weâre smokeâ, he concludes sadly, and we can tell that heâs beginning to believe it, finally; the smell of smoke, it turns out, does not symbolize hope but its opposite.
âSmokeâ is, I think, lyrically perfect, clever and sad and neat, in a way that my friend would not credit; itâs also one of the very few songs that is thoughtful about the process of love, rather than the object or the subject. And it was a constant companion during the end (the long, drawn-out end) of my marriage, and it made sense then, and it still makes sense now. You canât ask much more of a song than that.
Itâs possible that this sort of craft goes unnoticed because âSmokeâ is âjustâ a song, in the way that âYesterdayâ or âSomethingâ werenât âjustâ songs. The young men who wrote them were also, unwittingly or not, in the process of changing the world (or â to attempt to cover all the arguments in one clumsy parenthesis â in the process of being given credit for changing the world, unwittingly or not). This inevitably means that an awful lot of attention was focused on their talent â which, after all, was ostensibly the onlyworld-changing tool at their disposal. If youâre singers, and youâre changing the world, then people are bound to look pretty closely at what youâre singing â because how else are you doing it? As a consequence, some very good, very pretty, very sharply written, brilliantly produced and undeniably memorable songs have been credited with an almost supernatural power. Itâs what happens when people are deified. The eighteenth-century British scholar Edmond Malone calculated that Shakespeare âborrowedâ two-thirds â 4,144 out of 6,033 lines â from other sources for Henry VI , Parts I, II and III. And, though Henry VI is a minor play, the point is that this stuff was out there, in the world, and Shakespeare inhaled it. What he exhaled was mostly genius, of course, but it was not genius that came out of the blue; it had a context.
The Beatles had a context, too, but they seem to have inhaled that along with everything else: they have hoovered up and become the sixties, and everything that happened in that extraordinary decade somehow belongs to them now. Their songs have therefore become imbued with all sorts of magic that doesnât properly belong to them, and we canât see the songs as songs any more.
Ben Folds has not changed the world, and nor has he changed popular music. (Indeed, at the time of writing, hemay well be struggling to earn his living from popular music, although I hope not.) He is writing songs at a time when nobody equates music with social change; he has no context to hoover up, and he is working in a medium (loosely, pop/rock) that at the time of writing â and, letâs face it, at the time of reading, unless youâre reading this in 1970 â is widely regarded as washed-up, exhausted, finished. So his songs are just songs. They represent nothing, and nor are they a part of anything else, and they must fight for attention in an industry and a critical climate that is only interested in cultural significance.
This is what has to change, if pop music is to survive. Literature seems to have just about maintained a toehold in our culture because weâre prepared to accept that books can be sui generis : Zadie Smithâs White Teeth , for example, represents nothing but itself. It isnât at the forefront of a new, young, hip, multicultural, etc., literary revolution, and it belongs very firmly to a familiar narrative tradition. But that doesnât make it any less of an achievement, or any less interesting; and it certainly hasnât made it unpopular, either with critics or with readers. If it had been a record, however, weâd probably have ignored it; the general view would have been that weâve heard all that great writing
âSmokeâ is, I think, lyrically perfect, clever and sad and neat, in a way that my friend would not credit; itâs also one of the very few songs that is thoughtful about the process of love, rather than the object or the subject. And it was a constant companion during the end (the long, drawn-out end) of my marriage, and it made sense then, and it still makes sense now. You canât ask much more of a song than that.
Itâs possible that this sort of craft goes unnoticed because âSmokeâ is âjustâ a song, in the way that âYesterdayâ or âSomethingâ werenât âjustâ songs. The young men who wrote them were also, unwittingly or not, in the process of changing the world (or â to attempt to cover all the arguments in one clumsy parenthesis â in the process of being given credit for changing the world, unwittingly or not). This inevitably means that an awful lot of attention was focused on their talent â which, after all, was ostensibly the onlyworld-changing tool at their disposal. If youâre singers, and youâre changing the world, then people are bound to look pretty closely at what youâre singing â because how else are you doing it? As a consequence, some very good, very pretty, very sharply written, brilliantly produced and undeniably memorable songs have been credited with an almost supernatural power. Itâs what happens when people are deified. The eighteenth-century British scholar Edmond Malone calculated that Shakespeare âborrowedâ two-thirds â 4,144 out of 6,033 lines â from other sources for Henry VI , Parts I, II and III. And, though Henry VI is a minor play, the point is that this stuff was out there, in the world, and Shakespeare inhaled it. What he exhaled was mostly genius, of course, but it was not genius that came out of the blue; it had a context.
The Beatles had a context, too, but they seem to have inhaled that along with everything else: they have hoovered up and become the sixties, and everything that happened in that extraordinary decade somehow belongs to them now. Their songs have therefore become imbued with all sorts of magic that doesnât properly belong to them, and we canât see the songs as songs any more.
Ben Folds has not changed the world, and nor has he changed popular music. (Indeed, at the time of writing, hemay well be struggling to earn his living from popular music, although I hope not.) He is writing songs at a time when nobody equates music with social change; he has no context to hoover up, and he is working in a medium (loosely, pop/rock) that at the time of writing â and, letâs face it, at the time of reading, unless youâre reading this in 1970 â is widely regarded as washed-up, exhausted, finished. So his songs are just songs. They represent nothing, and nor are they a part of anything else, and they must fight for attention in an industry and a critical climate that is only interested in cultural significance.
This is what has to change, if pop music is to survive. Literature seems to have just about maintained a toehold in our culture because weâre prepared to accept that books can be sui generis : Zadie Smithâs White Teeth , for example, represents nothing but itself. It isnât at the forefront of a new, young, hip, multicultural, etc., literary revolution, and it belongs very firmly to a familiar narrative tradition. But that doesnât make it any less of an achievement, or any less interesting; and it certainly hasnât made it unpopular, either with critics or with readers. If it had been a record, however, weâd probably have ignored it; the general view would have been that weâve heard all that great writing
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