Jarvis Cocker: "Lyrics are not poetry"

Over at The Guardian, Jarvis Cocker, formerly of rock group Pulp, lays down the law, or at least his take, on writing lyrics/their importance/non-importance to pop songs and how they aren't, as many Intro To Poetry students think, poetry.

He begins with a bit of personal history with the (pop) lyric:

Many of my lyrics were hastily written the night before a recording session because I'd been putting off writing them until the very last minute. It's strange that the most intelligible part of a song – the words – should be seen as the most boring and chore-like aspect of the songwriting process by musicians themselves. And I think that's down to a very simple fact: the words to a song are not that important. They're contractual obligation, a necessary evil, an afterthought.

Take an undisputed rock classic like Louie, Louie by the Kingsmen. The lyrics to that song are so indecipherable that they actually prompted an FBI investigation into their allegedly obscene content back in the early 1960s. After 31 months, the FBI concluded that they were "unable to interpret any of the wording in the record". In other words – you can't tell a word of what the singer is singing and it doesn't matter.

But once you've realised that the words are not so important, then the real fun of lyric-writing can begin. If nobody's listening, you can say whatever you want. My first attempts roughly coincided with my first romantic dealings with the opposite sex. I was struck by the massive discrepancy between the way relationships were depicted in the songs I'd heard on the radio and the way I was experiencing them in real life. (Could have been my technique, I suppose.) So I decided to attempt to redress the balance, to put in all the awkward bits and the fumblings.

And then, he gets down to the business.

I have always had an extreme aversion to the way lyrics are often typeset to resemble poetry. Lyrics are not poetry: they are the words to a song. My very first attempts at lyrics, dating from 1978, were either very silly (eg: Shakespeare Rock: "Gotta baby only one thing wrong: she quotes Shakespeare all day long. I said, 'Baby why're you ignoring me?' She said, 'To be or not to be.'") or embarrassingly earnest (eg: Life is a Circle: "Life is a circle you're caught on. Life is a road that's much too long. It winds, goes ahead – only stops when you're dead.")

If I have learnt anything about songwriting since then, it is that in order to ring true a song must be rooted in your own personal experience (but not take the place of it). I would subscribe to Leonard Cohen's view, "Art is just the ash left if your life is burning well." Life is the important bit and detail is key – only a true eyewitness would notice apparently insignificant minutiae. When you put such details into songs, they bestow authenticity. I think that you don't really have much control over what does and does not stick in your mind: it's the haphazard nature of memory that gives you an original voice, provided that you can learn to recognise it and use it.

The worst thing you can do is to make a conscious effort to ignore all that stuff and write "properly", to try to do it "how it's supposed to be". That happens a lot – or maybe people don't value their own experience enough to deem it worthy of being written down.

It wasn't until I moved away from Sheffield in 1988 that I began to write explicitly about it – I couldn't really see it clearly until then. Then I wrote about it in a frantic attempt to stop it fading from my memory. I couldn't wait to get away from the place, yet then I obsessively recreated it in my mind. Only I made it better than it was. It's good to keep in all the awkward moments and false starts but you can mess with the order a bit and adjust the lighting when needs be. You're the boss, after all – it's your kingdom. No one needs to know where reality ends and wishful thinking takes over.

There's more after the jump! And there's this book, too, which prompted the piece.