Some recent posts have gotten my mind thinking.  In particular, the posts by Tom Beaudoin and Maeve Heaney have raised the question of  interpretations that are not lyric-oriented, but are instead interested in thinking about the meaning of the music.  We get so used to thinking that the only aspect of a song that matters is the worded expressiveness, and we pass over the “material substrate” of the music itself.

For me, this raises a really interesting set of possibilities.  I think of Peter Gabriel, during his musique concrete phase in the early 80s (n.b. Melting Face and Security?), telling interviewers that he was trying to process primal screams through filters so that they became part of the texture of the songs–the sonic landscape. I think of Ween, Geza X, my beloved Brainiac, and the almost unlistenable moments of NEU!–each is pushing beyond the “meaning-content” of the lyrics to the point of using the voice as an instrument in itself.

Which makes me think about the points where voice and instrument are literally melded–autotune, vocoder, and talking guitar.  Let me take this backwards in three steps: the contemporary example, of course, is T-Pain.  But isn’t he just using new technology to build on the ground laid by Roger and Zapp? And Roger was riffing with synthesizers, using technologies popularized by Peter Frampton and his guitar.  But in these examples, the “instrumentalized voice” is still capable of being examined for meaningful lyric content.

So what of the artists that used voices but refused to offer intelligible lyrics as content?  Dave Thomas of Pere Ubu once wrote that printing lyrics on album sleeves was similar to fascism (I’m paraphrasing), but that’s not what I mean.  I’m thinking of Mike Stipe from the early days of R.E.M., and I am especially thinking of Cocteau Twins:

But we can go in another direction here, as well.  Namely, abandoning attention to lyrics altogether, and instead finding meanings in music alone.  Maeve has suggested as much with her sharing of the videos by Apocalyptica.  There, music takes the foreground and no lyrics get in the way.  We could find numerous other examples–El Ten Eleven and Man or Astroman? spring to mind.

Of course, there is another direction to take this, as well – an example where the lyrics are completely banal, and not really worth analysis.  In such a case, the music jumps forward as the portion of the artifact truly worthy of analyzing.  The example I have in mind here is “Your Drums, Your Love,” by AlunaGeorge:

Now lyrically, there is nothing particularly exciting here.  What is interesting, to me, is that the video director embraced that fact, and chose instead to focus on interpreting the music beneath the lyrics.  The dancers are reacting to the notes and stutter edits (n.b. around 1:45, the guy with the glasses, especially)not the emotions or content of the lyrics.

Frankly, what this reminds me of the most is liturgical dance.  Rather, the problematics around liturgical dance, where so much of the practice is simply “acting out” the lyrics of a praise song.  Is there a way to pass beyond the desire to simply re-state lyrics in movement, and offer instead a free play of expression that touches emotions beyond (and beneath) the words?

I think that might be what the director of “Your Drums, Your Love” was attempting–the lyrics are unsatisfying, but the visual artifact that resulted is interesting and bears repeated viewing.

What would liturgical dance look like, if it freed itself from “mere repetition” of lyrics, and reached for deeper emotions beneath the lyrics?  I spent some time looking around for examples, and found none.  Does anyone know of some they might suggest?  Especially liturgical dance in the vein of the kind of expression shown by the dancers in ‘Your Drums, Your Love”?

3 Comments »

1. 

   Some recent examples come to mind for me. Have a look at Bob Dylan’s ‘Duquesne Whistle’ video and My Brightest Diamond’s work on ‘All Things Will Unwind’ album. Not exactly liturgical, but definitely deeply spiritual, and above and beyond the words, or visuals offering a completely new angle to the words. The animation of Brandt Brauer Frick’s ‘Caffeine’ also offers a whole animated movement sequence and story that imbues the only text of the title and otherwise instrumental piece with a power and passion and meaning not overtly in the music itself(or is it?) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQzZ_Wr1m5U. Profound liturgical exploration for me, albeit secular liturgy! Sorry tried to put more links in but the machine thought I was spamming.

   Comment by Andrew Tredinnick — December 28, 2012 @ 3:59 am

2. 

   Great post, David. Recently, I’ve been doing research on the connection between music and emotions. It’s quite fascinating. There is a substantial body of work in this area. Two leading experts who study the influence of instrumental music on our emotions are music psychologists Patrik Juslin and John Sloboda.

   Comment by Mary McDonough — December 28, 2012 @ 10:56 am

3. 

   This post was a great read. In answer to your question at the end, I think of David Byrne as exploring this quite a bit in his various works. I haven’t seen the documentary, “Ride, Rise, Roar” but I did see the live tour show that it documents, and there was a lot of interpretive-type dance punctuating the music, not the lyrics, even though it did help (in some cases) give deeper insight into the lyrical content. Of course, that insight might have been completely in the hands of the audience member.

   Comment by Greg — January 3, 2013 @ 9:33 am

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