Theatre | Critical Dahl-ings

Last week I found myself in The Cambridge Theatre in London, watching Tim Minchin’s musical adaptation of Matilda, by Roald Dahl. On one hand, this confession should make it obvious that here at Silkworms Ink, a cutting-edge literary e-press, we lack the nous to track down any cultural events more significant or trailblazing than a children’s musical. On the other hand, I don't think there were actually any children present, other than onstage; the audience was rammed full of childless twenty-to-thirty-year-old adults, all of whom presumably went home afterwards and told their childless twenty-to-thirty-year-old friends that it was a show grown-ups and kids could enjoy alike.

            Anyway, I did enjoy it; it was a Tim Minchin musical, with the characters singing spoofy Tim Minchin songs in Tim Minchin’s favourite registers, making sly Tim Minchin polemic digs and being, in general, about as memorable as any of Tim Minchin's tunes. But it did remind me of the rather serious structural problem with Dahl’s novel; it’s two very different stories, tenuously connected, one of which sprouts out of the other and swallows it whole just as it's running out of steam. The second, eventually dominant story is a rousing, dark schoolyard tale, in which Carrie and Sheba Hart team up to defeat a villainous 1920s portrayal of a lesbian. The first story is the heartrending tragedy of a middle-class girl born into a working-class family, until eventually their inept criminality results in their fleeing to join their innumerable comrades in southern Spain, allowing her to return (hurrah!) to her own kind.

            Facile, yes, but both of the interlinked stories in the novel articulate two distinct sides to Dahl’s personality and his writings; the revolt of Matilda and her classmates against Miss Trunchbull is a characteristically dark and funny, rather wonderfully skewed fairytale in which the righteous young heroine actually gets to defeat the monster after the rescuer/woodsman figure (Miss Honey’s father, heroically named ‘Magnus’) has already been tragically swallowed up by it. Matilda’s psychic powers come out of nowhere halfway through the novel and never seem to relate thematically to her intelligence or her love of books; rather, they rise from her impotent fury at adult injustice, her innate sense of fairness and strength evolving into the power required to overcome the villain. And Trunchbull is, indeed, a fine villain, perhaps Dahl’s best; he could create a grotesque character without blinking, but like so many great monsters, the hulking headmistress is as pitiable as she is terrifying, an insecure obsessive who, similar to his Twits and Witches, regards children as an undefined species of louse - memorably visualised, too, by Quentin Blake as a buttoned-up mass of brawn just barely keeping its balance on two pin-slender legs.

            Matilda’s parents, however, have no such complexity; they’re bingo-playing, used-car-selling scumbag stereotypes who loathe their own daughter and her love of books mainly in order to give Dahl an excuse to bitch about television, a subject he thoroughly enjoys. Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, I seem to remember, contains a room devoted to television for no other reason than to horribly punish Mike Teavee, a small boy who, as you may have guessed, watches too much TV. Afterwards, the Oompa Loompas, serving as Greek chorus, caution parents to throw away their own sets. A brief reminder:

The most important thing we've learned,
So far as children are concerned,
Is never, NEVER, NEVER let
Them near your television set --
Or better still, just don't install
The idiotic thing at all.
In almost every house we've been,
We've watched them gaping at the screen.
They loll and slop and lounge about,
And stare until their eyes pop out.
(Last week in someone's place we saw
A dozen eyeballs on the floor.)
They sit and stare and stare and sit
Until they're hypnotised by it,
Until they're absolutely drunk
With all that shocking ghastly junk.
IT ROTS THE SENSE IN THE HEAD!
IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD!
IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND!
IT MAKES A CHILD SO DULL AND BLIND
HE CAN NO LONGER UNDERSTAND
A FANTASY, A FAIRYLAND!
HIS BRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT AS CHEESE!
HIS POWERS OF THINKING RUST AND FREEZE!
HE CANNOT THINK -- HE ONLY SEES!
'All right!' you'll cry. 'All right!' you'll say,
'But if we take the set away,
What shall we do to entertain
Our darling children? Please explain!'
We'll answer this by asking you,
'What used the darling ones to do?
'How used they keep themselves contented
Before this monster was invented?'
Have you forgotten? Don't you know?
We'll say it very loud and slow:
THEY ... USED ... TO ... READ! They'd READ and READ,
AND READ and READ, and then proceed
To READ some more. Great Scott! Gadzooks!
One half their lives was reading books!

There’s a triple irony in there; one, in advocating that an escape from reality via literature is somehow intrinsically of higher merit than an escape from reality via television, two, that it was written around the time of Nigel Kneale’s first glorious genre pieces and Dahl’s own Twilight-Zone-esque anthology series ‘Way Out’ (now available online; it's really rather good), and three, that a spiel about the medium of film rotting the brain was written by the man who inflicted You Only Live Twice upon the brains of adults and children everywhere. 

You can really tell this was written by someone passionate about creating intellectually challenging artforms.

I can’t bring myself to like this posturing, sneering Dahl any more than I like Boris Johnson for his godawful poetry collection The Perils Of The Pushy Parents, which steals openly from him;

Loving parents, learn from me.

If your children crave TV

Tell them, OK, what the hell

You can watch it for a spell ...

IF YOU READ A BOOK AS WELL.

SON, I'M TALKING IN CAPITALS TO INFORM YOU THAT YOU MUST COME TO ACCEPT THE INNATE SUPERIORITY OF ONE ARTISTIC MEDIUM OVER ANOTHER INSTEAD OF ANALYSING QUALITY ON A CASE-BY-CASE BASIS. IT MUST BE TRUE. I READ IT IN A BOOK.

There will always be an argument, which is to me at least part-convincing, that Dahl was a nasty man. It is, in fact, almost obtuse to point out that a highly-refined nastiness of spirit is what is so often utterly glorious and appealing to children and adults in his work, from the giants that reach into kids’ bedroom windows and gobble them up to the macabre turns of his Switch-Bitch stories. 

What’s a little sad, though, is that when we’re young we read his books as a sensational dive into a land of horrors and marvellous weirdness; we don’t pay attention to the crude attempts at messages (I’m not sure Charlie And The Chocolate Factory scared me off watching television as much as my quaking fear of changing the channel and accidentally encountering Gene Wilder in the film version), we don’t really take in the uncomfortable fact that the Oompa Loompas were originally gurning, simpleton African pygmies, and we probably don’t find ourselves sitting through a children’s musical about an extraordinary genius being held back by a society that encourages mediocrity, thinking, ‘Hang on, this is the exact plot of The Fountainhead’. Maybe, despite the popular cliché, Roald Dahl’s books demand to be read and loved while you're young and before you start to panic about his politics.

Machine | Mixtape | Mixtape XIX, The Britney-Machine

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We are playing the machines, the machines play us, it is really the exchange and the friendship we have with the musical machines which make us build a new music.

Ralf Hütter, Kraftwerk

In his excellent biography of the bewilderingly under-appreciated British avant-garde joker, B.S. Johnson, Jonathan Coe makes the following assertion:

…Having thoroughly mastered, at Cambridge, the art of the sweeping, uninformed dismissal, I was more than ready to concur with B.S. Johnson’s theories about the modern novel. Of course there was no point in writing anything that didn’t follow straight on from Ulysses and The Unnameable…More recently, needless to say, this conviction has slipped out of my grasp, along with most of the other certainties of youth. If I think about it at all, I see the high modernism of Joyce and Beckett as a straightjacket the novel had to break out of – just as late twentieth century composers, if classical music was ever going to move forward again, had to make a decisive break with the twelve-tone system…In the three decades since Johnson’s death, the British novel has reinvigorated itself in other ways, ways which he did not foresee: not by ‘making it new’ with ever more radical attempts at formal innovation, but by recognising the multi-ethnicity of modern Britain and opening itself to influences from other cultures; by tapping into the energies of popular music, film and television; by turning its back on modernist elitism and rediscovering the pleasures of humour, storytelling, demotic and so on… Like A Fiery Elephant

Indeed. I like this quotation, I’ve used it a lot – every time somebody like, I don’t know, Tom McCarthy starts banging on about the terrible price contemporary readers and writers pay for turning our backs on radical formal innovation, I find its simple truisms useful and optimistic. Having said that, the way Coe draws upon the example of post-Schoenberg classical composition here belies the complexity of the parallels (and lack thereof) between music and literature when it comes to post-modernism (literally in the after-modernism sense, rather than anything too conceptual) and contemporary forms. One strand of which is sort of my focus with this mixtape.

So a major example of the kind of composer Coe is pointing towards is Karlheinz Stockhausen, who embraced everything from pointist to formula composition in his efforts to move away from the twelve-tone system. Most of the results are pretty fucken formally weird, which is in itself a bit of a spanner in the workings of Coe’s analogy – insofar as it proves that a bunch of post-twelve tone classical composition represents precisely ‘ever more radical attempts at formal innovation.’ But placing that sort of pedanticism to one side for a moment, I mention Stockhausen because of the influence his work had on Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, the founding members of Kraftwerk. And Kraftwerk are the starting-point of an important example of why Coe’s kinda laid-back theory doesn’t work when it comes to pop music.

It could, potentially, be argued that Hütter and Schneider reframed Stockhausen in neo-modernistic terms. This is a moot point, but I mention it purely to steal the following exemplary paragraph from Chris Power’s Drowned in Sound review of the 2009 remastering of The Man-Machine:

On its release the artwork for The Man-Machine, depicting the band standing on a staircase wearing paramilitary-style red shirts and black ties, caused controversy. Inspired by the Russian constructivist El Lissitzky, it is arguably the most complex image in their carefully considered visual ouevre. It suggests a reaching out, as is true elsewhere in the band’s work, for the utopian dream of a modernist German aesthetic; one that hadn’t been made problematic, if not irrevocably perverted, by the Nazis. Yet at the same time it employs National Socialist colours, which in the late-Seventies were in the process of being ironically appropriated by German artists. Meanwhile the red shirts, the borrowings from constructivist art and the position of the band’s faces, gazing to the east, suggests an acknowledgement, if not exactly an engagement, with communism. Further, it is also an acknowledgement of the dark side of the marriage of man and machine implied by and ultimately surpassed by the title track, which rejects the Nietzschean conception of the Übermensch, hijacked by fascism, and instead celebrates the positive results of combining human warmth with machine precision in, as Hütter’s quote above has it, a spirit of 'exchange and...friendship'.

Actually, it’s not an entirely moot point because a part of what I want to prove, via this week’s Spotify tracklisting, is that the best of contemporary pop music nicks not just the basic tropes of Man-Machine-era Krafwerk, but also the same philosophical approach – has done, in fact, along a pop-culture chain that extends from Gary Numan and the Human League through to Jay-Z (who sampled The Man Machine). And if we can accept that there is something of the modernist about Kraftwerk’s oeuvre, which we surely can, then I guess that means that there is something of the modernist about contemporary pop music also. Which is to say that Coe’s assertion ignores the fact that contemporary music doesn’t necessarily have the same relationship with 'high modernism' as contemporary literature. Far from it.

Indeed whilst, say, the extraordinary commercial success of a grime artist like Tinie Tempah suggests that pop music has made itself new by recognising the multi-ethnicity of modern Britain, and whilst the actually rather good musical-cinematic efforts of Kanye and Gaga suggest the same, but in terms of the ‘energies’ of film, I would argue that a more defining feature of modern pop music is its inheritance from Kraftwerk. Namely, its friendship with musical machines. And that nowhere is this more apparent than on Britney Spears’ blistering Blackout.

Blackout gets a lot of mentions in the increasingly prevalent stream of music journalism that argues a lot of ‘pop’ is far more formally and, perhaps more crucially, electronically interesting than what a lot of the artists working within its ‘alternative’ cousin-genres manage to come up with. See also Girls Aloud, Robyn, Rihanna and so on. This, from the Guardian’s Tom Ewing:

On Blackout – released with minimum promotion in the middle of her shaven-headed, zombie-eyed, walking-tabloid period – Britney gave us the tightest, most inventive dance-pop record of the last 10 years. Everything that's happened in mainstream pop since – such as the routine electronic treatment of vocals, or the turn to European club beats and synths – happened on this album, only in a darker, braver and catchier fashion. From its title in, Blackout didn't try to gloss over the state its star was in – it embraced it. In particular, the vocal twisting, distorted, blurred and robotised Britney, giving the eerie impression of a record that had swallowed up its own singer.

It is a record that makes a mockery of the concept that autotune represents some sort of a corruption of ‘proper’ music, of the idea that artists using autotune or miming, even, when performing live, is somehow wrong – providing, of course, that the results are compelling in more interesting ways than Mariah-style, lookee lookee, she can sing seven octaves, oooooooooh. With Blackout, they certainly are that. Ewing’s description of the record eating Britney’s only-ever-disappointing-when-left-alone vocal is spot on – Freakshow particularly turns it into something frighteningly mannish, a la Laurie Anderson. Even more compelling though is Britney’s very own Kling Klang studio, her ‘mutterschaft’ – Hütter’s words for Kraftwerk’s musical laboratory, which became integrated into their live performance during the Computer World tour – namely, the producers whose efforts make her own look somewhat pathetic by comparison. The Clutch, the Neptunes and, most dramatically, Bloodshy and Avant (also responsible for Toxic) who turn the magnificent Piece of Me into a shifting, bleeping, threatening tapestry of electronica into which Britney is assimilated via a sequence of extraordinary vocodered gymnastics.

The machines play Britney, just as the machines played Kraftwerk. And the results are far, far more compelling, far more friendly towards Britney than a song like I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman will ever be. As, indeed, Spotify itself puts it, ‘how responsible is Britney for her music, anyway?’ Viewed in this light, her ‘disastrous’ performance at the VMAs in 2007 suddenly begins to look like a work of performance art genius, on a level with Kraftwerk’s The Robots manikins, drawing elegant attention to the futility of human effort in the face of the perfection of machines. Compare the below:

A SPOTIFY PLAYLIST, THEN:

1. The Robots – Kraftwerk

2. Gimme More – Britney Spears

3. Spacelab – Kraftwerk

4. Break The Ice – Britney Spears

5. Metropolis – Kraftwerk

6. Get Naked (I Got A Plan) – Britney Spears

7. The Model – Kraftwerk

8. Piece Of Me – Britney Spears

9. Neon Lights – Kraftwerk

10. Heaven On Earth – Britney Spears

11. The Man Machine – Kraftwerk

12. Radar – Britney Spears

Of course, the ultimate point of these tapes is to shed new light on an aspect of literature that wouldn’t necessarily have light shed on it otherwise. As I’ve gone on so extensively about musical side of this tape, though, I’ll simply mention a couple things that spring to mind when music is thought about in this way.

The first, literature and machines

Last week, Phil talked about Ross Sutherland’s experiments with poetry and internet translation machines, a man-machine collaboration that is surely in keeping with the quote of Hütter’s with which I began this piece. Here’s how Sutherland describes his approach:

I began to feed famous poems into the translator, bouncing them back and forth between the different languages, then back into English. With every translation, the program was forced to collapse the ambiguity of the original.

The fact that this relationship exists must mean other machine-literature relationships also exist, and I intend to find them.

The second, literature and editors

How useful is a comparison between musical producers and literary editors? It’s a question that requires an essay in its own right, I think, because of authors like Roald Dahl who make the writer-editor relationship look much more complicated than literary idealists might initially envision. As a review of Jeremy Treglown’s biography of Dahl on RoaldDahlFans.com puts it, Dahl

didn't by any means have perfect pitch: Dahl counted increasingly on his editors' help not simply with stylistic fine points but also with larger matters of structure and character. Stephen Roxburgh offered the most extensive help, tinkering with The BFG, reworking The Witches, proposing that Dahl try a memoir and then helping with research for both Boy and Going Solo. Though some earlier changes had arguably had a domesticating effect (removing a graphic passage about nose–blowing from The Twits, making the hero of Fantastic Mr. Fox a noble avenger rather than a shoplifter, and so on), the later revisions were not done to satisfy the ‘pseudo–liberal librarian mentality,’ as Mr. Roxburgh put it. They were to improve plots, rearrange and reconceive characters, tighten up the writing. Dahl was never coerced: this valuable writer was only expertly cajoled, and for the most part that was all it took. He responded to suggestions with mature flexibility, gratefully acknowledging problems and rewriting with flair.

I’m not saying Dahl is like Britney Spears. But I am saying that the Neptunes get a hell of a lot more credit for their work than people like Stephen Roxburgh do, and I’m interested in why that is.

Sam Kinchin-Smith

Music Editor

Name | Music | Monica, Erica, Rita, Tina, Sandra, Mary, Jessica, It Was Really Nothing

Writers who think the names of their characters are important are stupid and annoying. I’ve overheard creative-writing-seminar conversations along the lines of, I’m trying to work out if he’s an Edward or a James, y’know, I wanted to go for something Old Testamenty but I think the associations would be too strong. When I started out he was definitely a Peter but he stopped behaving like a Peter for some reason, it was a real shame. Writers who talk about ‘their’ characters as though ‘they’re’ one, their friends, and two, changing outside of their control, are fucking stupid and annoying.

Actually, it’s not quite as simple as that (well, it probably is re. the second thing). Onomatopoeic and connotative names are fundamentally important to a certain type of brilliant, stylised writing, everything from Dickens to Jonathan Coe’s What A Carve Up! via Roald Dahl. And actually, just as Jon pointed out all the way back in May that even the most seemingly unadorned, unelaborate first lines of novels betray a considerable degree of craft (usually in order to look unadorned and unelaborate) so the most ‘normal’ names in literature are, very obviously, the product of cautiously imaginative design. An example to demonstrate what I mean: were a novelist, having plotted and created his or her story utilising archetypes along the lines of Man A, Woman B, Child C – as is perhaps the most sensible approach of all – to then turn those sketches into John Smith, Karen Jones and so on (i.e. making use of what are, potentially, still the most mathematically common names in the UK) he would be accused of making a BS Johnson-style meta point that detracted utterly from his or her text’s attempts at naturalism. And we turn again to Brecht’s question to Lukács (paraphrased, obvs): how naturalistic can naturalism actually be?

Either way, people giving too much a shit about names is way more prevalent in English literature than it is in, say, German (even though Goethe decided to rhyme his most famous protagonist’s name with his own, the fucking idiot) for one, rather obvious reason: the cliché even more beloved by unimaginative journalists than ‘causes cancer’, the English and their obsession with class. As somebody who, due to my decidedly double-barrelled surname, gets a fair bit assumed about him by people he hasn’t met, I’m extremely attuned to the fact that character names from Shakespeare to Harry Potter are an issue of class-defining shortcuts. Does anything scream ignorant, prosaic peasant like ‘Dogberry’ or ‘Bottom’? Anything suggest petit-bourgeois barbarian like ‘Pumblechook’ or ‘Dursley’? And the relationship between the aristocracy and centuries-old surnames hardly needs repeating, except to say that literature which professes to find such things disgusting doesn’t half buy into the aesthetic thrill of such aristocratic mythology.

So yes, things worth talking about with reference to names in literature: idiots, naturalism and class. So here’s an interesting thing: none of those things are worth talking about with reference to names in music. Rather, songwriters who don’t think the names of their characters are important are the stupid, annoying ones. A fact which suggests that names offer an interesting entry-point into discussing the different processes involved in word- and song-writing. Let’s see.

Enter Morrissey, master of dependent-upon-a-single-name song-writing, most notably in William, It Was Really Nothing and Sheila Take A Bow. Both songs are thought to be about actual figures (well, sort of) the character William Fisher from Keith Waterhouse’s 1959 novel Billy Liar and Shelagh Delaney, the playwright responsible for A Taste of Honey – to some degree anyway. Indeed, of Shelagh Delaney, Morrissey said the following: ‘I’ve never made any secret of the fact that at least 50% of my reason for writing can be blamed on Shelagh Delaney.’ For the record, Strangeways Here We Come is a paraphrased version of a line from the movie adaptation of Billy Liar, whilst the Smiths’ This Night Has Opened My Eyes is a retelling of A Taste of Honey directly quoting the play in several places.

And yet neither figure’s name is used straightforwardly, Billy (as he is throughout the book) returning to William and Shelagh becoming Sheila. With both these decisions feeding into the rest of what the songs are about, their ambiguities and structures of musical meaning. Mozza’s own description of William, It Was Really Nothing’s meaning is this:

It occurred to me that within popular music if ever there were any records that discussed marriage they were always from the female’s standpoint – female singers singing to women: whenever there were any songs saying ‘do not marry, stay single, self-preservation, etc.’ I thought it was about time there was a male voice speaking directly to another male saying that marriage was a waste of time... that, in fact, it was ‘absolutely nothing.’

‘William’ creates an atmosphere of adult, masculine seriousness that ‘Billy’ obviously lacks. And turning Shelagh into Sheila means Steven Patrick can inhabit his female alter-ego without the issue of, y’know, Gaelicness or Mozza’s lack thereof getting in the way. For let’s be frank, his Sheila might resemble one of Delaney’s characters – or even Delaney herself – to some degree, but does the following read as a description of anybody but himself?

Is it wrong not to always be glad?
No, it’s not wrong – but I must add
How can someone so young
Sing words so sad? 

And that’s not even getting into the musical manner in which the three-syllable cadence of ‘William’ with its formal, royal connotations, falls in line with the meandering whimsy of the Smiths mid-eighties sound. The royal thing is worth emphasising, particularly considering that two years later, The Queen is Dead would be released. And the way a shorter spelling of ‘Sheila’ encourages the ‘Sheila / Take a’ bouncing rhyme at the heart of the second song should not be underestimated either.

Oh, one more thing, the ambiguity of ‘William’ also succeeded in catalysing a whole strand of speculation about Morrissey being in love with Billy MacKenzie from the Associates, almost all of which is apocryphal except for the fact MacKenzie’s band recorded a response song called Stephen, You’re Really Something in 1993. The power of the name in song is not, in short, something to be trifled with.

Mozza’s William, It Was Really Nothing model of a name followed by a comma followed by the rest of the song-title is much copied – and represents, indeed, an indie by-word for elegantly thought-out name usage in songwriting (and yes, of course the Beach Boys’ Caroline, No came first, but I’m convinced this is more of a post-Smiths kingda thing). Architecture in Helsinki’s two and a half minute track, Frenchy I’m Faking, is a masterpiece of half-rhyme and alliteration a la Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – all of which is dependent upon the syllabic symmetry and chiming sonics of that first line. Indeed, there is some amazingly crisp writing here:

Frenchy, I’m faking,

Been longing to stir you up,

Changing looks slightly like back in the 90s,

Far and away, whistle-delayed delights.

The prospect of lightning was ever so frightening,

She said, your kisses are nice,

But I’m looking for hills to roll

Down with abandon and no understanding.

I borrowed your suitcase and filled it with pearls and gold,

You let me down lightly,

I killed you politely.

And AiH’s awareness of the Smiths reference in the title is proved, I think, by the first line of the second verse’s nod in the direction of Bohemian Rhapsody. Meanwhile the Magnetic Fields’ hilarious Fido, Your Leash Is Too Long is a brilliant inversion of Morrissey’s earnest intent precisely because the name it centres on fits so well into its comic framework. The song is obviously about cheating – so using such an archetypal, unimaginative dog name ensures ‘Fido’ is understood to be partially symbolic. The song is also about funny, childish wordplay – the ‘shit’ of ‘Shitzu’ and, more surprising, the ‘fuck’ of ‘foxhounds’ are emphasised with puerile glee – and calling a dog as stupid a name as ‘Fido’ buys into that.

Fido, your leash is too long

You go where you don’t belong
You’ve been diggin’ in the rubble getting bitches in trouble
Fido, your leash is too long

Fido your leash is too long
I don’t know where I went wrong

You scare me out of my wits when you do that Shit

-zu Fido, your leash is too long 

Fido, you’ve gone far enough

I must have all of your love
You’ve just run out of luck I don’t care what you fox

-hounds do, but your leash is too long

Mambo No. 5, you’ll notice, doesn’t have a name in its title – indeed, its full title, Mambo No. 5 (a little bit of…) reveals a self-conscious decision not to include a name. But look what the song itself contains. This, folks, is what happens when the naming tendencies of naturalistic fiction, when casual, arbitrary, connotation-less naming meets songwriting:

a little bit of Monica in my life
a little bit of Erica by my side
a little bit of Rita is all I need
a little bit of Tina is what I see
a little bit of Sandra in the sun
a little bit of Mary all night long
a little bit of Jessica here I am
a little bit of you makes me your man

MISOGYNY and TERRIBLE HALF-RHYMES, that’s what happens. So what does this all mean for the word-writing versus song-writing question? There’s a whole bunch of obvious stuff that barely needs pointing out – that the sound and rhythm of proper nouns matter more in the constraints of a song that in the open-endedness of a novel, that titles play a much more fundamental role in song-writing than they do in word-writing (even poetry), that sorta thing. But there’s one question that’s come out of this what's much more interesting than those differences everybody’s got some idea of. Namely, if names, one of the more prominent signposts pointing to whether a piece of writing is let’s say ‘realistic’ or ‘stylised’, are only effective things in songs when used for purposes other than pure Lou Bega naturalism, does this mean it’s impossible for a song to be ‘realistic’ in the way we understand a certain type of fiction or poetry to be realistic?

And does this matter? When so much music is valued for being ‘real’ in the sense that it accurately reflects, say, African American, or working class British life, I suspect it does.

Sam Kinchin-Smith

Music Editor