Poetic Songs

From AJS.COM

Poetry in pop music is a pretty common affair. It could be argued that all lyrics are poetry, but I'd like to think that there's at least a lower-limit on what we consider poetic. That said, there are also some excellent pieces of poetry out there in song form, and I wanted to cover some of that ground.

Contents 1 Shriekback 2 Billy Joel 3 The Call 4 Weird Al Yankovic

Shriekback

In what I consider to be a strong contender for the best album of all time, Shriekback delivered a very late 80s feeling collection of poetic pop/rock/funk called Oil and Gold. Among the songs, almost all of which classify as excellent poetry, is Fish Below the Ice. Here's a sample:

Yeah we shake it up, and we break it down
The sound of a satellite saying get me down
Yeah we shake it up, and we break it down
Hear the Voice of America in your home town

Well the film is running 'til the film runs out
There's no point of focus; it zooms in and out
It's information and it leaves no mark
It's just as permanent as paintings in the Iron Age

Billy Joel

Billy Joel's fame is directly tied to his evocative and poetic pop/rock from the 70s. From folksy slice-of-life songs like The Piano Man to the cutting war story Goodnight Saigon:

We had no home front
We had no soft soap
They sent us playboy
They gave us bob hope
We dug in deep
And shot on sight
And prayed to jesus christ
With all our might
We had no cameras
To shoot the landscape
We passed the hash pipe
And played our doors tapes
And it was dark
So dark at night
And we held on to each other
Like brother to brother
We promised our mothers wed write

The Call

An 80s Christian rock band, The Call put the middle-American protestant Christian cultural landscape on the map. Their best known album, Reconciled contained a number of moving songs that hid in the landscape of generic pop with strikingly convincing camouflage. One song, I Still Believe, was covered in the vampire film Lost Boys, to great ironic effect. From With or Without Reason come these lyrics:

I dedicate this inner chamber
I dedicate this harvest toil
Either with or without reason
The language of the heart takes hold
Now don't you see that love offends us
When it rises up against this waste
either with or without reason
Evidence of sin and grace
Oh, there's somebody waiting
Oh, there's somebody near
Oh, there's somebody waiting
Oh, there's somebody here

Weird Al Yankovic

Weird Al's music is rarely original. Instead, he writes his lyrics over those of existing songs, exploiting the comedic effect of toying with popular songs. This is a popular form of parody, but Weird Al is the unquestioned icon of the genre. Writing poetic lyrics can be tremendously difficult. Doing so within the constraints of existing lyrics can be nigh impossible, and yet Weird Al's songs occasionally manage heights that evoke something more significant, if comedic, than the original source song. However, his best works actually capitalize on songs that are already powerfully poetic. Such examples include his pair of Star Wars tributes, Yoda (Lola, The Kinks) and The Saga Begins (American Pie, Don McLean). These songs manage to capture the appeal of the Star Wars franchise without resorting to gushing fandom in a way that I don't think has been accomplished elsewhere. In another effort, he branched out into rap / hip-hop with It's All About the Pentiums (It's All about the Benjamins (Rock Remix), Sean "P. Diddy" Combs), enthusiastically embracing both the technospeak of the computer technophile culture and the aggressive one-upsmanship of the rap / hip-hop culture:

Wanna be hackers, code crackers, slackers?
Wastin' time with all the chatroom yakkers?
9 to 5, chillin' at Hewlett Packard?
Workin' at a desk with a dumb little placard?

Yeah, payin' the bills with my mad programming skills,
Defraggin' my hard drive for thrills.
I got me a hundred gigabytes of RAM.
I never feed trolls and I don't read spam.

Installed a T1 line in my house,
Always at my PC, double-clickin' on my mizouse.
Upgrade my system at least twice a day
I'm strictly plug-and-play, I ain't afraid of Y2K