Something that isn't poetry:

I've been spending a lot of time talking about what makes a song a poem, but I haven't yet explained what makes a song not a poem. Searching the internet for all things Bob Dylan for my previous post, I got a bunch of search hits called "Bob Dylan v. Rebecca Black." I had a physical reaction to this, just shy of actually vomiting. If you're not familiar with the musical gem that is Rebecca Black's "Friday," here it is:

See? To even utter her name in the same sentence as Bob Dylan's is blasphemy. Just to be clear, the video my search engine kept urging me to watch was nothing competitive at all, which was a bit disappointing... Bob Dylan throwing down with Rebecca Black... the satisfaction of one good punch... Anyway. So here it is:

The second version of the song really doesn't have anything to do with whether or not the song is actually poetic, but it did get me thinking - if Bob Dylan is quite obviously a poet, what makes Rebecca Black not a poet? What makes "Friday" not a poem? Well, for starters, the lyrics.

(Yeah, Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ah-Ark)  
Oo-ooh-ooh, hoo yeah, yeah  
Yeah, yeah  
Yeah-ah-ah  
Yeah-ah-ah  
Yeah-ah-ah  
Yeah-ah-ah  
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Seven a.m., waking up in the morning  
Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs  
Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal  
Seein' everything, the time is goin'  
Tickin' on and on, everybody's rushin'
Gotta get down to the bus stop  
Gotta catch my bus, I see my friends (My friends)
Kickin' in the front seat  
Sittin' in the back seat  
Gotta make my mind up  
Which seat can I take?
It's Friday, Friday  
Gotta get down on Friday  
Everybody's lookin' forward to the weekend, weekend  
Friday, Friday 
Gettin' down on Friday  
Everybody's lookin' forward to the weekend
Partyin', partyin' (Yeah)  
Partyin', partyin' (Yeah)  
Fun, fun, fun, fun  
Lookin' forward to the weekend
7:45, we're drivin' on the highway  
Cruisin' so fast, I want time to fly
Fun, fun, think about fun  
You know what it is I got this, you got this
My friend is by my right, ay I got this, you got this
Now you know it
Kickin' in the front seat  
Sittin' in the back seat  
Gotta make my mind up  
Which seat can I take?
It's Friday, Friday  
Gotta get down on Friday  
Everybody's lookin' forward to the weekend, weekend  
Friday, Friday


Here's the thing, the song has a (forgive me) classic meaning: carpe diem. Still doesn't make it a poem. If this song is put up against what is probably the most famous carpe diem poem in history, Robert Herrick's "To the Virgins, to make much of Time," it simply doesn't hold up. Compare the lyrics to the poem:

GATHER ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.
The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,	5
The higher he 's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he 's to setting.
That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;	10
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.
Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry:
For having lost but once your prime,	15
You may for ever tarry.

Essentially the song and the poem both mean the same thing: take advantage of life while you're young, seize the day, go after every opportunity to enjoy life before it's too late. But still, they're very different. A closer look at Black's lyrics reveal that there is actually nothing more to reveal; in it's basic form all the song is saying, "Let's have a good time on Friday," without metaphor or figurative language. What makes this not a poem is that the words don't transcend the music, nor do they hold any hidden meaning - everything is just laid out there, nice and obvious. Also, there's the issue of her actual choice of words - how can one "kick it" in the front seat and sit in the  back seat at the same time? This shows a total lack of craft that she can't keep the logistics of her song straight. She's young, I get it, but what concerns me more than anything is every high school student knows Rebecca Black and her un-poetic drivel, but if asked who wrote the line "Gather ye rosebuds while ya may," many of them would not be able to tell me.


By contrast, what makes Herrick's poem a poem? It requires thought, and interpretation for one thing. And there is a tone of urgency which can only be expressed through his word choice - "The age is  best which is the first, / When youth and blood are warmer; / But being spent, the worse, and worst / Times still succeed the former" - when I read these lines I notice that I even begin to pick up the pace as the poem goes on. 


So, Dylan/Herrick v. Black? Even putting the names together hurts. "Friday" just is not in the least poetic.

Bob Dylan

Walk into any bookstore or conduct an internet search looking for "Bob Dylan" and you're likely to find at least a dozen books written about Dylan's lyrics. I sort of don't even need to make the argument that he's a poet - he's been regarded as such for decades so it's basically a fact. In my last post I talked about Pichaske's point that in order for a rock lyric to be true poetry, to be true literature, the words need to express some greater human truth whether it's emotional, societal, or both. On his record The Times They Are A-Changin', Dylan personalizes the sociopolitcal climate of the time - including the religious climate - through stories about himself or other individuals.

One of the many books published on Dylan's lyrics Jokerman: Reading the Lyrics of Bob Dylan by Aidan Day. Day explains that his "study" focuses on "the semantic properties of the words of the lyrics"; however, he is not claiming "priority for the printed text over the performance, nor to undervalue the profound expressive possibilities of Dylan's voice." And furthermore he states, "A Dylan lyric on the page is one text of that lyric while a performance of it constitutes another. Nor is there necessarily one dominant performed version" (5). In other words, according to Day, no performance or presentation is the same and each must be considered separately of all others.

All that said, I completely agree with Day when he states that "[Dylan's] words alone stand as significant texts" (5), and one of the reasons for this is because of their emotionally charged sociopolitical statements, and The Times They Are A-Changin' is riddled with these.

The Times They Are A-Changin'

This initial reaction to the album's title track, and its principle interpretation has been that it was an anthem of change for the 1960s. But in a 1964 interview with Cameron Crowe, Dylan said, "I wanted to write a big song, with short concise verses that piled up on each other in a hypnotic way. The Civil Rights Movement and the folk music movement were pretty close for a while and allied together at that time." A year later he continued to explain in yet another interview saying, "I didn't mean 'The Times They Are A-Changin'' as a statement... It's a feeling." Despite the tone of command in the song - "Come writers and critics" or "Come senators, congressmen" etc. - Dylan was not seeking to cause change, but to lyrically express and record the change he could already feel and see happening.

The Ballad of Hollis Brown

Later in the record Dylan's songs become more focused and he uses them to tell stories and create illustrations of the reasons we need to keep supporting the change already beginning. "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" is Dylan's exercise in empathy, and is written in response to the national poverty rate in the late 1950s, early 1960s (about 19%) through the lens of Hollis Brown and his life. The song itself harkens back to the murder ballads of the 19th century, and here Hollis Brown, after losing his crops and his horse and dealing with his inability to feed his children, commits a murder suicide ending the lives of his wife and five children, then turning the gun on himself ("There's seven people dead / On a South Dakota farm"). Eventually in response to the poverty level, and incidentally not long after the release of Dylan's record, then president Lindon B. Johnson would announce The War of Poverty during his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964. Though the popularity of the War on Poverty would eventually wane, it seemed the government was beginning to take heed in trying to prevent the type of scenario which Dylan's ballad presented.

With God on Our Side

"With God on Our Side" strays from empathizing with those living below the poverty line and turns its focus to the fear of impending war. The song begins, "Oh my name it is nothin' / My age it means less" voicing the sentiment of many soldiers who enlisted to serve their country and may have lied about their ages to do so. The speaker goes on to express a fear of the Russian threat, which is most definitely a reference to the Bay of Pigs, singing, "I've learned to hate Russians / All through my whole life / If another war starts /It's them we must fight / to hate them and fear them / To run and to hide / And accept it all bravely / With God on my side." In many of Dylan's songs he sings about this sense of the "impending end of individual life. And the time that is so short is above all short for the master [and] the speaker's own identity. Time and again it is a conviction of his own depravity which traumatizes the speaker of these lyrics" (99-100), which is also seen here when he sings "So now as I'm leavin' / I'm weary as hell / the confusion I'm feelin' / Ain't no tongue can tell." Dylan ends the song in the same stanza but not before he makes the statement that whoever is fighting a war, whoever is on either side, will justify their actions by thinking that whoever their god is will be in support of their side of the fight. Where the song takes a turn is in that final stanza when Dylan says the final lines: "If God's on our side / He'll stop the next war." And there is his main social statement: for those of you who are so religious, if God was really on anyone's side, we wouldn't have war at all.

There is a lot more I have to write on Bob Dylan - let's face it, in the conversation of Song v. Poem, Dylan might be the only artist that matters. But more on that later.

In terms of legitimacy...

In his book The Poetry of Rock: The Golden Years, David Pichaske spends quite a bit of time on what makes a rock lyric "legitimate." Sometimes he deems a song "legitimate" based on how well or poorly the music/lyrics/arrangement work together. Other times his argument is based on the quality of the lyric itself, which is especially subject to Pichaske's own opinion. In order to agree or disagree with Pichaske, you kind of need to know what legitimacy means.

"Legitimate" is defined as "conforming to recognized principles or accepted rules and standards." But this definition creates a whole other set of questions:

• What are the rules and standards a song lyric must conform to?
• Who created these rules and who implements them?

Now, that is not to say that forms don't exist because they absolutely do, but "rules" implies, at least to me, that there are "correct forms" versus "incorrect forms." However, for the purpose of not getting into a lifelong philosophical debate on conformity and nonconformity with myself or the poetic and musical powers that be, I'll stick with discussing Pichaske's opinion and how it applies to the records I'm considering myself.

Pichaske opens his book with a brief history of rock in which he purports that "rock lyrics may survive surprisingly well even when stripped of their music" and "rock lyrics may be closer to the true poetic mainstream than other forms of twentieth century, prove on close examination to be neurotic, grotesque, abnormal... maybe, just maybe we are justified in applying a literary analysis to rock, and that we have some right to expect rock to measure up literarily. The cry 'But they're songs, not poems' is really not a valid excuse (5). Basically he's saying that one of the arguments for rock lyrics' legitimacy is the popularity of mainstream music - because it's popular, probably more so than printed poetry (think of the poetry section at a bookstore versus the size of a record store) music is more legitimate than poetry.

Another argument Pichaske makes for the legitimacy of rock lyrics does deal with issues of form. As previously stated, legitimacy deals with conforming to standards and forms, and although the importance of these forms is somewhat arguable, it's no secret that both both songs and poems follow them and perhaps even the same forms at time. To Pichaske, form is one thing that makes rock lyrics legitimate because "words seek form; form has to be reckoned with by [an] artist. One mark of sixties' rock's greatest was its refusal to take form for granted, its willingness to experiment in musical and poetic form" (7). Notice, though, he specifically says that there needs to be a willingness to experiment with form - perhaps the lyrics never refrain refrain or they break rhyme scheme, or the sonnet doesn't have the exact number of syllables it should per line.

Pichaske also compares certain types of music in order to explain which are legitimate and why. According to Pichaske legitimacy also has to deal with the messages behind the lyrics. He compares two types of folk saying, "Protest folk was more legitimate than hootenany folk because it integrated itself more with the social and history movement" (27). If the message behind or the meaning of a song's lyrics has something to do with society (politics or culture) then the song may be deemed legitimate, which is also what Pichaske argues in the case of poetry.

Finally, in his brief history, Pichaske takes a dig at critics writing, "And for their part, the music profs have been reluctant to grant [rock music] status as art as the lit. crit. boys have been reluctant to grant it status as poetry" (4). He then goes on to say that 'A good rock singer-composer-arranger knows not only how to write words and music that mean, but how to make them work with or against each other. That, my friends, is art!" (6). So according to Pichaske, the literary critics and music professors must consider lyrics in the same vein as poetry (even that which is canonized) because these lyrics are art, and in many cases that art is at least elevated as poetic art.

Pichaske goes on to discuss individual artists in terms of whether they are true poets and how. His opinions of these artists will be discussed in later posts when I discuss some of their records. For now, I agree with Pichaske that song lyrics must be able to stand alone and encompass a certain degree of craft in order to be considered the same as poetic art. Whether some of these artists I will discuss meet those "requirements" remains to be seen upon the analysis of their lyrics.