“I started to develop the idea,” he recalled in “Many Years From Now,” a 1997 biography by Barry Miles. The rest of the lyrics followed that rhythmic prompt. McCartney as he rode in a car while on holiday in southern Portugal. “Scrambled eggs / Oh you’ve got such lovely legs” grew into a jingle: “Scrambled eggs / Good for breakfast, dinner-time or brunch / Don’t buy six or twelve, buy a bunch.” The song’s true words arrived months later.
McCartney had the chords and the melody too, but only some “dummy” lyrics with masculine line endings. The evolution of “Yesterday” is a case study in vowel movement.
“You can’t say, ‘Da, da, da, da, da, FRED.”Ĭalls this extraction of language from sound “vowel movements.” “I love you just the way you ARE,” Billy Joel explained with customary reticence in an interview. As the Tin Pan Alley hacks knew, soft open-sounding words are best, because they float away on the rhythm. The sound that ends a line is often implied by the chords, melody and prior lyrics. “Bang, bang, the boogie to the boogie / Say up jump the boogie to the bang bang boogie,” the Sugarhill Gang observed on their pioneering “Rapper’s Delight” (1979). Worst of all, many successful lyrics are born as what Hence another undying McCartney phrase, “Ob-la-di, ob-la-da.” The beat demands rhyming lines, and loose rhymes are easier to translate into pure sound. McCartney was wise in “For No One” to sing his Larkinesque couplet “Your day breaks / Your mind aches” in a monotone. It is easier to remember the words to the mock-opera section of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” than the harmonies. Strong lyrics can turn out to be weak: Too much cleverness and the listener will forget to follow the melody. $” will recall that the emotive effects of performance-in this case, the singer writhes in a bath of milk-can eclipse the poetic ones. For that matter, anyone who watches the music video for Fergie’s 2016 song “M.I.L.F. The elisions, feints and pauses of a performance byĬannot be transcribed. Lyrics are written, but a great performance leaves the writing behind. Has stretched the rhythm with “Why don’t you all f-f-f-fade away,” the band go in search of lost time like a herd of angry elephants. Consider The Who’s “My Generation.” After Once compared this to the “tempo rubato” of Baroque music, in which truncated phrases compensate for the “stolen time” of extended expression. The tempo of the beat is fixed by the composer, but the syllables in the lyrics have their own natural pattern, which is compressed or stretched as the vocalist moves with and against the “rhythmic grid.” Soul producer There are, he writes, three “rhythmic forces” in any pop song: the “musical rhythm” of the beat the “poetic rhythm” of the lyrics and the “performative rhythm” of the interpretation. Bradley skillfully breaks down a century of standards and pop songs into their elements to reveal the interaction of craft and art in composition and performance. And though almost all pop music is shallow, cynical and commercially standardized, we often experience it as poetic-as expressing our deepest, most sincere emotions. Lyrics resemble parents, too, for the modern song lyric descends from folk music and lyric verse. Like teenagers, lyrics sound casual but are very often rigidly conventional. Lyrics have meter and rhythm usually they rhyme. Pop lyrics are clearly related to poetry. “The Poetry of Pop” is an exhaustive and often enlightening investigation of, as he puts it, “the aesthetic labors of language and performance that create the recordings we cherish or despise.” A great recording unites a composition and a performance, but the craft of making songs precedes the art of performing them. $” the secret history of food our evangelical age the madness of Robert Lowell Lenin on the train no one cares about crazy people and much more. Martin Luther’s iconoclasm why we love “Hey Jude” and “M.I.L.F.
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