Listening to Classic American Popular Songs and Reading Lyrics

Dear Erik,

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Reading Lyrics is a real find. I didn't know, for instance, that Ogden Nash wrote the lyrics for those two hauntingly romantic Kurt Weill songs "I'm a Stranger Here Myself" and "Speak Low" (which Lotte Lenya sings here). At the same time, it's a frustrating book. The Weill song for which I'd most like to have the lyrics ("How Can You Tell an American?") is not here. The cross-referencing to composers is done song by song (so you can't quickly find, let's say, all the songs written by Jerome Kern), and the index is almost illegible (so you have to leaf through the 17-page, two-column table of contents to find what you're looking for). Still, anyone who likes this music will give his Gottlieb quite a workout--the way a baseball fan pulls out his Bill James to settle a dinnertime argument and ends up leafing through it at 1 a.m. to find out where Tom Tresh was born or how many doubles Harmon Killebrew hit in 1966.

I was surprised to find that Yip Harburg is one of my favorite lyricists--for Harold Arlen's "Paper Moon" and the love-affirming "Down With Love" (Bobby Darin sings it here):

Down with love,
The flowers and rice and shoes.
Down with love,
The root of all midnight blues.
Down with things
That give you that well-known pain.
Take that moon
And wrap it in cellophane.

And then:

Give it back to the bird and the bees
And the Viennese.

(Incidentally, Erik, the Bergmans, who are amply recognized in this volume, are right, and you are wrong: It's not "simply a convention" that virtually all popular songs are about love. It's that music transports, and it's dignity-endangering to get transported over smaller things.)

Dorothy Fields is another favorite I didn't realize was a favorite, for "You Couldn't Be Cuter" (our greatest ode to being engaged, sung best by Ella Fitzgerald), "The Way You Look Tonight," and, as you mention, "A Fine Romance." (My own favorite lyric from that song: "You're just as hard to land as the Ile de France.")

The signature trick of pop-song lyrics is the unashamed use of outlandish feminine (i.e. polysyllabic) rhyme, like "intellectual" with "henpecked you all" in Byron's Don Juan. You seem to delight in these, too, if your enthusiasm for "Could You Use Me?" is anything to go by. My favorite wielder of this device is Noël Coward, as in "Uncle Harry," about his family of missionaries:

... some of them were beaten up
In course of these rampages--
My dear Aunt Maude was eaten up
While singing "Rock of Ages" ...

Or his great song "Nina," about the only girl in Argentina who doesn't like to dance:

She refused to begin the beguine when anyone besought her to,
And in language profane and obscene, she cursed the man who'd taught her to.
She cursed Cole Porter, too.

Cole Porter, too, is a formidable doggerelist, as in that bawdy Kiss Me, Kate tune "Where Is the Life That Late I Led?":

Where is Fedora, the wild virago?
It's lucky I missed her gangster sister from Chicago.
Where is Venetia, who loved to chat so?
Could still she be drinkin' in her stinkin' pink palazzo?
And Lisa, where are you, Lisa?
You gave a new meaning to the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

I'm struck, though, at the inconsistency of even the greatest lyricists. I hope I conveyed yesterday how fond I am of Johnny Mercer, but the charms of his "Blues in the Night" continue to elude me, and his "Accentuate the Positive" and "Jeepers, Creepers" ring like advertisements in my ears. That anyone likes Ira Gershwin's "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off"--and a lot of people evidently do--is another ongoing mystery. That "You say ... I say ..." business is a transparent gimmick that goes stale after a few bars, at which point it becomes so much pointless yapping. Nobody actually says "po-tah-toes," and the song can't be improvised upon the way like, say, Porter's "Let's Do It" can.

But at his best--as in "Our Love Is Here To Stay" (click for Ella) and "They Can't Take That Away From Me" (click for Frank)--Gershwin comes closer to writing actual poetry than any lyricist. That line about haunted dreams, slipped in almost as an aside--

The way your smile just beams,
The way you sing off-key
The way you haunt my dreams--
No, no! They can't take that away from me.

--shows such an eye for the deepest hopes and miseries of the human condition that it could be slipped into the Oxford Book of English Verse (next to Yeats's "A Deep-Sworn Vow," maybe) without lowering the tone.

I didn't mean to ignore your point about rock lyrics. If Bernie Taupin is the author of "And he shall be Leavon / In tradition with the family plan" and "I like livin' easy without family ties / Until the whippoorwill of freedom zaps me / right between the eyes"--not a single word of either of which means anything--then I'll grant you that he deserves a lengthy chapter in the Book of Morons.

The most "interesting" rock lyrics (Steely Dan, Talking Heads, They Might Be Giants) aspire to a suggestive surrealism, but that palls quickly. Elvis Costello wowed me in college, but today I look at "Beyond Belief"--

I'm just an oily slick
In a wound-up world with a nervous tick,
In a very fashionable hovel.
I hang around dying to be tortured.
You'll never be alone in the bone orchard.
This battle with the bottle is nothing so novel.

--and find it just a bunch of smarty-pants puns stacked on top of one another. Age me another 10 years, and I suspect I'll dismiss him as "adolescent."

I'd make a strong case for Tom Waits, although at his best (as in "I Can't Wait To Get Off Work and See My Baby"), he's less a rocker than a reactionary paying homage to just the songs we're listening to here:

Now I don't mind workin'
Cause I used to be jerkin' off
Most of my time in bars.
I been a cabbie and a stock clerk
And a soda-fountain jock-jerk
And a manic mechanic on cars.
"Nice work if you can get it"--
Now, who the hell said it?

Ira Gershwin said it! Talking over this music with you has, as always, been nice work, too.

Best,
Chris

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This week, Slate's Book Clubbers listen to classic American popular songs, accompanied by Allen Forte's book of the same name. They'll also refer to Robert Gottlieb's Reading Lyrics. (Click here to buy the former and here to buy the latter.)

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