In Competition No. 2502 you were invited to submit a review by a critic identifying the literary precursor(s) to a popular music star of your choice.
I was originally going to stipulate that the entry be in the style of a rock critic to winkle out the hipsters among you (although Christopher Ricks, whom I pegged the comp. to, was coming at Dylan from the perspective of an academic). But unsure how much of a crossover there would be between the readership of The Spectator and that of the NME, I lost my nerve and plumped instead for ‘critic’, which seemed to cover all bases. In general, the literary canon that rock critics draw on is fairly narrow — Ballard, Burroughs, Baudelaire, Baudrillard — but Jon Savage casts the net a bit wider in this month’s Word: ‘I mean, you read The Sorrows of Young Werther and it’s like a Smiths lyric. It’s very self-dramatising and you think, “Oh my God, here’s the start of all that.”’ A commendation to William Danes-Volkov, who also puts Morrissey under the microscope but who sees in the pope of mope’s lyrics unmistakeable traces of ‘Sohrab and Rustum’. The winners, printed below, net £25 apiece, and Bill Greenwell gets £30.
‘No sleep till morn, when youth and pleasure meet/ To chase the glowing hours with flying feet.’ Who can doubt that Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’ derives from Byron’s lines, taken from his poem ‘The Eve Of Waterloo’ (n.b.), and using a thumping dance rhythm suggested by ‘the beat of the alarming drum’? Or that the key image of a soldier on the stroke of 12 is not the origin of ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight)’? In ‘The Waltz’, we find the origins of Abba’s style, and ‘Super Trouper’: ‘With vests or ribands — decked alike in hue,/ New troopers strut…’ Note also the similarity between the opening of Byron’s ‘Darkness’ — ‘I had a dream’ — and the Abba hit ‘I have a dream’, with its subtle change of tense, and its proud ‘I believe in angels’, as did Byron (cf. ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’). Note also: Björn/Byron. Coincidence? Hardly.
Bill Greenwell
Mick Jagger’s debt to the poems of Philip Larkin — the ur-text, particularly, of ‘Aftermath’ — has never been adequately researched. Larkin’s ‘Annus Mirabilis’, revealing his awareness of popular music’s role in fixing the calendar (‘…between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles’ first LP’.), was picked up in Jagger’s (‘I can’t get no) Satisfaction’ — one of the many Jagger/Larkin lyrics about their lack of sexual intercourse, and being ‘on a losing streak’. Similarly, Jagger’s ‘Mother’s Little Helper’ (‘What a drag it is getting old…’) takes one of Larkin’s consistent themes, making it explicit, while the ‘little yellow pill’ has the same numbing effect for Jagger as ‘the toad, work’ did for Larkin. Identifying the source for ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ is work-in-progress; analysis of both Arnold (in ‘Self’s the man’ — what a great Stones title that could be!) and Dockery with his precocious sexuality suggest a composite creation.
D.A. Prince
The premise: an identity we are not given, which we must query even as we create it. That paradox lies at the core of existential thought. As Sartre maintained, we are ‘condemned to be free’. Or, as Sartre’s avatar in the domain of popular music phrases it, ‘Shit’s real; we peel for the meal.’ Like Sartre, Snoop Dogg both recognises that excrement and food, twin vectors of the practico-inert, are inescapable, and dreams of expressive liberation from the shackles of necessity and ‘mauvaise foi’. In ‘Betta Days’ he confronts the apathy which, like Roquentin’s nausea, threatens to paralyse him — ‘I sit alone in the zone with a face of stone’ — while counselling his fanbase to ‘keep the faith and get your hustle on’. Snoop Dog’s words are unflinchingly harsh and repellent, yet in his final optimism he may be even more neo-Kantian than his cultural godfather.
G.M. Davis
Those immortal lines from ‘The Waste Land’, to wit: ‘Twit twit twit/ Jug jug jug jug jug jug’ and ‘Weialala leia/ Wallala leialala’, clearly demonstrate how Paul Simon in the writing of his own lyrics was inspired by Eliot’s masterful use of repetition. Not only can this be seen in that magical refrain from ‘Cecilia’: ‘poh poh poh poh poh [etc.]’ but also in the phrase from ‘The Boxer’: ‘Lie-la-lie la lie-la-lie [etc.]’ ending with the unexpected ‘Lie-la la la la lie’. Sceptics requiring further evidence of this influence need only turn from technique to subject matter. There are, for example, obvious links between Eliot’s ‘river’ — ‘…a problem confronting the builder of bridges’ (‘The Dry Salvages’) — and Simon’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, or ‘Choruses from “The Rock”’ and ‘I Am a Rock’. Our conclusion therefore seems incontrovertible — that in Eliot’s end is Simon’s beginning!
Alan Millard
The slyly calculated adoption of an atavistic white-trash persona has tended to disguise the roots of Jerry Lee Lewis’s art, but a rigorous scrutiny, laying aside preconceptions, of the Lewis ‘canon’ (i.e., songs he has composed or been strongly associated with), reveals its provenance, tearing the mask from the faux-näif ‘redneck’ to expose the secret Augustan. ‘Too much love drives a man insane’, Lewis’s colloquialised restatement of Pope’s ‘The ruling passion conquers reason still’, points the way to understanding his oeuvre as a multivolumed ‘set’ in which order and sanity are lyrically and recurrently played against the chaos of human appetites. Equally, when we hear in ‘You know the sun gonna shine/ On my back door some day’ an unmistakable echo, or paraphrase, of ‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast’ we are subtly reintroduced to Pope’s concern with the abyss between aspiration and achievement, desire and satisfaction.
Basil Ransome-Davies
So there Cliff stood, just as he stood nearly 50 years ago. Only something was not there, had gone. He was applauded heartily, with courteous goodwill. Then I remembered another young man, his head full of modern ideas, singing in a new way, sweeping a country that was already doubtful about the ways of the Establishment. In France, he had found a living doll; and now he sang about the young ones as if he was always on a summer holiday. He became famous and discovered God. He became an established leader of society. Fifty years later he was still there, still honoured, and still singing. Only, something was not there, had gone. William Wordsworth, poet laureate, was applauded heartily, with courteous goodwill.
Paul Griffin
Competition No. 2505: Ode worthy
You are invited to supply the first 16 lines of an ode to something ugly. Entries to ‘Competition 2505’ by 26 July or email lucy@spectator.co.uk.
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