How come pop lyrics are suddenly great again?
A while ago London friends of mine decided to start a New Pop Revolution, frustrated that the kind of music they liked wasn’t breaking through to the mainstream. Being idealistic sorts, they launched their own label, Dogbox, stating their ambition as “the complete overhaul of the music industry”. Or, at least, “to save pop”.
They were, and still are, a little vague about what saving pop should involve (still, no harm in aiming high). But they did come up with a diverse list of “guiding lights”, including songs by Pulp, Blondie, Prince, Roxy Music, the Smiths, Betty Boo and Goldfrapp. NPR songs, it seems, should be fiercely individual, but with an eye on the mainstream, clever but not clever-clever or obscure. Crucially, the songs should be pop, not rock; arty, but not necessarily art.
How do you spot a song like that? It’s in the lyrics, invariably. A typical NPR song is Sick of DIY by London band Luxembourg. It is, for a start, a song about DIY, not something you hear often either on Pop Idol or in stadiums. But it finds in DIY a touching metaphor for loneliness: “It’s not enough from Friday to Sunday, I want you here from Tuesday to Monday.” The song is rooted in the mundane specifics of British life (“I took a battering at the back of the top of the number 31”) but aims for something universal. Oh, and it has good jokes (a shy, gay singer born “pre-Madonna”).
Sick of DIY is, depending on your age, very Britpop, or very post-punk - music by smart young things who think pop should be both intelligent and accessible. “Lyrics are a very important factor,” Dogbox’s Alex Potterill told me. A great pop lyric can’t just be a series of “I”, “high”, “sky”, “fly” rhymes, but equally it shouldn’t sound like an essay.”
Anyone who champions the art of the great pop lyric deserves praise, in my book, but there’s a hiccup, of sorts - a revolution already seems to be happening, without the NPR’s help. This past year has been a fantastic time for the pop lyric. Towering over 2006 were Arctic Monkeys’s Alex Turner and Lily Allen, precociously talented lyricists both. Then there was the second album by Amy Winehouse (whose idea of a chorus hook is “What kind of f***ery is this? You made me miss the Slick Rick gig.”); the first album by the Long Blondes (who write lines like “You know I’m not so young, I spend an hour getting ready every day, and still I end up looking more or less the same”); the Scissor Sisters (is it just me, or is “you’re an acid junkie college flunky dirty puppy daddy bastard” among the finest insults ever put to a tune?); and, of course, the first solo album by Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker.
Almost every week recently, I’ve found a band whose lyrics leap off the page. The laddish bravado of Scotland’s The Fratellis may be more Noel Gallagher than Jarvis Cocker, but there’s more lyrical pizazz in one of their songs than in a whole Oasis album. Wales’s Hot Puppies offer similar domestic drama to the Long Blondes (“You don’t wear that cologne with the intention of leaving on your own,” goes a song called Green Eyeliner). Hot Chip make electro-pop with wit and heart. Personal favourites are the pop art pranksters Art Brut.
Where did these people come from all of a sudden? And it does seem sudden, overtaking a manifesto some fairly clued-up friends of mine wrote only a year ago. It’s months since I’ve read a lyric sheet and wanted to weep (Sandi Thom’s I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker, if you were wondering).
The Scissor Sisters, the Libertines, Franz Ferdinand and the Streets can probably all take some credit. All influential, they share a conviction that words are as important as music, but not a rockist belief that this lifts them above the pop crowd. This makes them, effectively, the opposite of the equally influential Coldplay and U2, woeful lyricists whose empty, pretentious songs are taken far more seriously than they deserve. (Disagree? You explain what Coldplay’s Politik is about, then.) Franz Ferdinand write about being a misfit at school, dead-end jobs and falling in love in fairgrounds. The Libertines were more starry-eyed, and got closer than the others to genuine poetry, but the lyrics were always more kitchen sink than open highway, and certainly pop.
What is the secret of a great pop lyric? I’d say it’s to do with finding the right balance between the familiar and the unexpected. To grab you instantly, a pop song must sound both like something you’ve never heard before (so it stands out) and something you’ve heard before a thousand times (so you feel instantly at home). Lily Allen’s Smile works because it takes a pop cliché - being abandoned by a lover - then, in the third line, is unexpectedly blunt: “You were f***ing that girl next door, what did you do that for?” The song’s twist is its casual cynicism - “when I see you cry, yeah, it makes me smile” - refreshingly honest compared to pop’s standard “inspirational” break-up ballads.
The same goes for the Arctic Monkeys’ I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor. It’s immediately obvious what it’s about, but what makes it stand out is what it’s not about - finding love. “Oh there ain’t no love, no Montagues and Capulets. Just banging tunes and DJ sets.” It’s not even about sex, really - the “dreams of naughtiness” in the chorus making the whole thing oddly chaste. It’s about teenagers dancing to music, but not some idealised version of it; these are real teenagers who dance “like a robot from 1984” and try to impress each other with cheesy jokes about Duran Duran.
Lily Allen and the Arctic Monkeys, like many of these bands, have something obvious, and quite modern, in common - the exactness of their geographical and cultural references. Why? It could be related to the changing nature of pop celebrity. Where pop stars once seemed distant and impossibly glamorous, the more we see through that façade, the more we seek out pop stars who seem ordinary and approachable. Lily Allen and the Arctic Monkeys are pop stars for the MySpace generation, and their songs reflect that.
The next challenge for them is: how do you maintain that connection once you are successful, and therefore more remote? Do you, like the Streets, write songs about being a pop star that are full of those same mundane specifics? Since the Streets’ Mike Skinner seems to have painted himself into a creative corner, maybe not.
That, perhaps, is the definition of the new pop lyric revolution - rather than finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, find the ordinary in the extraordinary.
Andrew
