Verbal Expression and Lyrics

Verbal Expression and Lyrics

Because art criticism is a verbal activity, I write with the consciousness that my language is being evaluated in that context, and knowing that certain words and phrases will assume overtones that were not intended. I choose to ignore this hazard by reassuring the reader that art-criticism is not my primary (or even secondary) occupation in life, and that my intention is to write about these works simply, and because I want to. I hope that by doing this I can assume a level of trust on the part of the reader that might otherwise not be afforded me.²⁴³

Even if this boils down to Eno’s nervousness at the prospect of his thoughts appearing in the context of a critical journal, it is his “consciousness of the hazard” of his language being misinterpreted or over-interpreted to which I would like to draw attention here. Elsewhere as well, Eno has shown signs that he is all too aware of the ways that language, even ordinary spoken or written prose, can work on a multitude of levels, not all of which were intended by the speaker or writer. This is especially true when it comes to historically, emotionally, and conceptually loaded words – big words like “art,” “music,” and “God.” In 1978, after discussing what he and others mean by the term “art band,” he said:

Art – and artist – are words that are very hard to use. I use them all the time because I’m not frightened of them anymore. I just decided that there’s nothing else to describe what I want to say, so I have to use them. But I know, at the same time, that it evokes the most awful ideas in other people’s minds – so I use the terms rather judiciously.²⁴⁴

As we have already noted, “music” is a word that Eno increasingly finds inadequate for the products of the recording studio. In 1983 he put it this way:

I think the word “music” has become difficult to describe. Traditionally music was written down and given to a conductor, who then translated it for the performers. It was necessarily ephemeral. Once the performance was finished it ceased to exist except in code on paper or in people’s memory. Now music is anything but ephemeral. When you make a record it exists forever and it exists in space.²⁴⁵

Eno here cuts to the core of a problem with which ethnomusicologists, scholars of popular music, and musicologists concerned with the performance of early music have begun to grapple over the last few decades. If, as Marhall McLuhan said, “the medium is the message,” then when we are dealing with “music” in entirely different mediums – live, written, recorded – do we perhaps not need entirely different words for each medium, or different sets of concepts to understand what message is being presented in each case? Modern recording technology has developed to the point where the sound heard can be “larger than life,” an intensification of reality, in the same sense that a Hollywood film, through quick cuts, panning, music, use of multiple locations, slow motion, color distortion or enhancement, and other techniques, presents a sequence of events to the viewer that are impossible to duplicate in a theater situation with live actors. Music teacher Andrew Buchman of Evergreen State College told an amusing anecdote at a conference I attended recently: one of his students, writing a report on a live concert, enthused that “the sound was great – almost CD quality!”

If Eno is wary of the ambiguities of language in ordinary speech and prose, it is precisely such ambiguities that he has attempted to exploit in his song lyrics. The idea that in terms of the meaning conveyed the sung word stands somewhere between the specificity of the spoken word and the abstract emotional language of music is not new, of course. In rock music, the first self-conscious experiments in the use of song lyrics for their purely phonetic and evocative qualities, rather than for their verbal meanings, were undertaken in the 1960s by Bob Dylan, many of whose songs, especially on his 1965-6 masterpieces Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, appeared to be chaotic jumbles of fantastic images without much connection to left-brain, linear, linguistic reality. The influence on Dylan of the French symbolist poets of the nineteenth century, Rimbaud in particular, and of the zen/beat poets of the 1950s like Allen Ginsburg, was more than superficial: for Dylan, such poets offered a concept of the use of song quite different from the one that had been current in the world of popular song for over a century.²⁴⁶

After Dylan, almost anything was possible in rock lyrics, and songwriters, some under the influence of psychoactive drugs and the psychedelic movement of the late 1960s, poured out streams of unprocessed visual, sensuous and conceptual imagery. John Lennon credited Dylan directly with showing the Beatles that song lyrics didn’t have to make sense, and indeed the Beatles’ lyrics after Help of 1965 took an entirely different direction. Lennon said, for instance, “You don’t have to hear what Bob Dylan’s saying, you just have to hear the way he says it.”²⁴⁷ Other rock groups and songwriters who explored the realms of free association and “meaninglessness” in their work included the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, and Yes.²⁴⁸

It was after the psychedelic efflorescence had died down considerably, in the early 1970s, that Eno began writing and recording songs. Four of his solo albums between 1973 and 1977, Here Come the Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), Another Green World, and Before and After Science) consist mostly of songs, with an occasional instrumental piece, since then he has written lyrics only rarely. Eno’s lyrics stand directly in the tradition of painting with words in a rock music context that begins with Dylan and runs through the psychedelic songwriters of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and it was his lyrics, as much as his music, ideas, and personal image, that were behind the critical excitement that accompanied his appearance on the scene. Eno stands apart from most of the songwriters of the era in the deliberation and rationality with which he approached his task. For him, presenting as art the unprocessed psychic contents of consciousness and of the unconscious was not enough: there was a distinction to be made between the vision and the form in which it was presented, and the working-out of the form was as important as the vision itself.

Another important influence on Eno’s concept of lyrics was the phonetic poetry of Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters, Ernst Jandl, and Richard Huelsenbeck. Shortly after getting out of art school, Eno went through a period of about six months during which he experimented with sequences of words selected solely for their phonetic, “musical” qualities, without any regard for their denotational or connotational meanings. He integrated his ideas about phonetic poetry with his experiments with tape recorders: phonetic poetry

was the first musical area that I was interested in [as a composer/performer]. It was a kind of music in disguise, so I allowed myself to be interested in it. At the time I’d been listening to music for a long time, and since I couldn’t play any instruments and could scarcely control my voice, I considered that I really didn’t have a future in that area ... [Doing phonetic poetry] was important in that it started me using tape recorders in an interesting way because shortly after I had begun doing work with my own voice, I’d begun building up backing tracks of lots of other voices on top of which to do my poems, so that I was starting to work with multi-tracking if you like at that stage.²⁴⁹

In the song lyrics on his published solo albums, Eno rarely indulges in pure phonetic poetry, rather, he treads a careful line between nonsense and sense, between connotation and denotation, between the explicit and the implicit. When, in 1985, he and John Cage were talking about the distaste they share for music that comes too heavily laden with intentions, Eno added, “I have the same feeling about lyrics. I just don’t want to hear them most of the time. They always impose something that is so unmysterious compared to the sound of the music [that] they debase the music for me, in most cases.”²⁵⁰ This disinclination to deal with the concreteness of verbal meanings played a large part in Eno’s turn away from songwriting after having finished Before and After Science in 1977.

The process of writing song lyrics has always been “peculiar and convoluted” for Eno, to write them at all he had to “trick” himself into doing it. He felt writing lyrics was embarrassing because of the way words can expose the mind’s thoughts and feelings directly. To write words, he had to search for ways to throw the inner critical voice off guard:

With the lyric writing, I tend to begin by just shouting to a backing track, gradually building up a system of syllable rhythm, then getting the kind of phonetics that I want and gradually beginning to fill in words to the types of sounds my voice is making at this stage ... It works from sound to words and from words to meaning, so it works quite the other way around from the way people normally think lyrics are written, I think.²⁵¹

Eno used this “backwards” technique to write the lyrics to the songs on all of his solo progressive rock albums. He would very infrequently, if ever, begin to work on a song with any concrete idea of what it would be about in the verbal sense. “The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music,”²⁵² as unselfconsciously as possible, with a “what would happen if?” attitude. Eno has likened his lyric-writing process to “automatic writing, the way you scribble until words start to appear.”²⁵³ Frame of mind is all-important in this sort of creativity: while the negative critical judgement or censor, which tends to inhibit the free play of musical and verbal association, must be turned off, positive judgement of other kinds must at some point be exercised to determine whether the words fit the music and have suitable musical colors in themselves, whether the words are indeed capable of evoking a rich enough fabric of meaning – whether, in short, the words are any good. In effect, Eno’s lyric-writing technique represents a way of probing the unconscious mind, systematically mining it for images and meanings – meanings tied up with images that may still be somewhat obscure once found. Eno is not interested in trying to strip off the final layers of ambiguity, the final results of such a stripping might resemble the dream interpretations of psychoanalysis, and hence indeed have a pronounced “embarrassing” effect. Eno is content to give the listener the dream without the interpretation, the more so since this gives the listener the opportunity of being creative, through trying to work his or her own thoughts and emotions around the images presented. He said in 1981:

It’s as if you’ve discovered a very dusty inscribed stone somewhere, and you’re trying to scrape off all the muck to find out what’s underneath it, and you keep coming up with one word here, another one there, and you’re trying to imagine what might be in between those words. So in that sense I’m in the same position as the listener. I’m looking for the meaning of it as well. The only temptation to resist is the temptation to fall into a simple meaning. It’s a tantalizing process, you know?²⁵⁴

Eno’s image of cleaning the dusty old stone in search of its inscription is strikingly reminiscent of analogies used in analytical psychology to describe the process of trying to make conscious contact with the contents of the unconscious. A Jungian might amplify Eno’s image by saying that such a stone was inscribed ages ago by a “civilization” with which we no longer have direct contact (the archetypes of the collective unconscious), it bears some message of great importance to us now, if we can only make it out. Eno may not find the whole message, some of the letters may be worn away with age, and he may have to fill in some of its words through guesswork. And he is not intent on interpreting the message in a personal way, at least not in public, he is content to let it speak for itself, for it might have a different meaning for different listeners.

Ultimately, this reluctance to actively interpret the contents of the unconscious, to risk the embarrassment that might accompany such interpretation, must be considered a limitation in Eno’s song lyrics. His words, for all their ingenuity, evocative power, and phonetic sensibility, often lack the sense of real moral commitment that comes with the best rock lyrics, like those of Dylan or Lennon. Eno’s lyrics are strong in their aesthetic impact, and occasionally in their mysterious, quasi-spiritual quality, they have less to say about the realm of the ethical, the realm of human realities and relationships. They are not so self-indulgent as some of the spacey cosmic tableaus of early psychedelia and later progressive rock, and yet one feels that Eno sometimes is indeed holding back too much, is perhaps too nervous about making a real statement. But at least he seems to be aware of his intentions, and his lyrics do accomplish what they set out to do, which is to force the listener to forge some kind of meaning out of them.