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Songs About Books
Posted by Rob Ortenzi on 26-Aug-08 @ 12:50 PM|
Selected by Luke O'Neil.
When you're in a band, you've got a lot of musical equipment to move, so you don't always have the room to carry a book around to let everyone know how smart you are. One surefire way to remedy that situation is to work literary references into your songs-think of it as pretentious rock stars doing their part to trick kids into appreciating literature. By now we're all familiar with old standards like the Police's "Don't Stand So Close to Me," and everyone knows you can't swing a paperback without hitting an allusion in a Morrissey song, but here's a few they might not have covered in your English Lit classes. |
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BELLE AND SEBASTIAN “This Is Just A Modern Rock Song” (from The Boy With The Arab Strap) (Jeepster/Matador,1998)  It’d be hard to miss the bevy of literary references littered throughout the catalogue of these twee Scottish indie folkies, but just in case you did, head bookworm Stuart Murdoch spells out the band’s thesis pretty clearly in this one: "I’m not as sad as Dostoevsky, I’m not as clever as Mark Twain..." He’s right, of course. No one is. But as far as rock goes, their rare blend of pithy humor and sad sack introspection make B&S about as close as it gets to these two literary giants.
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IDLEWILD “Roseability” (from 100 Broken Windows) (Capitol,2000)  What is it about Scottish bands and books? Perhaps one of the most intelligent and referential lyricists in the past decade, Idlewild’s Roddy Woomble and band have made a career out of draping huge guitar anthems over even huger philosophical queries about post-modernism and the line between fiction and reality. If you ever thought the stream-of-consciousness writings of Modernist American Gertrude Stein were difficult to parse (“There is no there there”; “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”) then good luck figuring out the meaning behind this cryptic, scorching rocker.
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THE CURE “Killing An Arab” (from Three Imaginary Boys) (Elektra,1979)  The French existentialist Albert Camus cast a long shadow over the history of rock, influencing everyone from the Fall (who took their name from one of his books) to Magnetic Fields (who poked fun at his moping acolytes in song), but this classic of Lit Rock is the best known example. Taking its cues from Camus’ The Stranger, the song follows the book’s narrative of a man lashing out at the perceived indifference of the world through violence. As if Cure fans didn’t have enough to be depressed about already.
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FRANZ FERDINAND “Love And Destroy” (from Franz Ferdinand Deluxe Edition) (Domino,2004)  This wouldn’t be the first rock song influenced by The Master And Margarita, Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov’s brilliant and biting political allegory about a mysterious magician who wreaks mischief and judgment on 1930s Moscow. Its influence can be seen in everything from the Rolling Stones to the Lawrence Arms. This song, with its refrain, “Welcoming black, the queen of the ball/It’s dark beneath the Muscovites’ sky...Margarita, love and destroy” is adapted directly from the book’s harrowing third passage.
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KLAXONS “Golden Skans” (from Myths Of The Near Future) (Polydor,2007)  It took us roughly a hundred listens to get past the glorious celestial harmonies and beat-driven euphoria of this new-rave track and pay attention to the lyrics. But once we did, the allusions to British sci-fi author J.G. Ballard became apparent. Taken from their album Myths Of The Near Future, which is also the name of a Ballard short story, “Golden Skans” is, like much of Ballard’s work, a head trip into science fiction dystopia. “Light touch my hand, in a dream of Golden Skans, from now on/You can forget our future plans.”
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THE DECEMBERISTS “Song For Myla Goldberg” (from Her Majesty The Decemberists) (Kill Rock Stars,2003)  Probably the most literarily dense and lyrically dexterous band playing today, the Decemberists, and lyricist Colin Meloy, offer no shortage of allusions throughout their work. Much of this song, and in particular the lyric, “Put paper to pen/To spell out ‘Eliza’” follows the plot of contemporary American novelist Myla Goldberg’s “Bee Season” about a girl named Eliza, who, amidst a variety of familial melodramas takes part in a series of spelling bees. Lines like, “Seraphim and seaweed swim where stick-limbed Myla lies” only further bolster Meloy’s poetic bona fides.
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MODEST MOUSE “Bukowski” (from Good News For People Who Love Bad News) (Epic,2004)  Drunken, shambling, religiously defiant, perversely eloquent poet laureates of American decay; Charles Bukowski and Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock have at least a couple things in common. Although from the sounds of this track, it’s not necessarily a connection Brock exactly relishes anymore: Scraping off a bit of the rust and downplaying the glamour of self-destruction, Brock sings, “Woke up this morning and it seemed to me/That every night turns out to be/A little more like Bukowski/And yeah, I know he’s a pretty good read/But God, who’d wanna be such an asshole?”
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BAYSIDE “Talking Of Michelangelo” (from Sirens And Condolences) (Victory,2004)  Chuck D, Tori Amos and Rush have all wrestled with T.S. Eliot’s towering achievement of Modernist poetry, The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock. Bayside tackle it head on with a song taking its title from the poem’s refrain. Echoing the premise of a lonely, introspective, perhaps suicidal man wandering the streets at night reflecting on beauty and regret, both narrators struggle with Hamlet’s existential conundrum and conclude with meditations on drowning. Perfectly apt inspiration for an emo band, come to think of it, as Eliot turns an obsession with talking to a girl into a life-and-death matter.
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THE DIVINE COMEDY “The Booklovers” (from Promenade) (Setanta,1994)  Taking the name from Dante’s epic poem, Irishman Neil Hannon set the bar pretty high, literarily speaking. References throughout his songs to Wordsworth, Fitzgerald and Chekov only upped the ante. But this track, name-checking some 70 writers from throughout history, has to have set some sort of referential record. A catalogue of names followed in each line by an aside: (“Katherine Mansfield: [cough cough]”; “Vladimir Nabokov: Hello, little girl..."; “Umberto Eco: I don’t understand this either...”) are packed with enough literary in-jokes on the authors’ lives and work to keep NPR beard-strokers captivated for weeks.
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BJÖRK “Sun In My Mouth” (from Vespertine) (One Little Indian,2001)  Perhaps one of the only vocalists capable of matching the idiosyncrasies of avant-garde American poet e.e. cummings in song, Björk sets the entirety of his poem “I Will Wade Out” to music. It’s a stunning collision of styles, and Björk’s vocal haunts the lyric (“In the sleeping curves of my body/Shall enter fingers/Of smooth mastery/With chasteness of sea-girls/Will I complete the mystery/Of my flesh”) with a sensual wash of beauty.
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How about these.... Paperback Writer - Beatles Book - Sex Clark Five Walt Whitman's Niece - Billy Bragg & Wilco Everyday I Write the Book - Elvis Costello The Book I Read - Talking Heads Hey Jack Kerouac - 10,000 Maniacs Book Song - Fairport Convention