Report From the Underground: No Interpretation

The problem for me began with Pavement, or rather, to be exact, Pavement fans. If you look on the internet, on message boards or fan sites, you’ll frequently see a “What does this mean?!?!” followed by a snippet of Malkmus’s writing, maybe “Lies and betrayals/fruit-covered nails/electricity and lust” or “One of us is a cigar stand/And one of us is a lovely blue incandescent guillotine.” Invariably, someone would answer the query with an interpretation of the lyric that either awkwardly tried to cobble together some meaning from the entire song as it pertains to that line or simply just stated an interpretation of the line on its own, apropos of nothing.

I, of course, cannot look down my nose at these people. Back in high school I wrote a review of Wowee Zowee that called “Grave Architecture” an indictment of the lower classes or some other blatherskite like that. My tune began to change though, when I witnessed, outside of the Trocadero during the Terror Twilight tour, a gaggle of fans accosting Malkmus and asking him to explain his lyrics; “What’s ‘Serengeti nightmare for the echo tour’ mean?” one particular fan beseeched. I don’t know why, but it just felt absurd to see all these people spending so much time trying to figure out a few words - actually scratch that, I do know why: because invariably these people would take such abstraction, such interesting things done with syllables and phonemes, and tortuously conform them to the realm of the everyday reducing them to boring bits about relationships and such. And for what reason? I’ll tell you why: because of an archaic allegiance to meaning.

Discussing this topic, a friend said to me, “All music evokes imagery. That's why humans enjoy it,” a seemingly narrow-minded understanding of what music is, but let me explain why I say that. I’ve only started listening to experimental music (a blanket term I’ll give to modern composition, noise rock, free jazz, etc. for brevity’s sake, even if it’s not quite accurate) within the last few years, but one of the things that I’ve come to see in the music is a real endeavor to get away from using the sounds as a means to evoke a particular picture (obviously a broad generalization of the numerous types of music I’ve designated with “experimental music”) and a real strive to instead examine the structural elements of music - tonal interplay, dissonance, etc. - sound simply as sound and not as a messenger of information. Maybe this isn’t a standard view, but the fact that I’ve thought about this, being fairly new to these types of music, means that, with such a long tradition, there is no doubt in my mind that some artists and composers adhere to this idea. My question then is, if music can be appreciated as simply tones and noises, why can’t words simply be appreciated for their phonic qualities and not as carriers of a deeper meaning? Why cannot we dissociate the linguistic force of the words from the words themselves?

The problem we run into, of course, is that lyrics, as opposed to just sounds, are pieces of language. And although the ontological status of meaning is up for grabs (Is there some extra-linguistic entity that is meaning? Probably not. The meaning of words is contingent upon context, intention, vocal inflection, etc. not something above and beyond language, but this might be getting too obscure), we can be sure that words do mean something, that when I say “Pass the salt” I intend for the target of my speech-act to interpret the noises emerging from my larynx and indeed pass the salt. Even in abstraction, the history of poetry has taught us that metaphors are stand-ins for something, that they represent and aren’t merely colorful uses of language, so due to the fact that we have always expected all forms of language, literal and abstract, to carry some meaning (or be the stimulus for some action), we somehow have come to the conclusion that words must always mean something.

It comes down to the fact that we feel the need to interpret abstract lyrics because we’ve always learned that words mean things, and if they don’t, then they’re just nonsense. Now, couple this with the emotional attachment that we frequently get from pop songs, and what you get is people who need to interpret in order for there to be a foundation for that attachment, for who wants to be emotionally connected with nonsense? It speaks to us if indeed we can make it apply to us, but how many people have felt “In the distance lies a grower/nee Rude-off, King Fame Throwa/Son of Groupie, Red-Worn Sexan.”? I’ll wager none of us has. We interpret in order to feel something.

But so what? Who dictated that we need to have the lyrics represent ourselves or tug at our heartstrings for us to become emotionally involved with it? If the beauty of a John Fahey guitar piece can move me, why can’t the lyrics of Steve Malkmus do the same without me having to have translated them into some easily digestible bits about life or love? What cosmic law did the formation of the universe hand me that said I can’t enjoy words as words?

Interpreting lyrics though is a way of engaging the artist; it’s a means of participating in the music. Are we just supposed to just return to old-fashioned ideas of passive listening? To this I’d like to propose something different. The notion behind radical experimenting is to break away from tradition, and to this end, I would propose that it is not merely something for the artist to engage in, but also something that must be done by the listener. This means breaking away from dated beliefs such as words necessarily having meaning or that the lyrics have to pertain to you to have emotional impact. Can’t we attend more to how the lyrics sounds, how they are put together, how the words play off each other, puns and the like? Can’t we be emotionally involved because the words themselves are beautifully arranged or due to the singer’s vocal inflections? It is only once we can escape these pitfalls that we can begin to appreciate abstract lyricism as a thing in itself and not only as a means to an end.