his favourite American poet. After a dramatic pause for another drag on his ever-present cigarette, he answered: not Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman or Sylvia Plath, as the questioners might have been expecting, but “Smokey Robinson.” And in that moment, Dylan ignited the whole high culture vs pop culture debate and opened a can of worms about whether mere rock lyrics (as so beautifully concocted by Robinson, Tamla Motown’s genius writer-in-residence) could ever really be considered poetry.
Except it never happened. At the press conference, Dylan was actually asked if he was more “a songwriter or a poet” and replied with the line to which he has resolutely stuck ever since—“I’m more of a song and dance man.” The Smokey canard was, it transpired, confected two years later, by Al Abrams, the Motown PR man. But the two stories have become tangled and confused—just like the arguments about whether rock lyrics ever really make the crossover into poetry.
A Lover Sings is part of a series in which the words of, among others, Jarvis Cocker, Van Morrison and the Joy Division/New Order crew have been given the treatment normally reserved for poets. The format and the cover are identical to those the publisher, Faber & Faber, uses for the works of poets such as TS Eliot, Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney and John Berryman. It is almost a shock to see Bragg’s name on such an austere cover, especially as he has never seemed particularly desperate for his words to be thought of as something more lofty. He made his name in the mid-1980s as a solo protest singer, a kind of punk Dylan accompanying himself on scratchy electric guitar.
The lyrics themselves—presented chronologically and laid out, of course, like poetry—are joyous. While he makes no pretence to being a great artist, Bragg is nonetheless a writer capable of striking images, crafty turns of phrase and whizzbang flashes of humour. One minute he’s making lovelorn jokes that reverse the traditional Moon/June romantic song-writer’s standby:
I saw two shooting stars last night
I wished on them but they were only satellites
Is it wrong to wish on space hardware?
I wish, I wish, I wish you’d care
(“A New England”)
The next, he’s using the old bluesman’s intro to make an altogether more bleak point about the course of relationships:
I woke up this morning
To find that we have outlived the myth of trust
(“The Myth of Trust”)
One of the pleasures of the book is that it allows us to follow Bragg through a career in which he’s stubbornly ploughed a pair of parallel, yet connected, lyrical furrows: the interior vista of hopes, dreams, runaway love and unstoppable disappointment (Yeats’s “foul rag and bone shop of the heart”) and the wider, political world where Bragg has been an untiring opponent of inequality, racism and division. His best political songs have come later in his career, when he has skated out on to the thin ice of identity and the question of what it means to be British. On his 2002 album England, Half English (the eighth of 10), Bragg gathered up all the skills he’d honed over the previous 20 years and scorched the earth around racists, little-Englanders and others incapable of joined-up thinking. The title track is a marvellous, and deeply loving, dissection of much that we think belongs to this green and sceptred isle but actually arrived from elsewhere. His Mum (Italian), Marmite, curry, Morrissey, Morris dancing, Britannia and St George are all outed as not being quite English, before he hammers home the final nail, straight into the emblem that adorns the pure white of the national football jersey:
And those three lions of your shirt
They never sprang from England’s dirt
Them lions are half English
And I’m half English too
Reading the lyrics of someone whose music you love (as I do much of Bragg’s) affords additional pleasures. As you scan the words, you are, inevitably, accompanying them with their familiar tunes; you can’t do this with poetry, and you can’t replicate the experience by turning down the telly and reciting every line of the now-silent Maltese Falcon, as I’ve often tried. The brain-singing of printed lyrics is a unique thrill.
The book also reminds me of my encounters with Bragg himself. I remember just before his first album came out in 1983, and he became the darling of the music press (this was a very big deal in those days), he played a residency at a none-too-swish London joint called the Captain’s Cabin. We trooped down there to be mesmerised by this single chap and his guitar, howling out jagged, choppy vignettes about faithless shop girls and shark-eyed dictators. In a world dominated by the foppish finery and vapid hedonism of the New Romantics, he seemed like something authentic, something new, something to cling on to. He seemed, despite his very best efforts, to be a star.
Some time later, by which time he really was a bona fide bigwig, I was editor of the New Musical Express (which lauded his every move). My secretary, the wonderful Karen Walters, was stepping out with the great man. One day she came to me, looking unusually serious. She had something to say, and she wasn’t joking. Could we please refrain from calling Billy—as we often, no, always did—“the big-nosed Bard Of Barking.” It was really upsetting his mum. We stopped.
"99 per cent of pop songs do not, when printed on cold, white paper, transmogrify into poems"The Faber volume is part of a sizeable industry. Books of lyrics by pop stars jostle for space on Amazon and beyond. Limited editions, either signed, cloth-bound or slip-cased, carry shameless price tags. The latest Dylan anthology, a heavyweight tome entitled The Lyrics: Since 1962, cost $299 when it was published in the United States last year. Each new publication reignites the argument about whether rock and pop verses can seriously be called poetry.
The obvious answer is no. For reasons we’ll come on to, 99 per cent of pop songs do not, when printed on cold, white paper, transmogrify into poems. They look the same, they use the same building blocks, but they are not the same.
So why does the argument persist? Partly, it’s down to pop music writers and critics. They, like the keepers of the flame of every popular art form, fall repeatedly into the trap of trying to bring legitimacy and status to the thing they admire by having it bathe in the glow of an older, more well-regarded, medium. Jazz, for instance, gets called “black classical music,” as though that’s a good thing. The best book about the wonderful cinematic sub-genre that is the Spaghetti Western is called (groan) The Opera of Violence. Comics are now “graphic novels.” And even the greatest popular music (how could it seek to be described as anything more celestial than that?) is offered a pat on the head by being compared to poetry.
It’s not just the critics, either. The people who craft the most worked-on and polished song lyrics themselves seem obsessed with reminding us that yes, they have actually read some poetry and yes, they really would like you to take their writing seriously. Dylan name-checks Ezra Pound, Eliot, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. Morrissey weaves John Keats, WB Yeats and Oscar Wilde all through the Smiths song “Cemetery Gates.” Van Morrison goes for John Donne, Whitman, Omar Khayyám, James Joyce, Yeats and Wilde and has an 1987 album called Poetic Champions Compose. Joe Strummer, one of Billy Bragg’s heroes, tips the hat to Federico García Lorca, while Paul Simon (another Bragg mentor) could hardly get through a song in his early years without mentioning poetry, verse, rhymes, Robert Frost or Emily Dickinson. It’s notable and instructive that the man who actually invented the rock and roll lyric as we know it (and whose words, in the context of their chugging, energised musical setting, certainly deserve comparison with poetry) felt no need for his emerging art form to be anointed by being compared with what had gone before. Instead, Chuck Berry, at the moment of rock’s birth in the mid-1950s, rejected the high-brow and the venerable and kicked over the statues:
Hey diddle diddle, I’m a-playin’ my fiddle
Ain’t got nuthin’ to lose
Roll over Beethoven
Tell Tchaikovsky the news
(“Roll Over Beethoven”)
"Cold words on the page are one-dimensional; mixed with sound they acquire new life"This—the “Is-it-poetry?” thing—is nothing new. As early as 1969, Richard Goldstein, the first famous pop music critic, published The Poetry of Rock, a treasurable little book that set out the case for the lasting importance of the cascades of words, couplets, internal rhymes and plain old shamanic gibberish then pouring out of what were still called stereos. In fact, there is no need for people to argue in this way. The truth is simple: some rock and pop lyrics are poetry—lots of Dylan; poets-come-lately like Leonard Cohen obviously; Pete Sinfield’s verses for King Crimson and Emerson, Lake And Palmer, though not, on reflection, “The Land Of Make Believe,” the song he wrote for Bucks Fizz which went to number one in the UK in early 1982; the simple certainties of Gerry Goffin’s homespun homilies; the beautiful other-worldliness of Wayne Coyne’s later, non-punk, work with the Flaming Lips; almost everything recorded by the Anglo-American rapper MF Doom (aka DOOM, Metal Fingers, King Geedorah, Viktor Vaughn, JJ Doom and Madvillain), arguably the most talented manipulator of the English language working today, in any medium. But the overwhelming majority of pop, rock, soul and rap lyrics are just diminished and rendered bland, trite and weedy by their consignment to paper prison.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. They are designed to go with music. There, in their proper place, they combine with rhythm and melody and funk and swing to produce something far greater than the sum of the parts. Cold words on the page are one-dimensional; mixed with sound they acquire new life, sometimes offering a shifting kaleidoscope of possible meanings (some deep, some joyously dumb), sometime demanding that the listener focus one idea, one emotion. It’s nothing short of alchemy, and I’m sure anyone reading this can instantly think of dozens of examples. Average words; great song—why else do you find yourself crying unpredicted tears or wreathed in a soppy smile when listening to a great pop song?
Lyrics are not meant to be read aloud. Peter Sellers’s brilliant 1965 single, where he enunciates the Beatles’s “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help!” in the voices of, respectively, Laurence Olivier and Michael Ramsey, then Archbishop of Canterbury, shows what jolly, and genuinely hilarious, sport can be made of even the most finely-chiselled lines. But Sellers wasn’t singing. Great singers (and even merely distinctive ones) take the words, lines and phrases to new places. To the microphone they bring their own life experiences, the times in which the song is being sung, a human link between the thoughts being expressed and the music directing those emotions and their own skill. They bring, in short, their way with words. Think about Lou Reed’s song “Perfect Day,” from his 1972 album Transformer:
Just a perfect day
Drink sangria in the park
And then later, when it gets dark
We go home
These lines could hardly be more banal. Yet something about Lou Reed’s voice imbues them with a magic that has turned the song into a kind of global anthem.
The same applies to “I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” a song written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong that was a hit for Marvin Gaye in 1968:
I bet you’re wondering how I knew
About your plan to make me blue
With some other guy you knew before
Between the two of us guys
You know I loved you more
White-bread plain, those five lines, in the hands of a virtuoso like Gaye, have become the doorway to a song that has itself become the template for jealousy and paranoia given musical life.
Frank Sinatra, Eliza Carthy, Al Green, Willie Nelson, Art Garfunkel, Aretha Franklin, Gregory Isaacs, Hank Williams, Gregory Porter, Nina Simone, Luke Kelly, Sam Cooke, Sandy Denny and a thousand others—they could sing the blurb off the side of a cereal packet and make it sound like a lament for a lost love. It’s the voices, the singing, that give verve and depth to the words.
Voices that genuinely understand, and value, language are even more powerful. In 2002, the ambitious, experimental band Fog wanted to use the critical soliloquy from William Saroyan’s 1939 play The Time of Your Life as the opening track on their debut album. But the words are difficult, theatrical, prone, on the end of the wrong tongue, to sound hammy. So they brought in an expert, a master. Over a gloomy wave of noise the aforementioned MF Doom unlocked the latent majesty of the words, making one of the simplest and most moving pieces of music of the century so far.
In the end, the question of whether the words of pop songs achieve poetic status or not is neither here nor there. In A Lover Sings, Bragg’s lyrics are preceded by an introduction which expounds his thoughts about the place and importance of music, and are followed, at the end of the book, by notes on the songs themselves. The latter are full of revelation and fun, shedding new light on old favourites. I particularly like the notes for “England, Half English,” where Bragg (presumably fearing his reader is that judge who once looked up in the High Court and asked, “Who is Mr Bruce Springsteen?”) patiently explains who and what are Essex Man, Marmite, bubble and squeak and morris dancing.
In the introduction, Bragg takes the whole tug-of-war over lyrics and poetry and places it gently to one side. He talks instead about the shared experience of singing. “To be in a crowd of strangers at a concert, singing along to a favourite song,” he writes, “provides a collective experience rarely encountered in modern daily life. Individuality melts away and emotions become communal. For a few minutes, everyone in the space shares a common purpose—to sing the song at the top of their voice. If music has any real power, it lies in this moment, when we experience the solidarity of song, the cathartic realisation that you’re not the only person who shares the sentiments that are being so forcefully expressed.”
There is, as the boy himself once said, power in a union.
