Why meaning and theme are not everything
September 3rd 2006 05:36
The heroine of "Candy" falls in love with a junkie. She then becomes a junkie herself. Which leads to prostitution, a gory miscarriage, and a mental asylum. (And the real-life Candy apparently had a worse story to tell, losing two babies, and being drug-fucked for longer.)
The value of the film for me… It shows me what it's like to be this sort of person, to be in these sorts of situations. It gives me an emotional workout, a catharsis or a trip. And it intellectually fascinates as it plays with substories and expectation and suspense.
The value, that is, lies mostly in the effects.
The value is not in whatever moralistic proposition one might draw -- like "Love is sometimes not enough" or "Love is sometimes a destructive drug". And nor does the movie necessarily help me to "understand" such a proposition better.
Plot and theme are often the excuse on which to hang the moments.
It's the moments you remember, long after you've forgotten the story.
You can't treat lyrics like poems. Not always, anyway. To convey their meaning, lyrics are more reliant on vocal tone and instruments.
But how important is meaning in the first place?
Franz Ferdinand recently admitted that their lyrics make no sense.
Weird Al Jankovic rightly parodied "Smells like teen spirit". Nirvana is the classic example of great tunes but crap lyrics.
Crap, that is, from the point of view of meaning. The fact is, words don't matter, or don't entirely matter, in many musical contexts. Sometimes they simply fill the line out, in the same way that Homer uses words simply to fill the metre out.
And to the extent that meaning is there, the meaning of such lyrics does not necessarily lie in propositions about the world. Rather, it's the sound symbolic use to which the word can be put, and the immediate associations and images, and the button-pushing emotive effect.
A couple of words will stand out in the noise, and, as for the rest of it, it can disappear beneath the instruments, and the experience is probably improved for it. You won't gain anything from hearing what Nirvana is actually saying.
Was having a discussion with Hellvis recently. He commented regarding Nirvana: "[L]yrics didn't need to make any sort of narrative sense, but could paint a picture or impression, or just sound really good together".
How old are nonsense songs anyway? Well, there was a bunch of nonsense in the sixties and seventies, and, long before that, there was nonsense in nursery poems and songs (Edward Lear anyone?), and in traditional folk ballads.
Apparent nonsense has its own effect. And there are ways to read nonsense so that it's sensical after all.
I used to run a literary journal, very briefly and years ago, and I remember one contributor saying that sometimes the sound was more important to him than the words.
It's occasionally said of Wilde and Nietzsche that they get carried away by the aphoristic form, are pressured into making paradoxical statements.
A sentence can be like looking for a key to open multiple locks. It must convey your meaning, sure, but it must also fit, for instance, your sense of effective communication, your sense of euphony, your sense of formality, your sense of suspense, your sense of personality.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia articles Candy and Smells like teen spirit.
"Love is a high you never want to come down from"
The value, that is, lies mostly in the effects.
The value is not in whatever moralistic proposition one might draw -- like "Love is sometimes not enough" or "Love is sometimes a destructive drug". And nor does the movie necessarily help me to "understand" such a proposition better.
***
Plot and theme are often the excuse on which to hang the moments.
It's the moments you remember, long after you've forgotten the story.
***
You can't treat lyrics like poems. Not always, anyway. To convey their meaning, lyrics are more reliant on vocal tone and instruments.
But how important is meaning in the first place?
Franz Ferdinand recently admitted that their lyrics make no sense.
Weird Al Jankovic rightly parodied "Smells like teen spirit". Nirvana is the classic example of great tunes but crap lyrics.
"A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido. Yeah!"
Crap, that is, from the point of view of meaning. The fact is, words don't matter, or don't entirely matter, in many musical contexts. Sometimes they simply fill the line out, in the same way that Homer uses words simply to fill the metre out.
And to the extent that meaning is there, the meaning of such lyrics does not necessarily lie in propositions about the world. Rather, it's the sound symbolic use to which the word can be put, and the immediate associations and images, and the button-pushing emotive effect.
A couple of words will stand out in the noise, and, as for the rest of it, it can disappear beneath the instruments, and the experience is probably improved for it. You won't gain anything from hearing what Nirvana is actually saying.
***
Was having a discussion with Hellvis recently. He commented regarding Nirvana: "[L]yrics didn't need to make any sort of narrative sense, but could paint a picture or impression, or just sound really good together".
How old are nonsense songs anyway? Well, there was a bunch of nonsense in the sixties and seventies, and, long before that, there was nonsense in nursery poems and songs (Edward Lear anyone?), and in traditional folk ballads.
Apparent nonsense has its own effect. And there are ways to read nonsense so that it's sensical after all.
***
I used to run a literary journal, very briefly and years ago, and I remember one contributor saying that sometimes the sound was more important to him than the words.
It's occasionally said of Wilde and Nietzsche that they get carried away by the aphoristic form, are pressured into making paradoxical statements.
A sentence can be like looking for a key to open multiple locks. It must convey your meaning, sure, but it must also fit, for instance, your sense of effective communication, your sense of euphony, your sense of formality, your sense of suspense, your sense of personality.
***
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia articles Candy and Smells like teen spirit.
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Comment by Cibbuano
Hunt Famous
Orble Post of the Day
Fat Cult
Techbreak
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
Another reason crap lyrics are sometimes valuable is that streams of consciousness are often valuable -- the "automatic writing" in surrealism, or the prose of the Beat poets. The unconscious is often wiser than the conscious, and the pattern of someone's unconscious can be instructive.
Comment by JohnDoe
Film & TV on DVD
More often though I do look for punchy dialogue in film scripts and meaningful introspective lyrics in my music.
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
One thing that preoccupies me is this concept of worlds beneath the surface of words. The best example I can think of is Harold Pinter's play "Betrayal" -- "No English play says so little and implies so much."
I used to do acting. (And I did it very badly.) My acting teacher sometimes said, "In a great actor, the words go one way, and the behaviour goes another." Ie, a common acting technique is where the actor decides on an action for themselves (I'm going to persuade or intimidate or cheer up, etc), and you simply use the words to do that, without much regard for their meaning. The brilliance of your acting is in what you convey despite the words. You could, in effect, be saying anything whatsoever.
I'm a big fan of punchy dialogue. Fish is my favourite character in Ally McBeal. Dialogue whose implications strike your brain just a moment after their sound strikes your ear.
But I also think it's not entirely a good thing that Woody Allen acts from the neck up. Intellect is a narrow part of what acting can explore.
Comment by JohnDoe
Film & TV on DVD
Us Mamet fans appreciate what he doesnt say in his scripts more than what he does. Punchy and quotable but so much more too.
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
Mamet was a peculiarly appropriate person for you to cite. He was trained by Sanford Meisner. And the Meisner acting style is what I was learning.
Comment by JohnDoe
Film & TV on DVD
Im more of a Lee Strasberg boy from an acting perspective.
Comment by Hellvis
Earache Hotel
"Smells Like Teen Spirit" does have some meaning. As far as I can remember, it's a sort of pisstake on the idea of a youth revolution, alternately celebrating it and cynically dismissing it.
As for nonsense, I think there should be more of it. Nonsense was used by art movements like the Dadaists as a reaction to the rational world of the bourgeoise who they felt had failed them. I tend to agree with this stance. As the Nomeansno song "0 2=1" says 'Nonsense is better, than no sense at all."