That really touched a chord with me. As someone who desperately wanted to be a heavy metal musician in the late 1970s I wore out the grooves of my Judas Priest and Black Sabbath records teaching myself to play one hard-won note at a time. At this stage of my life having battled it out in the club wars of the 80s and 90s and am now teaching. My young potential guitar players come to me with almost zero intellectual curiosity about the music. If is so depressing.
I was a massage therapist for 30 years before I took over directing and teaching a MT program in a community college. I saw the same lack of curiosity in a majority of the students despite doing everything I could to foster a questioning attitude. It wasn't a lack of intelligence in most cases. One of my best teachers, I've been fortunate to have had a few in my life, said it's more important to have the right questions than to have the right answers. Too many want the answers without going into the questions and coming back to them when they have found "answers".
Yes, I totally get it! Have you found any insight about this issue? I agree it is not an intelligence thing per se, but perhaps a lack of passion? I keep searching and thanks for your input.
I really don't now but I suspect curiosity is either innate or inculcated early in life. Perhaps an epiphany later in life can do it. I did have a precious few who came in without it and something triggered its growth. Maybe it was something I did but probably whatever credit I could take was by modeling my own curiosity and providing a non-judgmental learning environment.
That brings up the question of teaching-learning. Does anyone really teach anyone anything or do we "just" provide a model and an environment for learning to take place. Just in quotes because it is no small thing to create that environment.
Am I wrong, suggesting intellectual curiosity about the music is one thing, but more important is that your students can be touched by the music, physically and emotionally - and even better so they aim to touch their audience to have this dialogue/dance?
I would one-hundred percent agree! I don't think I spoke very clearly. At the time my friends and I knew exactly what kind of music was important to us...and I mean IMPORTANT. Metal and Prog was everything to us. I knew the names and backgrounds of all the players, who their influences were, etc. Unlike today, there was no internet, YouTube, or anything like that. You also could not really study Rock guitar at school. I managed to score a couple of music degrees, but they are in music education and composition/theory. When I finally hung up the full-time professional thing I was excited to start teaching. I always thought, somewhat arrogantly, I suppose that if I could have met my former self I could save them years of frustration trying to figure things out. Nowadays I will see many little versions of myself walk through the studio doors and when I ask who there favorite players are, they can't say, or even what their favorite band is. This ma wekes me very sad, because like you pointed out, I would love to pass on my passion and live for music. All I can do is be an example and pass out technical information. I am working with a couple of studios in programs to counter this and there is my YouTube channel...but I have not figured it out yet. Sorry for the long answer, but I appreciate your response and helping me get some clarity. Thanks!🤘
Lyrics in certain songs became a draw with me way back in late 60s early 70s, especially Eagles, Pink Floyd, Journey, Aerosmith, I picked up on them and thought some had double-meanings, only to find out after, that they were picked out by music paper journalists. From that point on, I started writing lyrics and melodies came naturally, though I first became a rock drummer in 69' and my road was long, a story in the making, because I ended up in Hollywood.
Filemon, the magician in Carl Jung's Red Book, said "magic happens to everything that eludes comprehension." Great music like art is magic. We can't really understand it despite our society's emphasis on left brained logic and reason. Searching for song meanings on the Internet reminds me of this line from a Scouse poet, "Expert textpert choking smokers, Don't you think the joker laughs at you?"
But the "expert-textpert" listeners "I Am the Walrus" was written for knew the previous generation of popficianados didn't have the expertise to understand Lennon's surreal lyrics (though they might well have recognized where Bobby Darrin's "Mack the Knife" and The Doors' "Whiskey Bar" songs came from).
My closest friend (we are both 70 years old and have similar music tastes) and I were texting recently about overhearing younger people listening to music from the 60s and 70s and I wrote him this:
"But I feel a bit sorry for the kids nowadays who will never experience hearing “Strawberry Fields Forever” for the first time in their mother’s kitchen on a one-speaker AM radio and wondering 'What the hell is THAT?'"
The night before "Sgt. Pepper" was released (in the US at least), the campus radio station that was available in the dorm where I lived played "Day In the Life" without introducing or identifying it--just something like, "We have something special here, we'll leave it to you to figure it out." I was sitting with three friends in their room--not high--and when it was over we were speechless, jaws lowered as the last chord stretched on and we stared at one another.
No, No, No! I was in charge of marketing opossum meat throughout the World in the day. If you play MANY of those classic vinyl records backwards, you will definitely hear " . . . EAT MORE POSSUM, EAT MORE POSSUM . . . "
Really? I could have sworn I made that up as a comment on existence in general!
Loved this piece. There’s a great Ken Kesey quote that allies with what you’re saying.
“The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer. They think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.”
As a 12yo new Beatle fan gorging on everything I could read about them, how delicious it was to realize, as if no one else likely had, that the numbers in the line in "You Never Give Me Your Money": "1234567 all good children go to heaven," add up to 28, the age at which Paul allegedly had gone heaven.
"You Never Give Me Your Money" has profound personal significance for me. I never quite got with the arcana of "Paul-is-dead" references, though you can't help but know some loving the Beatles. However, just recently, it struct me that the conclusion of The Pixies' "Monkey Gone to Heaven" is a pretty direct reference to that song and the folk tradition of counting-rhymes they both reference.
I have a “Beatles complete” songbook that I have been going through recently, so the timing of this is golden.
Their music is just as mysterious and magical as the yellow bus and the lyrics are. The harmonic progression moves as soon as it’s settled, but you don’t even know you’ve left home. Eleanor Rigby is an English folk ballad dressed under classical cellos sung by a rock band. The “grandpas songbook” chord progression shifts to the new “rock and roll” progression right at the moment Lennon asks Dear Prudence, “won’t you come out to play”. Lucy in the sky with diamonds flips what would be a bass line in most songs to be an octave above the melody (my brains and my hands both rebelled against this, making me feel… so incredibly high). I’m more floored with every song I learn.
Yesterday has become one of my favorite harmonic progressions of all time. So simple - the movement in and out of the OH before “yesterday came suddenly“ . It’s a perfect musical moment in an already exceptional catalogue.
I am especially grateful for this article. Thank you.
A great pleasure is to go back and listen closely to stuff you’ve been listening to for years and have thereby taken for granted. The Joni Mitchell archives series has brought me back to lyrics I could always recite by heart but haven’t actually thought about in 40-50 years. Just one example: “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow” is as pointed and artful a lyric about sexism and feminism as anything I can think of. And I’m still trying to decipher the Ethiopian wall reference.
It's an odd twist of fate that the song Joni Mitchell wrote about the break up of a relationship,the end moment,getting in the taxi and off,almost immediately became THE anthem for the Environmental Movement and we still see it that way and quite it today and probably always will. I wonder if it works so well BECAUSE it wasnt deliberately written as a pious plea to keep Nature safe.
Maybe the Ethiopian wall line about being sacrificed to Arwe. He was the serpent king who ruled for four centuries demanding virgin women as sacrifices.
Getting chained to a rock to be eaten by serpent was a common story element in the ancient world. It shows up in the story of Andomeda and Perseus. I had forgotten, but it turns out that Andromeda was Ethiopian.
I was born in 1960 so I had much the same experience. The older kids who lived across the street pored over those Beatles lyrics endlessly.
That sense of not necessarily knowing everything is one reason I loved the TV show “Lost.” I enjoyed the enigma of it while everyone else complained about not being spoon-fed all the answers.
Another show like that was “Twin Peaks,” where I used to tell people, “if you’re watching to find out who killed Laura Palmer, you’re watching for the wrong reason.”
These days when I don’t understand what a song is about, it’s mostly due to being an old guy and not knowing the jargon.
There's a tendency nowadays to explain every damned thing. It isn't just about lyrics. It shows up in fiction with overdone world building and too many backstories. It's tedious. It fights the imagination. I keep thinking of Joan Didion's line from Play It As It Lays, "What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask." Thank god Shakespeare is dead or we'd be watching the prequel trilogy explaining what made Iago evil in idiotic detail. There was an interview with one of the Furiosa developers bragging that they had a backstory for every character in the movie. Why? Who cares? Did you even know they made a prequel to Fury Road?
If you've never read Jo Walton's essay on The Suck Fairy, the magical being who sucks all the good stuff out of things one has read and enjoyed in the past, you should. Good reading like good listening is as much about the "text" as what one brings into it, all the stuff that happens in your head. "It's like the moral opposite of skimming".
When I listen to the song "Dig a Pony," I think that this is what might happen if Wallace Stevens decided to do rock and roll. The lyrics seem nonsensical yet strangely profound. Mostly, the song moves me, much like a Wallace Stevens poem might move me, but with a damned engaging guitar riff.
Chicago blues is full of sly reference and sexual inuendo, of course. My favorite is still when Muddy sings, "Muddy Waters, another mule is kickin' in your stall!!" from Long Distance Call. Best version of still has to be on Fathers & Sons, live from 1969.
Very little of Muddy Waters' lyrics + stage performances had anything remotely resembling "innuendo" about them. Same for many other blues singers. Maybe us white kids were slow on the uptake, but Black listeners all knew.
I agree, which is why I called it a version! Taylor is very big on what someone once called "pajama party" group gossip as a way of bonding with her followers.
That really touched a chord with me. As someone who desperately wanted to be a heavy metal musician in the late 1970s I wore out the grooves of my Judas Priest and Black Sabbath records teaching myself to play one hard-won note at a time. At this stage of my life having battled it out in the club wars of the 80s and 90s and am now teaching. My young potential guitar players come to me with almost zero intellectual curiosity about the music. If is so depressing.
I was a massage therapist for 30 years before I took over directing and teaching a MT program in a community college. I saw the same lack of curiosity in a majority of the students despite doing everything I could to foster a questioning attitude. It wasn't a lack of intelligence in most cases. One of my best teachers, I've been fortunate to have had a few in my life, said it's more important to have the right questions than to have the right answers. Too many want the answers without going into the questions and coming back to them when they have found "answers".
Yes, I totally get it! Have you found any insight about this issue? I agree it is not an intelligence thing per se, but perhaps a lack of passion? I keep searching and thanks for your input.
I really don't now but I suspect curiosity is either innate or inculcated early in life. Perhaps an epiphany later in life can do it. I did have a precious few who came in without it and something triggered its growth. Maybe it was something I did but probably whatever credit I could take was by modeling my own curiosity and providing a non-judgmental learning environment.
That brings up the question of teaching-learning. Does anyone really teach anyone anything or do we "just" provide a model and an environment for learning to take place. Just in quotes because it is no small thing to create that environment.
Am I wrong, suggesting intellectual curiosity about the music is one thing, but more important is that your students can be touched by the music, physically and emotionally - and even better so they aim to touch their audience to have this dialogue/dance?
.
Rob Geurtsen
https://robgeurtsenyahoomail.substack.com/
I would one-hundred percent agree! I don't think I spoke very clearly. At the time my friends and I knew exactly what kind of music was important to us...and I mean IMPORTANT. Metal and Prog was everything to us. I knew the names and backgrounds of all the players, who their influences were, etc. Unlike today, there was no internet, YouTube, or anything like that. You also could not really study Rock guitar at school. I managed to score a couple of music degrees, but they are in music education and composition/theory. When I finally hung up the full-time professional thing I was excited to start teaching. I always thought, somewhat arrogantly, I suppose that if I could have met my former self I could save them years of frustration trying to figure things out. Nowadays I will see many little versions of myself walk through the studio doors and when I ask who there favorite players are, they can't say, or even what their favorite band is. This ma wekes me very sad, because like you pointed out, I would love to pass on my passion and live for music. All I can do is be an example and pass out technical information. I am working with a couple of studios in programs to counter this and there is my YouTube channel...but I have not figured it out yet. Sorry for the long answer, but I appreciate your response and helping me get some clarity. Thanks!🤘
Lyrics in certain songs became a draw with me way back in late 60s early 70s, especially Eagles, Pink Floyd, Journey, Aerosmith, I picked up on them and thought some had double-meanings, only to find out after, that they were picked out by music paper journalists. From that point on, I started writing lyrics and melodies came naturally, though I first became a rock drummer in 69' and my road was long, a story in the making, because I ended up in Hollywood.
Filemon, the magician in Carl Jung's Red Book, said "magic happens to everything that eludes comprehension." Great music like art is magic. We can't really understand it despite our society's emphasis on left brained logic and reason. Searching for song meanings on the Internet reminds me of this line from a Scouse poet, "Expert textpert choking smokers, Don't you think the joker laughs at you?"
HEE HEE HEE HA HA HA
But the "expert-textpert" listeners "I Am the Walrus" was written for knew the previous generation of popficianados didn't have the expertise to understand Lennon's surreal lyrics (though they might well have recognized where Bobby Darrin's "Mack the Knife" and The Doors' "Whiskey Bar" songs came from).
pretty sure I've heard Mr. Lennon himself describe those lyrics as "jibberish." See also Lewis Caroll.
Yes, Lennon said many of his lyrics were nonsense. That's why it's so funny that many people look into them like they're hermeneutics.
I agree. Rob G.
My closest friend (we are both 70 years old and have similar music tastes) and I were texting recently about overhearing younger people listening to music from the 60s and 70s and I wrote him this:
"But I feel a bit sorry for the kids nowadays who will never experience hearing “Strawberry Fields Forever” for the first time in their mother’s kitchen on a one-speaker AM radio and wondering 'What the hell is THAT?'"
The night before "Sgt. Pepper" was released (in the US at least), the campus radio station that was available in the dorm where I lived played "Day In the Life" without introducing or identifying it--just something like, "We have something special here, we'll leave it to you to figure it out." I was sitting with three friends in their room--not high--and when it was over we were speechless, jaws lowered as the last chord stretched on and we stared at one another.
Wow
What a great memory
Oh remember? What a memorable and mesmerizing final chord that one was?
I heard aul McCartney in an interview say fans interpretations of The Beatles' songs were smarter than them.
No, No, No! I was in charge of marketing opossum meat throughout the World in the day. If you play MANY of those classic vinyl records backwards, you will definitely hear " . . . EAT MORE POSSUM, EAT MORE POSSUM . . . "
This is why I have a retirement income . . .
Burma Shave, Tom Rhea.
“a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”
Really? I could have sworn I made that up as a comment on existence in general!
Loved this piece. There’s a great Ken Kesey quote that allies with what you’re saying.
“The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer. They think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.”
As a 12yo new Beatle fan gorging on everything I could read about them, how delicious it was to realize, as if no one else likely had, that the numbers in the line in "You Never Give Me Your Money": "1234567 all good children go to heaven," add up to 28, the age at which Paul allegedly had gone heaven.
"You Never Give Me Your Money" has profound personal significance for me. I never quite got with the arcana of "Paul-is-dead" references, though you can't help but know some loving the Beatles. However, just recently, it struct me that the conclusion of The Pixies' "Monkey Gone to Heaven" is a pretty direct reference to that song and the folk tradition of counting-rhymes they both reference.
Groan.
I have a “Beatles complete” songbook that I have been going through recently, so the timing of this is golden.
Their music is just as mysterious and magical as the yellow bus and the lyrics are. The harmonic progression moves as soon as it’s settled, but you don’t even know you’ve left home. Eleanor Rigby is an English folk ballad dressed under classical cellos sung by a rock band. The “grandpas songbook” chord progression shifts to the new “rock and roll” progression right at the moment Lennon asks Dear Prudence, “won’t you come out to play”. Lucy in the sky with diamonds flips what would be a bass line in most songs to be an octave above the melody (my brains and my hands both rebelled against this, making me feel… so incredibly high). I’m more floored with every song I learn.
Yesterday has become one of my favorite harmonic progressions of all time. So simple - the movement in and out of the OH before “yesterday came suddenly“ . It’s a perfect musical moment in an already exceptional catalogue.
I am especially grateful for this article. Thank you.
A great pleasure is to go back and listen closely to stuff you’ve been listening to for years and have thereby taken for granted. The Joni Mitchell archives series has brought me back to lyrics I could always recite by heart but haven’t actually thought about in 40-50 years. Just one example: “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow” is as pointed and artful a lyric about sexism and feminism as anything I can think of. And I’m still trying to decipher the Ethiopian wall reference.
It's an odd twist of fate that the song Joni Mitchell wrote about the break up of a relationship,the end moment,getting in the taxi and off,almost immediately became THE anthem for the Environmental Movement and we still see it that way and quite it today and probably always will. I wonder if it works so well BECAUSE it wasnt deliberately written as a pious plea to keep Nature safe.
Maybe the Ethiopian wall line about being sacrificed to Arwe. He was the serpent king who ruled for four centuries demanding virgin women as sacrifices.
You’re right - the lyric is “ then he chains me with that serpent to that Ethiopian wall”. Thank you!
Getting chained to a rock to be eaten by serpent was a common story element in the ancient world. It shows up in the story of Andomeda and Perseus. I had forgotten, but it turns out that Andromeda was Ethiopian.
I was born in 1960 so I had much the same experience. The older kids who lived across the street pored over those Beatles lyrics endlessly.
That sense of not necessarily knowing everything is one reason I loved the TV show “Lost.” I enjoyed the enigma of it while everyone else complained about not being spoon-fed all the answers.
Another show like that was “Twin Peaks,” where I used to tell people, “if you’re watching to find out who killed Laura Palmer, you’re watching for the wrong reason.”
These days when I don’t understand what a song is about, it’s mostly due to being an old guy and not knowing the jargon.
Spot on.
💎💕🎶💕💎 There is no app for sublimity 💎💕🎶💕💎
There's a tendency nowadays to explain every damned thing. It isn't just about lyrics. It shows up in fiction with overdone world building and too many backstories. It's tedious. It fights the imagination. I keep thinking of Joan Didion's line from Play It As It Lays, "What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask." Thank god Shakespeare is dead or we'd be watching the prequel trilogy explaining what made Iago evil in idiotic detail. There was an interview with one of the Furiosa developers bragging that they had a backstory for every character in the movie. Why? Who cares? Did you even know they made a prequel to Fury Road?
If you've never read Jo Walton's essay on The Suck Fairy, the magical being who sucks all the good stuff out of things one has read and enjoyed in the past, you should. Good reading like good listening is as much about the "text" as what one brings into it, all the stuff that happens in your head. "It's like the moral opposite of skimming".
No one likes him at school. Not surprising really!
When I listen to the song "Dig a Pony," I think that this is what might happen if Wallace Stevens decided to do rock and roll. The lyrics seem nonsensical yet strangely profound. Mostly, the song moves me, much like a Wallace Stevens poem might move me, but with a damned engaging guitar riff.
Imagine my disappointment when I found out that Eight Miles High was about a plane flight.
Or was it?
Sure. And Lucy in the Sky was about a drawing by Julian Lennon.
Chicago blues is full of sly reference and sexual inuendo, of course. My favorite is still when Muddy sings, "Muddy Waters, another mule is kickin' in your stall!!" from Long Distance Call. Best version of still has to be on Fathers & Sons, live from 1969.
Very little of Muddy Waters' lyrics + stage performances had anything remotely resembling "innuendo" about them. Same for many other blues singers. Maybe us white kids were slow on the uptake, but Black listeners all knew.
Today's version of this is Taylor Swift's secrets (Easter eggs, etc.) deliberately hidden in her songs.
No, not really, although it depends on what we listen to.
There are a lot of enigmatic lyrics being written and recorded, but they're not Top 40 material.
No, this really isn’t the same thing.
I agree, which is why I called it a version! Taylor is very big on what someone once called "pajama party" group gossip as a way of bonding with her followers.