Music, Art and Design

It's 1969 and an eighteen year-old is going up to university to study English Literature. His mind is full of possibilities, standing at the beginning of an imagined world of books and music, walking through the old town with a mind full of Keats and Shelley and a heavy greatcoat and flowing hair to match. Against the wall in his rooms are stacked LPs by Leonard Cohen, Procol Harum, The Doors and, of course, Dylan. The bookshelf has most of the canon of English poetry, together with translations of Rilke, Rimbaud and Dostoyevsky and a recently read The Doors of Perception. A new book has been added since arriving at university; the pocket-sized Bantam imprint of Richard Goldstein's The Poetry of Rock. This has been our young student's constant companion of late, alongside academically sanctioned volumes of the Romantic poets and others in the canon that answer his needs for existential questioning and introspection. He feels the words of these serious new musicians should also be seen as valid poetry and Goldstein's volume is doing the important job of legitimising the voices of these young (mostly) men for him.

This article argues for understanding popular songs and songwriting through the metaphor of archi- tecture, an idea we draw from vernacular terms used by songwriters when comprehending and explaining their own creative practice, and which we deploy in response to those who have called for writing about music to use a non-technical vocabulary and make greater use of metaphor. By architecture we mean those recognisable characteristics of songs that exist as enduring qualities regardless of a specific performance, recording or sheet music score. We use this analogy not as a systematic model, but as a device for exploring the intricate ways in which words and music are com- bined and pointing to similarities in the composition of poetry and the writing of song lyrics. The art of repetition and play with ambiguity are integral to popular song architectures that endure regard- less of the modifications introduced by performers who temporarily inhabit a particular song.

With the recent series of Faber and Faber's publications of song lyrics (Kate Bush, How To Be Invisible, Neil Tennant, One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem, Jarvis Cocker, Mother, Brother, Lover, etc.) the relationship between poetry and song is again brought into relief. Despite the publisher presenting them in similarly, the two forms each function in particular and different ways. Unlike poems, song words exist in time, scored by music; and the act of singing a lyric connects it with an audience in a way that is essentially communal, however small the audience or how private the experience of the singer. This latest set of lyric books harks back to a slew of 60s publications celebrating the so-called 'Song Poets', notably Richard Goldstein's The Poetry of Rock (1969), which elevated the song lyric to the status of poem-like printed text, an early example of which was The Beatles printing the lyrics of the album St Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on the album sleeve. People are often quick to elevate song lyrics to the printed world of poetry (Astor, 2010), with the cultural trope of the songwriter-as-poet perhaps reaching its apotheosis in Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. His evident discomfort with this award was clear from the tardiness of his initial response and to his pointing out in the acceptance speech that 'lyrics of songs are meant to be sung, not read on the page'. (Dylan, 2020). Dylan's uneasiness highlighted the differences between the two forms and although the connection between poetry and song is old and well known the different ways in which the two forms communicate with audiences is often overlooked. 1 1 The distinction examined here is between written poetry and sung lyric, the forms of oral poetry like rap or spoken word operate across the areas being looked at here, often functioning as performed language in a way that contemporary poetry does not.

This article argues for understanding popular songs and songwriting through the metaphor of architecture, an idea we draw from vernacular terms used by songwriters when comprehending and explaining their own creative practice, and which we deploy in response to those who have called for writing about music to use a non-technical vocabulary and make greater use of metaphor. By architecture we mean those recognisable characteristics of songs that exist as enduring qualities regardless of a specific performance, recording or sheet music score. We use this analogy not as a systematic model, but as a device for exploring the intricate ways in which words and music are combined and pointing to similarities in the composition of poetry and the writing of song lyrics. The art of repetition and play with ambiguity are integral to popular song architectures that endure regardless of the modifications introduced by performers who temporarily inhabit a particular song.

This article reviews the changing beliefs about artistic integrity and aesthetic value that feed into judgments of rock authenticity, taking issue with scholarship that reduces authenticity to acts of misguided judgment, myths, conceits, and fakery. It argues that there is no consensus about the meaning of authenticity in rock music, as understandings change according to the varied experiences, perceptions, circumstances, and vocabularies of participants. Authenticity in rock should not be approached cynically as if based on deception, gullibility, and ideological illusions, but for the insights it can provide into the circumstances that afford imaginative acts of creative connection and experiential empathy.

The 2012 in-depth investigative series published by the News & Observer regarding the N.C. Rate Bureau's database of insurance policies revealed that 30,000 or more businesses in North Carolina did not have the proper insurance to cover their employees who are injured on the job.