Frank Kogan

I used to write bad poetry 'song lyrics' as a teenager just like everyone else! I couldn't believe anyone would want to hear about my trivial problems so always binned them.

Seems like a crucial passage. But, you know, you do write about your problems occasionally and about your ideas and your triumphs and joys all the time. It's on your livejournal. You don't write your life down to the extent that poptasticuk and piratemoggy do, but that's not the point. Putting words to music is a basic way of communicating, has been for milliennia, and the restrictions of line and rhyme, and the addition of vocal timbre and rhythms, have a way of intensifying everything so that the ordinary can jump out at you as extraordinary. E.g., I think the following is actually quite profound, an entire ethic, when you hear it, in the context of a dance, or a life: "Let the music play/He won't get away/This groove he can't ignore/Just keep the groove and then/He'll come back to you again/Let the music play/He wont get away/This groove he can't ignore/He won't leave you anymore." But bare on the page they're rather "eh." And I don't particularly agree with the message anyway. (Why shouldn't you push a river? Why wait on the groove? Why trust it?) But the music adds persuasion. But the words add persuasion to the music, too. And why would you shut your ear to the persuasiveness of the words? Is there some kind of rebellion here (against your problems, that probably aren't so trivial to live through, or about some capital-M Meaning that your problems don't stack up well against, or some capital-Q quality and some capital-I Importance that good music dances circles around and that bad music lays on you like a dead fish)?

I think I'd have my work cut out for me to explain how "Let The Music Play" works as greatness. I'd have to give it a whole context for it to shine forth, and that's probably beyond my ability. Ashlee's easier because she's always pushing back against rivers and fighting against her inner grooves, which is easier for me to write down. Her struggles are fairly ordinary because life is ordinary, for the most part, and she's not writing down holocausts or epic battles. And it's "ella-ella" and "la-la" and the quick eloquence or the coming together of meter and rhyme that give life - ordinary life in song, that is - its flavor. And sometimes you're also - while, I'm also - getting flavor and a sense of mattering from the the analytical abstraction with which Ashlee lays out her issues. (As well I should, as someone who likes laying out issues with analytical abstraction.)

Often a song has won me before I even know what the lyrics are, and one of my absolute favorites ever is Paradisimo's "Bailando," which is in a language I don't understand. And when I heard them in English in Angelina's cover version I immediately forgot them. But often, when I do get to the lyrics, and the lyrics matter to me, they can then shape a whole bunch of emotions about the song, and even reshape the sound for me. Kelly Clarkson's "Because Of You" was soft and sad until I really paid attention to the words, and from thereafter the song was very loud, was wailing in my ears.