COMMERCIAL SUICIDE
The story of Ridinghood, a novel
The entries in this blog are to form part of 'Commercial Suicide', a novel about a songwriter who is losing his grip on reality. The story is structured as a tour diary interspersed with chapters of cultural criticism; it is told entirely in blog entries. The idea to start serialising, in an actual blog, a book that is effectively a blog-novel was too intriguing to resist.
Chapter Two: The Objective Artist
To read this chapter from the beginning click here.
Read the latest entry:
Here, There and Everywhere
‘You Can’t Do That’ is a fairly straightforward rocker with a limited melodic range, simple chords and an awesome, slightly Latin groove, courtesy of the best drummer in the world: Ringo Starr. The simple fill he plays just before each time John sings: “O, you can’t do that,” is one of the songs main hooks. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it symbolizes the singer’s right hook: At the precise moment when John sings: “Because I told you before,” Ringo’s percussion mimics the sound of a man’s fists knocking a woman to the floor.
‘Here, There and Everywhere’ is ostensibly a different kettle of fish. It is a rather more complex composition with a number of elegant melodic surprises. McCartney himself has often referred to it as his finest effort.
Lyrically, however, the two songs cover the same territory.
The Intro
“To lead a better life I need my love to be here.”
What to make of the line “To lead a better life”? We feel compelled to ask: better than what: the life the man is currently leading? The opening line strikes us as a mathematical equation: 1 (my love) + 1 (here) = 2 (a better life) and gives us an inkling that the situation put forward in the rest of the song is not (yet) a reality. Perhaps we ought to ask: better than whose life? Was the song written in reaction to what Paul had been witnessing all around him over recent years? It is hard to deny that in this song we find Paul in a self-satisfied mood. He seems resolved to describe to us, his already suitably informed audience, the dynamics of a truly successful relationship. After a few listens we sense the diabolical precision with which certain of such a relationship’s characteristic features are highlighted in favour of others. It is as if he is trying to achieve a deliberate contrast. He seems to be painting a picture of exactly the type of woman that, on the evidence of ‘You Can’t Do That’, John seemed incapable of finding. It is as if he wanted to rub John’s face in his inability to find a good, i.e. submissive and docile, woman. The artistic endeavour of ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ consists in Paul imagining the polar opposite of the irrepressible, free spirited woman of ‘You Can’t Do That’ and, in so doing, creating an objective vision of John’s perfect love.
The man’s insistence on referring to the woman in the third person only, goes so far as to create an objective viewpoint even for the listener. It gives us the impression that the woman is somehow under observation and finally persuades us that what is being described here is an ideal, hypothetical situation. ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ is set up as a kind of girlfriend checklist:
To lead a better life, I need my love to be:
1) Here,
2) There,
3) Everywhere
It represents a declaration of principles, a set of guidelines to which a woman must adhere when she becomes the man’s wife. It turns out that it is, after all, a woman who is being addressed: the man is explaining to a prospective partner the conditions under which he will agree to have a relationship with her. Unless her behaviour corresponds to that of the ideal woman described in the song, the love affair is a non-starter.
Imagine it for a moment: a man describing his perfect woman to a woman he wants to be his. This man’s insecurity is so great, he tries to control the relationship with a list of conditions, before it has even begun. He is effectively asking his lover to abandon her personality. I do not know personally any women who would respond favourably to such a proposition, let alone go along with it, no matter how gently they are being serenaded. (Paul’s close-up voice is in ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ at its most gentle.) A woman might herself spend the duration of her marriage covertly moulding her partner into an ideal of her own specifications, but if a man came right out and asked her to change, she would hold it against him and punish him for it for the rest of their married life.
‘Here, There and Everywhere’ is a more sophisticated version of ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’. Both are pre-relationship songs in which the man sets out the terms and conditions of the agreement, in particular the condition of her slavish dedication to him.
One can imagine the man in ‘You Can’t Do That’ offering up to his lover, at the start of their relationship, just such a set of guidelines. It is referred to in the line: “Because I told you before…” Paul’s objective faculty may well have latched on to that little sentence and persuaded him to use it as the premise for ‘Here, There and Everywhere’. By placing the song’s action at an earlier stage in the timeline (at a time when the proposed lover is poetically still so under-developed she can not be said to have a mind of her own, and as a result barely even registers in the song’s cast of characters,) Paul neatly by-passed the latent violence of ‘You Can’t Do That’, making for an altogether more generally palatable song. This is the key to Paul’s songs achieving greater popularity than John’s. Paul’s objectivity allowed him to smooth over John’s rough edges much better than John could himself.
To be continued.
Sebastiaan Elsenburg
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You Can’t Do That
The woman has transgressed: she has let go of her man’s hand (broken the chain) and gone to talk to another man. She knew it was against the rules: “Because I told you before, you can’t do that,” and it is, in any case, already the second time it has happened: “Well, it’s the second time I caught you talking to him.” The black eye from the first time will no doubt barely have healed. The line: “I think I’ll let you down and leave you flat,” while apparently indicating the man’s intention to escape from the relationship, has distinctly hostile and aggressive undertones. Personally, I am always tempted to sing: “I think I’ll beat you down and lay you flat.” In any case, it sounds to me more like a threat than an admission of defeat.
We might naturally assume that the man has sought to create a kind of safe haven for himself and his woman, where the two of them can exist without too much undue influence from the outside world and its mundane concerns, but is thwarted in his attempts by a fickle and inconstant woman. We may even have some hope that the act of holding hands in ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ was meant to symbolise a mystical bond: a band of gold, so to speak. However, the man goes on to sing: “Everybody’s green ‘cause I’m the one who won your love. But if they’d seen you talking that way, they’d laugh in my face.” We instantly realise that it was his concern with the world’s perception of him that persuaded him to pursue this particular woman (who is undeniably a catch: “Everybody’s green,”) and the world’s perception of his failure to keep her from roaming that is now making his life unbearable, not the fact that he might lose her: he is even considering dumping her (pre-emptively, one would gather,) before she can do any more damage to his public image and, by extension, his self-esteem.
We are dealing here with a man whose vanity has lead him to make an inappropriate and unsustainable choice of partner. We realise now that it was only for cosmetic reasons that he wanted to hold her hand; in one sense as a boast to the world: look what a hot babe I’ve got on the leash, and in another sense to warn off suitors.
In John’s early songs we often find him naively asking us to empathise with what cannot be described as anything other than repugnant behaviour, as in ‘I’ll Cry Instead’: “I’ve got every reason on earth to be mad, ‘cause I’ve just lost the only girl I had,” which begs the question: how many girls does he require in order to feel cheerful? In this case, as well as many other early cases, I truly think John is being naive rather than deliberately exposing his weakness of character. However, I also think that his growing awareness of that weakness over the course of the Sixties persuaded him to obscure meaning in his lyrics and made him receptive to Yoko Ono’s softening Oriental influence. John was not enough of a decadent to risk alienating himself to any great degree. Before everything else, he wanted to be one of the lads, and of course: the British Lad is the world’s most repulsive good guy.
John’s early love songs are generally about possession. For a simple, working-class lad such as him, it must have been confusing to discover the decay of the ancient precondition of marriage (woman as property of the man,) so far advanced. By the early Sixties there was very little left in the way of social structure on which an old-fashioned man could still safely build a life.
Accidental objectivity
However, whereas Brian carefully chose his perspective, other songwriters are sometimes forced into a similarly high level of conceptuality by mere virtue of being in a band. As a band member, i.e. part of a rather insular unit, a songwriter might be forgiven for unknowingly colouring his songs with what he observes of his fellow band members’ behaviour. Many of the greatest bands have within their ranks one member who embodies the spirit of the band, and another who is able (however unintentionally) to give artistic expression to that spirit. The former lives the band, while the latter conceptualises the band.
Since Paul was left-handed, John and Paul mirrored each other when they sat down together to write songs. Paul looked more closely into the mirror. He instinctively understood that his raw material was sitting right there in front of him, and was fascinated by it. John was rather too self-involved to observe anything for very long. Paul would spend the rest of his life seeking new and inventive ways to take revenge on his songwriting partner for not reciprocating his fascination. Paul’s artistic instinct, however, could not help but make full use of the objective viewpoint that sitting opposite John provided. The first indication that Paul had a strong tendency to conceptualise was the song ‘She Loves You’, in which the singer is cast in the role of magnanimous observer who prevents his friend, the person who is being addressed, from making a dreadful error. To state it plainly: the object (the ‘You’ in the sentence ‘She Loves You’) is saved through the singer’s objectivity.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the double A-sided single, John brusquely insists: ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’. A sense of annexation is palpable in this song, the act of holding hands symbolizing a kind of chain linking, as in the attaching of a leash to a dog collar. In any case, it becomes patently clear that John aims to engage the attention of his object of affection to the exclusion of everyone and everything else.
Whenever a man sings to a woman that he wants to tell her something, as happens in the opening line of this song, it brings to my mind the joke about what to tell a woman with two black eyes: nothing, you have already told her twice.
Ultimately, however, one senses that it will not matter how many times he tells her: a woman who is set such clear boundaries is guaranteed to put them to the test.
When John sang, Paul listened and took notes. He assimilated the spirit of John, whose type was that of the sensitive, troubled working-class man, acerbic and slightly misogynist. (People have called him a working-class hero (and he himself did nothing to dispel the idea,) but the term constitutes a contradictio in adjecto: if a working-class man is a hero he ceases to be working-class.) Having studied the type for a few years, Paul set about chronicling it, and because of his objective viewpoint, did so more eloquently and with far greater symbolic power than John ever chronicled himself, as is borne out in two apparently quite different ‘Lennon and McCartney’ compositions: ‘You Can’t Do That’, written by John, released in 1964, and ‘Here, There and Everywhere’, written by Paul, released in 1966.
Subjective versus objective
Some songwriters succeed for a while in lending weight to their subjective musings through the power of their music, as in the case of Stevie Wonder. In the early Seventies, he began writing songs from the point of view of a blind, black man (something which he had managed to resist throughout the Sixties) and consequently became very short sighted. Stevie has said in interviews that he likes to write a song while still feeling the emotion that the song is meant to express, so as to make it easier to achieve the right musical mood, or something. Whatever: this is the primary conceit of subjectivity: a subjective artist will take his heartache (for instance) and try to write a song about it right there and then, without regard for thousands of years of poetical tradition. Starting from scratch in such a way might strike one as rather arrogant, if it were not rather palpably indicative of deep insecurity: by setting a personal experience to music, a subjective songwriter means to convince us of the profundity of his emotional response. He (ab)uses music to give credence to his feelings, as if to say: “My personal experience engendered this beautiful (sad, angry, depressed, violent) musical mood. How profound my feelings are!” The modern songwriter is a vain man. Who is he trying to kid: surely everyone knows that you have to be an emotional cripple to be a songwriter.
A subjective artist is a bad artist. Writing a song about heartache, he will, as in the case of Stevie Wonder, keep in his creative consciousness only the image of his recent lover and the pain she has caused him. Unsurprisingly, the resulting song will be filled with lamenting sighs, woeful exclamations and, most tellingly: pleading questions. It will have a title along the lines of: “Why won’t you love me?” Listening to a Stevie Wonder record from the early Seventies is like listening to a ten-year-old whining: You will hear Stevie betray neither the slightest sense of humour, nor the least amount of self-knowledge. Stevie is still so close to the emotions about which he is writing, that he has no real notion of where they came from or what they mean. That is what happens when a blind man tries to look at himself.
When an objective artist has his heart broken, the last thing he will do is reach for his guitar. He will wait ten years, add a few more heartaches to his creative consciousness and find a decisive answer as to why “she won’t love him.” In other words, he creates distance between himself and his subject.
Art allows people to look at themselves from a distance, to take a break from the pressures of being continuously inside their own skin. If ‘honest’ emotional reportage is all to which you aspire as an artist, you should go into journalism and leave art to those who know that until your lovers suddenly roll into one archetypal heartbreaker before your very eyes, and all your meaningless heartache has matured into melancholic joy, you are not ready to write a love song, or any song for that matter.
The subjective pop artist
Indeed: queried on the subject, contemporary songwriters freely admit to writing from personal experience. One would think subjectivity were a kind of artistic valediction, the way artists from all genres fall over themselves to cite their own life as their inspiration. Even modern songwriters’ strained insistence on the importance of originality does not prevent them from echoing each other over and over on this issue. It is of course rather hard to resist making precisely this answer since in effect it constitutes an easy boast: my life is sufficiently eventful and the events are sufficiently extraordinary to feed my creativity. The fact that songwriters now regard it pretty much as their duty to point to their lives when asked about their aesthetics is yet another indication of our age’s artistic poverty.
Songwriters who write from personal experience find themselves, as their career progresses, writing either increasingly socio-political, or increasingly obscure songs, the latter, no doubt, because personal experiences tend to be a little boring and benefit hugely from a vague rendering. You can identify artists who allow subjectivity to impact upon their art by the increasingly long intervals between their successive albums. I am not kidding: they have to wait for interesting events to take place in their lives before they can write.
It is an unfortunate side-effect of fame that it seduces artists into an inflated sense of self. Songwriters who abandon time-honoured motifs and archetypal considerations in favour of ‘honest’ emotional reportage are an embarrassment. Truly: an artist has let go of intelligible reality when he imagines he ought to write opinionated songs, just because a few reporters came round his house the other day asking him for opinions. It is a development that has taken fifty years, but now, because tabloids can sell millions of copies by putting their faces on the cover, songwriters feel no qualms about putting their personality on display in their songs. When Michael Stipe sings: “It’s been a bad day, please don’t take a picture,” I picture a man, so ugly and innately downtrodden (geek) that, from spite (anagram of Stipe) he is unable to resist drawing attention to his fame.
When an artist feels that his life is interesting enough to form the basis of his art, he ceases to be an artist.