From Pet Shop Boys to Kate Bush, pop stars are publishing their songs as books. What do their words reveal about them?
What happens to a song lyric when it lands on the page? It becomes oddly silent but also not silent. Ghosts of its usual rhythms lie at the beginnings and ends of its lines. The blank space around it seems weirdly disconcerting, like white noise.
This happens, of course, because a song lyric isn’t poetry. A poem exists between pages of paper, bound by its own internal logic. A lyric arrives from the wider world, laden with decades of meaning and remembered melody, and is unmoored violently and suddenly from its bearings. It is also presented for the reader’s eye – which implies an act of choice – not the listener’s ear. The ear could have heard an unforgettable lyric quite by chance on an otherwise ordinary morning. This serendipity disappears in print, although we still hunt for magic within these new leaves.
Books of collected song lyrics are now big business, especially the elegantly designed, expensively produced kind. This phenomenon was kick-started by Faber & Faber in 2011, when it put Jarvis Cocker into a suitably vintage-looking, brown-and-yellow dust-jacket. The typeface spelling out his name deliberately echoed the publisher’s poetry list too, reflecting the status songwriters such as Cocker have gained in popular culture. And why not? Pop music is a distinguished pensioner now with a solid canon: only a hoary naysayer would argue that Bob Dylan’s catalogue of affecting narrative and acute social analysis lacked the cultural heft to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. (Sappho, Pindar and co were writing short songs about emotional states millennia ago, bashing away at their lyres, and calling them lyrics. They would have released them on limited-edition marbled vinyl if they could.)
The publishing industry is also responding to a nostalgic, middle-aged market, of course, for whom pop musicians were once guides and sages, offering intelligent insights into new worlds through an accessible, approachable medium. Actually, who am I kidding? For most grown-ups, they still are, especially in a culture scrabbling about for articulate heroes. Nevertheless, a tension on the page still remains, which Dylan noted in his Nobel speech in June 2017: “Songs are unlike literature… our songs are alive in the land of the living.” By implication, this means something dies when the lyric gets severed, a sentiment that Neil Tennant echoes introducing his book, One Hundred Lyrics and A Poem . “This is not the natural habitat of the song lyric,” he declares.
Before fame, Tennant was an editor for Marvel Comics and Smash Hits, where, he continues, he learnt about “editing text to make it clearer and more focused… I could apply this to song lyrics and the songwriting process as a whole”. This approach sounds oddly unromantic, and the mood it creates affects the lyrics that follow, as fabulous, sophisticated and melancholy phrases frequently fall with similar coldness on the page. Take 1985’s West End Girls, the song that made Tennant famous at 30, inspired by the many voices of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. The couplet “if when why what/How much have you got?” sounds like a perfect analysis of Thatcherism when it’s delivered in an upwardly mobile accent holding shadows of the singer’s native North Shields.
