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Thursday, November 08, 2007
WORDS DISOBEY ME
The Pop Group
Y
WEA Int'l : 1979
[Buy It]
IN OTHER WORDS (DEMO)
Sly & The Family Stone
1982
Available on : Who in the Funk Do You Think You Are: The Warner Bros. Recordings
Rhino Handmade : 2001
[Buy It]
LANGUAGE IS A VIRUS
Laurie Anderson
Home of the Brave
Warner Bros. : 1986
[Buy It]
WHEN THE WORDS FROM YOUR HEART GET CAUGHT UP IN YOUR THROAT
Smokey Robinson & The Miracles
1968
Available on : Complete Motown Singles 8: 1968
Hip-O-Select : 2007
[Buy It]
THE LOVE I SAW IN YOU WAS JUST A MIRAGE
Smokey Robinson & The Miracles
1967
Available on : The Ultimate Collection
Motown : 1998
[Buy It]
FLY ME TO THE MOON (IN OTHER WORDS)
Smokey Robinson
Timeless Love
New Door : 2006
[Buy It]
Last time I wrote about the limits of language, the way that our most complex (and, in different ways, our simplest) feelings are betrayed by the words we use to try to express them. People wrote in to agree or disagree, using language. Some extended the argument. Some distended it. Others still upended it, claiming that the issue isn't that language fails, but that it succeeds at diversion and obfuscation, which are the only true roles of language. In the comments section, Yuval Taylor posted one of the epigraphs from Stendhal's The Red and the Black, which is credited to R.P. Malagrida: "Speech was given man in order to hide his thoughts." Plenty of people have agreed with Stendhal. Mark Stewart, of the Bristol post-punkers Pop Group, concurred a century and a half later:Truth is a feeling
But it's not a sound
Truth is a feeling
But it's not a sound
We don't need words
Throw them away The point's made again in "In Other Words," a surprisingly guitar-heavy Sly and the Family Stone demo from the early eighties:When I hear you talking and I feel what you say
It sounds a little funny cause the words are in the way
I get the meaning that the words can't steal
In other words, I hear what you feel And it's (re)made (yet) again in "Language is a Virus," a funny little Laurie Anderson number in which a friend suspects her of performing her speech rather than feeling it. (The title and chorus are taken from a William S. Burroughs quote, "language is a virus from outer space"; he's her Malagrida.):Well I was talking to a friend
And I was saying
I wanted you
And I was looking for you
But I couldn't find you
I couldn't find you
And he said: Hey!
Are you talking to me?
Or are you just practicing
For one of those performances of yours?
Huh? Some may hold that the limits of language are the limits of the world, but others insist that language must be set aside before you can feel your way down to the truth. I was thinking about that last week, during a difficult (but rewarding) conversation with a difficult (but rewarding) friend of mine with whom I have always had a rewarding (but difficult) relationship. Over the years, there's been lots of talking. You might even say a surplus. Maybe it would have been easier, all along the way, to dispense with language. But then what? Semaphore? Anyway, dispensing with language has never been a possibility, because we're both highly verbal, which is to say that we're both highly limited by language, which is itself highly limited. I keep saying that, in that same dumb way, to make my point and at the same time prove it. But the point is more capably proven, to the point of disproof, by Smokey Robinson. His argument comes on "When the Words From Your Heart Get Caught Up in Your Throat," a B-side from 1968 that was completed in the studio forty years ago today; I'm going to quote the whole lyric, because that's what you do with literature:My heart has been trying to express itself
And it's really getting me down
There's a strange effect that comes over me
Whenever you're around
I have so much confidence when I'm by myself
It's like my nerves wore an armored coat
But baby now you're such a charmer you melt that coat of armor
And the words from my heart get caught up in my throat
Maybe I'd better write a note
My heart is getting discouraged with giving me line after line after line
But my lips can't relay what my heart has to say
They stutter and stammer each time
If I don't tell you soon what my heart wants to say
My chance will get more remote
But each time you've given me the opportunity
The words from my heart get caught up in my throat
Maybe I'd better write a note
I make the same promises to my heart every morning
That the very next time we met
I would tell you that I loved you and make you mine
By the time the sun starts to set
I rehearsed my lines a thousand times
Read some sweet poetry I could quote
But when you open your door to greet me
Smiling oh so sweetly
The words from my heart get caught up in my throat
I think I'd better write a note
I want to say the words but they're caught up in my throat
I'm gonna find myself a pencil cause they're caught up in my throat The music lets the lyrics down somewhat, which can happen with late Miracles songs. And while a hyper-articulate song about being tongue-tied may be a peculiar kind of grandstand play, that's the genius of Smokey Robinson. In the last verse, when he says that he prepared for his date by reading "some sweet poetry [he] could quote," he might be talking about Shakespeare, about Beatrice's lament in "Much Ado About Nothing" that "men are only turned into tongue"; or the way Iago, in "Othello," describes Emilia's reticence by saying that "she puts her tongue a little in her heart"; or how the Clown, in "Twelfth Night," explains that "words are very rascals since bonds disgraced them." But it's just as likely that he's talking about his own lyrics--that he's not reading Shakespeare, in other words, because he's writing it.
If the song recognizes that clear communication is an illusion, it also implies that is is only one of many. You may not be able to say what you mean or mean what you say, but you also can't believe what you see or you feel, as he explains in "The Love I Saw in You (Was Just a Mirage)." It's a justly famous song -- it went top twenty and appears on all the anthologies -- that remains the most devastating account of romantic illusion in pop music history. The story is simple. It always is: boy meets girl, boy loves girl, girl pretends to love boy, boy wakes up one day to discover that his heart has been ripped out of his chest by girl's deceitful ways. It's been around as long as there have been boys, girls, and hearts. But the lyric is peerless. People like to mention the famous Bob Dylan quote in which he referred to Smokey Robinson as "America's greatest living poet." I just wish it was clear how unironic a statement it was:We used to meet in romantic places
You gave the illusion that your love was real
Now all that's left are lipstick traces
From the kisses you only pretended to feel
And now our meeting you avoid
And so my world you have destroyed
Just a minute ago your love was here
All of a sudden it seemed to disappear
The way you wrecked my life was like sabotage
The love I saw in you was just a mirage The idea of a mirage may have been a little bit abstruse for a pop song, so Smokey offered a compact two-line definition that, when sung, is one of the best lines of poetry in the song:Just like the desert shows a thirsty man
A green oasis where there's only sand This song, of course, gives the lie to the other one, which also gives the lie to itself, and as a result it's an instrument of tremendous hope beneath its message of hopelessness. This is exactly what language can do when it's not concealing or misrepresenting the truth--it can tell the truth in so many words.
Time moved on. Age came to Smokey, as it comes to everyone. Plastic surgery came to Smokey, perhaps more than it comes to everyone--in fact, sometimes it looks like he underwent some extra procedures that were earmarked for others. In 2004, he released a gospel album, "Food For the Spirit," that was also a tie-in with Smokey Robinson Foods ("The Soul is in the Bowl"). In 2006, he released an album of standards, "Timeless Love," that was, in its own way, just as divided between art and commerce. Rod Stewart had just gone quintillion platinum or whatever with his American Songbook series, and others like Carly Simon had followed, so Smokey probably felt that it made sense to redeploy those songs with one of America's iconic voices. The album was recorded with a small jazz combo, and the strings were added later to give the project more sonic foliage. Smokey's wavery tenor was still a thing of great beauty. And there was a clear, strong geneaology that linked the standards of the forties and fifties to the standards he had written in the sixties. "Fly Me to the Moon" had already been remade as a soul song, by Bobby Womack, but Smokey's version went back to the beginning, to 1954, when the song was written by Bart Howard and recorded by Kaye Ballard. It was originally called "In Other Words," and that was the meaning in addition to being the title. "Fly Me to the Moon" (the title was changed when Johnny Mathis recorded it in 1956) reiterates that true feelings don't require flowery language, that sometimes words get in the way of a simple message, but it also locates the consolation prize. If words didn't disobey us, if the words in our heart didn't get caught up in our throat, if we had no fear, we might also have no poetry:Fly me to the moon
And let me play among the stars
Let me see what spring is like
On Jupiter and Mars
In other words hold my hand Labels: ben, soul
posted by Ben
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