I am lyrically challenged. You know, as in I don’t know the lyrics to songs. Even if you hum a few bars I can’t fake it. Also? I can’t name that tune in forty-three notes, let alone seven. Why is that? And am I alone in this?
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, my teenage ears were assaulted with ear candy aka disco. Lines like “Let’s whip it, baby. Let’s whip it right”, lacked a certain….depth. And songs with substance didn’t stand a chance with me. We didn’t have thousands of songs on iPods. All I had was the radio, so I couldn’t rewind a song a bunch of times until I finally figured out that Mick Jagger wasn’t singing , “I’ll never leave… your pizza burnin’.”
Today, I will start listening to a song with an attempt to comprehend its meaning, but something happens somewhere between ten and thirty seconds into the song. I miss a word and stop understanding what they’re talking about or I just forget to listen and the next thing you know, I’m catching myself thinking about what I need to get at the pet store for my ostrich, Sheila.
JD at I Do Things posts song lyrics at the beginning of all her posts and most of the time, no, pretty much all of the time, I have no idea which song they come from (unless it’s “Whip it, Baby”)
In this arena called musical prowess, I am shamed by my husband, Mr. MudPuppy, who could kick anybody’s ass in Rock & Roll Jeopardy because he knows EVERYTHING about music. He lives, eats, breathes, sheds and poops it. He can sit on the couch and just listen to music. Or watch the same concert DVD over and over.
I know! Who does that? I can’t even watch the same movie more than once.
I’ll come into the room and see Geddy Lee from Rush again or that dude from Iron Maiden telling the same story from that seat on their tour bus in that same documentary from a month ago, and I’ll say, “Haven’t you already seen this?” And you know what he says?
“Yeah?”
Like there’s an implied “What of it?” at the end. Like there’s nothing wrong with watching Megadeth’s Behind-The-Scenes thing, or that Steve Vai performance repeatedly. As if he GETS something out of it every time. Pffft!
So anyway, for him, music can be a primary activity. Like I said, he can just sit there and listen to it. That bores me to tears. I have to be DOING something else and music is allowed to play in the background while I’m busy doing that something else. Of course, if my mind is on that something else, I’m not really “listening” to the music, which of course prevents me from ever learning what a song is about.
And we listen to different music anyway, Mr MudPuppy and I. While he enjoys all sorts of music, he leans toward 80s Heavy Metal most of the time, while I’m more of a Scissor Sisters / Mika type of person. Frankly, I don’t know what he sees in me. Although we do both like Butch Walker. So there’s that.
I blame my mother. And my father. They were both cultural dodo birds when it came to music. I’m talking bottom-of-the-barrel tragically unhip. You grow up listening to what your parents listen to and that’s your musical library getting informed and molded for the rest of your life.
Most of you were lucky enough to hear original artists. You know what I spent my childhood getting exposed to? Homogenized cover tunes. That’s right - Muzak on a Stick. I grew up in an elevator, my friends. Does anybody in Sacramento remember KEWT? Some people called it “Easy Listening”. I called it crap. Well, now I do. I didn’t know any better back then that my musical taste was being forcibly extracted from me at such an early age.
Yes, KEWT. The home of pure unadulterated instrumental music, where songs were either stripped of their lyrics and dignity, or worse, sung by Lawrence Welk-like studio singers.
Enter Ray Conniff. My mother had an 8-track suitcase full of Ray Conniff albums in the car, so that’s what we listened to. All the time. So I do know all the words to those songs, but at seven years old they never meant anything to me.
Lyrics like:
♫♪Who’s in the Strawberry Patch with Sally,
Who’s making love to her tonight? ♫♪
and
♫♪Happiness Is, Happiness Is, Happiness Is, Happiness is
Happiness Is, Happiness Is….different things for diff-er-rent people…that’s what happiness is. ♫♪
and
♫♪Photograph, photograph, photograph, photograph,
Photograph, photograph, photograph, photograph ♫♪
No I’m not kidding. Wait, here’s another one…
♫♪Leave me alone, won’t you leave me alone,
Please leave me alone, now leave me alone.
Leave me alone, please leave me alone, yes leave me. ♫♪
So while I may have these frickin’ songs memorized, even to this day, I don’t know what any of the songs are about. Except the one where they sing “Photograph” over and over about 63 bazillion times. I think that one is about a photograph.
If I had to recall four specific 8-tracks that I spent an inordinate amount of time being exposed to it would be these:
Ray Conniff - The Way We Were (which includes all of the songs whose lyrics I sang for you above)
Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass - The Sexy Whipped Cream Album Inappropriate for 7-year-olds
Soundtrack from The Sound of Music (My mom had a “thing” for Christopher Plummer)
Soundtrack from Fiddler on the Roof (My mom had a “thing” for Tevya/Topol)
Now you might be saying, “Well, that’s not so bad. Those last three are pretty good.” And that would be true if it stopped there, but there was only one album of the last three listed above, whereas the rest of the suitcase contained 147 Ray Conniff 8-tracks.
Why couldn’t my parents be cool and listen to The Beatles or Elvis or Frank Sinatra? Something culturally relevant for Pete’s sake? For MY sake. My parents missed out something fierce. And in turn, so did I.
If I were a rich man, I’d yidle-deedle-didle-deedle back to my childhood and buy some real music for my mother for birthdays and Christmas, rather than hearing over and over again that a doe is a deer. A female deer. And then I would grow up listening to music that meant something. Music that didn’t have all the flavor sucked out of it before I had a chance to hear it.
It’s not that I don’t like music. I do. I’m even moved by it at times. I just don’t know the words. And I don’t want to hear music that has been “cleansed” to within an inch of its life.
Once every ten years or so, I do pay attention to the lyrics of a song and this one, called Walk You Home, by Passenger, I fell in love with the first time I heard it. The video for it below is curiously shot, and the song is funny, clever, and a bunch of other adjectives I can’t list without spoiling it.
Just listen to the words.
Link to Walk You Home by Passenger video.
Link to Lyrics for Walk You Home
