Pop music
What'd they say?
Marcus Berkmann
How can a pop star ensure that he, she or indeed it is taken seriously? It's a question that has befuddled many an ambi- tious musician. Rock 'n' roll credibility is an elusive commodity, although a lucrative one. It's unlikely that the careers of Bruce Springsteen and John Lennon would have been quite the same without it.
Being taken seriously, though, can have enormous personal cost. Lennon was taken so seriously that someone shot him. Bruce Springsteen will probably have to wear denim jackets into his dotage. And look at Keith Richards — a man barely alive, and we certainly can't rebuild him (we haven't the technology).
But listening to the new Rickie Lee Jones album this week (Flying Cowboys, Geffen) I suddenly realised that being taken seriously in pop is not just about drug abuse, violent death and uncomfort- ably tight jeans. You can build a solid and successful career without even the slightest risk of hernias in later life. It's simple just make sure they can't hear the words.
Not being able to hear the words is, of course, one of the main objections that pop-haters have to all music recorded since Pat Boone (besides it being loud and raucous and all knob-twiddling anyway where are the real instruments these days?). Being able to hear the words, on
the other hand, is one of the main objec- tions that pop-lovers have to the works of Miss Kylie Minogue. Someone like Rickie Lee Jones, though, constructs her image as an Artist on her utter inability to enunciate a word clearly. For each line of every song, her fairly daft lyrics ('Where the Lord's face is an all-night cafe' sums up her oeuvre pretty well) are interpreted as a strange ethereal wail, sounding not unlike 'Waaannnmmm mAAAaaaaal Oooweee- aaaaaooh !' The effect is electrifying: the normal listener removes the record instant- ly and throws it out of the window, while the critic gives it an extremely good review.
The same is true of Tom Waits. What Is he going on about? It's clear from that croaking ruin of a voice that he has smoked about three packets of cigarettes since the beginning of the track, but often what he is trying to tell you is quite unclear. His records nevertheless sell in healthy quanti- ties, mainly, I suspect, to people who want to give up smoking.
More recent — and no less successful purveyors of the unintelligible have been REM, whose dense, guitar-heavy rock is made immeasurably funnier by Michael Stipe's weedy voice. There it is, deep at the back of the mix, and no one, it seems, is too sure what he's singing, including the other members of REM and, most per- tinently, Stine himself. The Cocteau Twins' vocalist Liz Fraser is possibly even obscurer. There's usually one word on each album you can make out — after six or seven hearings, anyway. On their lash Blue Bell Knoll (4AD), that word was 'pineapple'. Why pineapple? Why not pomegranate, or gooseberry? However much I listened, I couldn't make out another word. Out of the window it went.
Unintelligibility can even help the termi- nally unfashionable. The Bee Gees nowa- days are regarded as a rather quaint (i.e. embarrassing) reminder of the disco era, with its accompanying white suits and chest hair, but for about ten minutes in 1978 they were taken quite seriously. Luckily for them, these were the same ten minutes in which they sold 28 million copies of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. But could you understand what they were singing on 'Stayin' Alive'? Playing it the other day for the first time in years, I could make out only one couplet: You can tell by the way I use my walk/I'm a woman's man, no time to talk'. if we had been able to understand any more, would we have bought all those millions of records? I think not.
So that's the trick. Sing drivel, but do so in such a way that everyone thinks you're a tortured artist, instead of an illiterate buffoon. Then watch the money flow in. But don't make the same mistake as Rickie Lee Jones. Her last couple of albums have been massive commercial failures, and the new one doesn't look as though it will do any better. Why? Could it be because she included a lyric sheet . . ?
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