Boring, self obsessed whiners
Dai Crowther
Dai.
Big bleat
Why are singer-songwriters generally such boring, self-obsessed whiners?
asks David Bennun.
Guardian (UK Newspaper)
He was lying across the sofa on the other side of the room at the party,
guitar case propped against the arm. His shaggy head was cradled in a
dark-haired girl's lap. A dyed redhead had set herself the task of stroking
his bony thighs. His anguish was clearly both existential and
inextinguishable: each time one or the other girl leaned down to offer words
of comfort, he would twist his face away and wince inconsolably. I was very
impressed. And of one thing I was certain. Here was a man who wrote and
performed his own songs. He was probably going to write one about this, the
following morning. Or afternoon, leastways.
Strangely, writing and performing songs does not, on its own, entitle you to
be known as a singer-songwriter. Prince, Ozzy Osbourne or Debbie Gibson, for
example, have never been branded thus. To be a singer-songwriter you must,
first and foremost, be too sensitive to live, too vain to die. Secondly, you
must not operate in a musical area, such as funk, heavy metal or teeny-pop,
where there is any danger of the listener being distracted from your
outpourings by their enjoyment of the way the record sounds. And thirdly,
you must consider your own life, thoughts and feelings to be the only
legitimate subject for your, or indeed any, work. You have suffered for your
art. Now it's everybody else's turn.
Which is not to say that all singer-songwriters are dreadful. Just most of
them. Nick Drake is as close to a patron saint as singer-songwriters will
ever get. He has all the necessary qualities, being intense, tortured and
dead. This makes him a wildly romantic figure to those whose only other
great romance is with themselves. He is also, paradoxically, famous for
being underappreciated. To singer-songwriters, most of whom base their
entire output on feeling underappreciated, this is truly something to aspire
to.
Folk, or at least folk-based music, is the meat and drink of
singer-songwriters. More so than meat and drink, to look at most of the
scrawny beggars. There are a number of reasons for this. The acoustic guitar
is cheap and relatively portable. It demands no great virtuosity to produce
a simple background noise. And crucially, it dispenses with the need for
other musicians, who for some reason often fail to appreciate your genius
and artistic temperament. Once you've had some solo success, the upstarts
come for hire and you can be as precious as you please with them.
Bob Dylan, who invented the genre, set all the precedents, both for quality
and vanity. Inevitably, it was sanctimonious drivel like Blowin' in the
Wind - even that dropped "g" was insufferably mannered - which inspired
others to follow in his tracks, rather than more sophisticated and powerful
early songs such as The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll. By the time
everybody else had cottoned on to Blowin' in the Wind, Dylan had disavowed
both its sentiments and its sound. He still acted the singer-songwriter to
perfection, being moody, enigmatic and a randy little bugger to boot. As
Paul Simon and Leonard Cohen would both later admit, writing songs was a
great way for a geek to get girls.
Simon had started out as a wannabe pop star. So, as it happens, had Dylan -
he played piano for briefly popular teen idol Bobby Vee - and so would many
other singer-songwriters including Tori Amos, Alanis Morissette, Alex
Chilton and all of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Some of them did fairly
well. Simon and Garfunkel scored rock'n'roll hits under the name of Tom &
Jerry. Graham Nash was one of the Hollies. Morissette had a previous
incarnation as "the Canadian Tiffany", a copy of a starlet no one remembers,
from a place no one is much interested in, but which exports
singer-songwriters by the sackful.
In the wake of Dylan, it had become clear that money, credibility and
long-term status were liable to attach themselves to poet-philosophers with
hollow-body six-strings. Leonard Cohen, conversely, was already a poet,
albeit not a very good one, and a writer of preposterous novels. By heading
down the high-art scale, he found his real vocation, producing superb
records which have only recently been recognised for their sublime
miserabilism.
But for every Dylan and Cohen, there would be a thousand Donovans and worse.
And what Dylan did for sullen, skinny boys, Joni Mitchell would do in spades
for skittish, self-obsessed girls. Like all the best singer-songwriters,
Mitchell moved from early simplicity into wild, exhilarating bursts of
inventiveness. And like all the best, she would unwittingly inspire a legion
of tedious solipsists who made up in egotism what they lacked in ability.
The early 70s were clogged up with howlingly awful artistes of both sexes,
each more willing than the last to plumb the very puddle of their psyche.
Just as Dylan boasted that he had killed off Tin Pan Alley, the system which
separated composing and performing, so punk and 80s pop pretty much did for
singer-songwriters, who were to be kept in abeyance for the best part of two
decades. The 80s were a wretched era, but if there was one good thing to be
said for them - and I emphasise "if" - it was a relative absence of
strumming and whining, at least in conjunction with one another.
Again, there were exceptions. Suzanne Vega, pale and uninteresting, did very
nicely with her milk-and-water verses. Tanita Tikaram was Lloyd Cole in
drag, or vice-versa. Politicised singer-songwriters enjoyed a fleeting
vogue - Michelle Shocked, Tracy Chapman, Phrank. It was a good time to be a
lesbian with a guitar, or at least to look like one. Billy Bragg, admirably
oblivious to the whims of fashion, continued to turn out records. Each one
resembled a lab experiment in which an amorous bloodhound had been furnished
with a bullhorn and a copy of Das Kapital.
The 80s also witnessed the flourishing career of Kate Bush, queen of the
"I'm a tree" persuasion of singer-songwriter. This happily infrequent
drama-school technique mainly involves getting into character, and begs the
question as to which makes for more embarrassing lyrics: soul-baring
banalities, or method-acting exercises? To be fair to Bush, she turned up
trumps with her Hounds of Love album, one of the outstanding records of the
decade. She also invented Tori Amos, but you can't blame her for that.
Come the 90s, singer-songwriters have returned with a vengeance. Literally
so: vengeance being a principal motive for most of their breed. Vengeance on
those who shunned them, refused their advances, ignored their prowess or
simply thought they were plain weird. This is as good a spur as any - just
ask Thom Yorke from Radiohead. But a grudge against the world does not
necessarily mean you merit its rapt attention. One name echoes down the
halls of infamy: Alanis Morissette.
In the 70s, sulky male bards were everywhere. Twenty years on, it's the turn
of the girls to bore us rigid with stuff that rightly belongs in teenage
diaries. And Morissette kicked the whole thing off by selling umpteen
million copies of her album, Jagged Little Pill. That her name sounds like a
joke feminisation of Morrissey's is what you might call a significant
coincidence - given that her lyrical style is what you might call humourless
Smiths with PMT. Even so, Morissette's sonic gravel is as pearls from the
deepest ocean compared to the slew of records from dismal young women signed
in the aftermath of her wasp-chewing triumph. I would name names, if I could
remember them. But we all know they're out there, and not one of them has
produced anything approaching the standard of Smelly Cat by Phoebe from
Friends.
Meanwhile, the boys haven't been idle. (That's merely a turn of phrase, of
course; singer-songwriters of any variety are usually idle to the point of
appearing stuffed - this is also known as being artistically blocked.)
Having lost out in the Dear Diary genre, they've turned instead to the
Suffering Soul. You may already have heard of Mishka, the nautical Caribbean
beatnik - a boatnik, really. Mishka combines the more winsome traits of Bob
Marley with a style of lovelorn bleating which, while it makes my fillings
spin in their cavities, will very likely launch him, sooner or later, into
the charts, far beyond the reach of critical slingshots.
The progeny of old singer-songwriters have now taken to popping out of the
woodwork with records of their own - Jakob Dylan, Adam Cohen, Rufus
Wainwright (son of Loudon), whose baroque piano compositions make him the
pick of the bunch by a fair few lengths. As if this weren't enough, every
month brings the attempted rehabilitation of long-forgotten warblers,
sometimes deserved, sometimes not. Nick Drake started the trend. Phil Ochs,
another suicide, was next. As for Gene Clark, I personally intend to bang on
about him until whoever owns the rights to the inspirational No Other album
gets the message and reissues it.
Future revival subjects, at a guess, will include the recently deceased
David Ackles; the mawkish work of Clifford T Ward, who is sadly now
afflicted with MS; PF Sloan, who wrote the dreadful Barry McGuire hit Eve of
Destruction; plus Dory Previn, Don McLean, Phoebe Snow, James Taylor, the
mullah formerly known as Cat Stevens, and, eventually, David McCallum, who
when not camping it up as Robert Vaughn's blond companion in The Man From
U.N.C.L.E., could be found propping up the bill of pop packages throughout
the 60s. No, they don't make 'em like they used to. That's one thing to be
grateful for.
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Frank Langton
>Big bleat
>Why are singer-songwriters generally such boring, self-obsessed whiners?
>asks David Bennun.
This is where my songwriting's been going wrong. :-)
Been trying to write interesting universal-themed songs and all the time I
should have kept doing that boring, self-obsessed whining instead. Never too
late.... ;-)
Cheers
Frank.
Drifting back to my favorite place - Obscurity :-)
A few songs Lo-fi streaming only at
http://members.aol.com/FrankatCampion/audio.html
Paul Saunders
> >Why are singer-songwriters generally such boring, self-obsessed whiners?
>
> This is where my songwriting's been going wrong. :-)
> Been trying to write interesting universal-themed songs
I don't bother with interesting universal-themed songs, I just write about
walking and camping and stuff what anyone else thinks about it!
Having said that, I've read that walking is the most popular recreational
activity in the UK, so who knows, there may be a huge market just waiting to
be exploited?
Paul
--
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk
Seth Jackson
<pv...@wildNOSPAMwales.fsnet.co.uk> wrote:
>Having said that, I've read that walking is the most popular recreational
>activity in the UK, so who knows, there may be a huge market just waiting to
>be exploited?
"These boots are made for walking, and that's just what they'll do..."
- Seth Jackson
Songwriting & Music Business Info: http://www.sethjackson.net
mark
Of course Dylan never boasted that he killed off tin pan alley
" I put an end to it(tpa) ..they were good songwriters...The funny thing
about it though is that I didn't start out as a songwriter.I just drifted
into it.Those people had it down to a science.
Dai Crowther <d...@dragon-tales.co.uk> wrote in message
news:1015028649.10034....@news.demon.co.uk...
Watson Davis
wrote:
>On Sat, 2 Mar 2002 10:26:07 -0000, "Paul Saunders"
><pv...@wildNOSPAMwales.fsnet.co.uk> wrote:
>
>>Having said that, I've read that walking is the most popular recreational
>>activity in the UK, so who knows, there may be a huge market just waiting to
>>be exploited?
>
>"These boots are made for walking, and that's just what they'll do..."
One of these days these boots are going to walk all over you.
Watson (the ninja of nice) Davis