Popular Song Lyrics
Poetry has its origin in performed song, but there is a profound difference between a poem written to be read and lyrics written to be sung. This is due to the power of music: it acts upon the feelings without articulating anything, and harnessed to lyrics music may seem to lend emotive force to whatever (if anything) is endorsed in the text. As a result, writing lyrics to a contemporary pop song entails a fairly simple formula: all that is required are lyrics obey a law of vagueness, such that anyone can identify with it. The listener can imagine almost anything that matches his or her sense of what the tune "means." As far as the major record labels are concerned, a song only needs to be a sufficient advertisement for itself -- a "radio-friendly unit-shifter," to borrow a phrase from Kurt Cobain, where "radio-friendly" indicates a song's capacity for being repeated nonstop on the airwaves, and "unit-shifter" indicates its capacity for being sold in bulk to the masses, at Walmart or on iTunes. But it is worth noting that some songwriters still yearn to attain the poetic element in their craft: the song is intended by its writer to mean something. I want to examine two songs closely -- "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana (lyrics by the late Kurt Cobain) and "Whatever" by Hot Chelle Rae (lyrics by Ryan Follese and Nash Overstreet) -- to see the way in which the lyricist's meaning is still constructed poetically in the lyrics, with an awareness of what I have defined as the law of vagueness as being the operant factor in allowing the song to "mean" something to the listener. In conclusion, I hope to show that Cobain wrote something closer to poetry.
With...
Cobain himself claimed that he had no idea that "Teen Spirit" was a trademarked name for a brand of girl's deodorant -- instead, Kathleen Hanna (lead singer of the band Bikini Kill) had written the sentence "Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit" as graffiti on the wall of his apartment, and Cobain borrowed it for his title (Thompson 2010). The fact that "Teen Spirit" is, in itself, a pun on "team spirit" seems to be part of why Cobain found the phrase evocative. After all, "team spirit" in high schools is popularly endorsed as the acceptable face of group behavior on the part of young people; as such, it sits ironically with the depiction of group behavior that we get in the song's first stanza:
Load up on guns, bring your friends
It's fun to lose and to pretend
She's overbored, self-assured
Oh no I know a dirty word (Nirvana, 1991)
"Bring your friends" makes it clear that this is some kind of social gathering, although the implicit menace in "load up on guns" makes it clear that this is not the sort of party most high-schoolers would want to attend. In the second line, however, the means for defining the party described here becomes simultaneously more vague and more poetic. We can understand how a social gathering might be defined as a place where it's "fun…to pretend," whether one pretends to be enjoying oneself, or pretends to be an adult. "Fun to lose," however, is more slippery. "Lose" is a verb that normally takes an object: we can lose our virginities, or lose a game. At the…
