Popular Song Lyrics Poetry Has Its Origin

Popular Song Lyrics

Poetry has its origin in performed song, but there is a profound difference between a poem written to be read and lyrics written to be sung. This is due to the power of music: it acts upon the feelings without articulating anything, and harnessed to lyrics music may seem to lend emotive force to whatever (if anything) is endorsed in the text. As a result, writing lyrics to a contemporary pop song entails a fairly simple formula: all that is required are lyrics obey a law of vagueness, such that anyone can identify with it. The listener can imagine almost anything that matches his or her sense of what the tune "means." As far as the major record labels are concerned, a song only needs to be a sufficient advertisement for itself -- a "radio-friendly unit-shifter," to borrow a phrase from Kurt Cobain, where "radio-friendly" indicates a song's capacity for being repeated nonstop on the airwaves, and "unit-shifter" indicates its capacity for being sold in bulk to the masses, at Walmart or on iTunes. But it is worth noting that some songwriters still yearn to attain the poetic element in their craft: the song is intended by its writer to mean something. I want to examine two songs closely -- "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana (lyrics by the late Kurt Cobain) and "Whatever" by Hot Chelle Rae (lyrics by Ryan Follese and Nash Overstreet) -- to see the way in which the lyricist's meaning is still constructed poetically in the lyrics, with an awareness of what I have defined as the law of vagueness as being the operant factor in allowing the song to "mean" something to the listener. In conclusion, I hope to show that Cobain wrote something closer to poetry.

With Kurt Cobain, we might as well start with the title, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," noting that these words occur nowhere within the lyrics. Cobain himself claimed that he had no idea that "Teen Spirit" was a trademarked name for a brand of girl's deodorant -- instead, Kathleen Hanna (lead singer of the band Bikini Kill) had written the sentence "Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit" as graffiti on the wall of his apartment, and Cobain borrowed it for his title (Thompson 2010). The fact that "Teen Spirit" is, in itself, a pun on "team spirit" seems to be part of why Cobain found the phrase evocative. After all, "team spirit" in high schools is popularly endorsed as the acceptable face of group behavior on the part of young people; as such, it sits ironically with the depiction of group behavior that we get in the song's first stanza:

Load up on guns, bring your friends

It's fun to lose and to pretend

She's overbored, self-assured

Oh no I know a dirty word (Nirvana, 1991)

"Bring your friends" makes it clear that this is some kind of social gathering, although the implicit menace in "load up on guns" makes it clear that this is not the sort of party most high-schoolers would want to attend. In the second line, however, the means for defining the party described here becomes simultaneously more vague and more poetic. We can understand how a social gathering might be defined as a place where it's "fun…to pretend," whether one pretends to be enjoying oneself, or pretends to be an adult. "Fun to lose," however, is more slippery. "Lose" is a verb that normally takes an object: we can lose our virginities, or lose a game. At the same time, the use of the word seems designed to invoke the idea of being a "loser." All of these associations cling to the word, and all seem to work towards the establishment of meaning in the lyrics -- since the next line moves on to describe a girl in the third person, it is entirely possible that all three of these associations with "lose" are intended. The girl is described in poetic language of pun and paradox: the pun occurs in "overbored," which -- to a listener -- is indistinguishable from its homonym "overboard." Either way, though, the effect is paradoxical: a girl who is in over her head is unlikely to seem self-assured, although a girl who finds the party tedious could seem socially superior. The paradox comes from not being able to tell, unless we read the lyrics, that "overbored" (a word which Cobain invented for the song) is what's specified. But a party where one observes a girl is a place where awkward sexual encounters (like loss of virginity) or gamesmanship (like the loss of some competition) or socially-defined ideas of uncoolness (as in whatever loss is attributed to teenage "losers") are all possible. The last line of the first verse, however, captures the sense of the knowing naivete of adolescence. It also crystallizes the lyrical method here: because it is a seeming non-sequitur, we realize that we are to understand the lyrics here as being a kind of collage of impressions, rather than a straightforward statement of anything. As such, the law of vagueness does not erase all meaning -- instead, the song becomes a series of impressions, adding up to some kind of teenage social gathering, in which ideas of sex and immaturity and self-esteem all churn together. If the listener finds this an accurate observation of what teenage social life is like is, then the listener will find the song to be poetically meaningful.

At this point, Cobain introduces the song's repeated chorus. Each time it begins with a repeated chant employing wordplay: "Hello, hello, hello, how low." The sense is of constant introduction to other people at a party, with an insinuation that the only thing anyone is thinking about is "how low" people are willing to go. This could be interpreted morally, or as a winking allusion to "going down" as a euphemism for oral sex, or both. But the collage method of constructing social impressions continues in the climactic part of the song's repeated chorus: