Broken Hallelujahs

Well, as we all work (post-academic year) towards returning to the ranks of living, I find myself wondering if any of you ENLT 325ers are still stopping by this locale for an occasional visit. A couple of you have asked how one might have responded to the "broken hallelujah" phrase on the take-home final exam. It's a phrase that popped up on multiple occasions in class discussions, and I also wrote about it briefly (I think) on the blog. In any event, if you merely contemplate the possible connotations of the phrase, I think you might realize that pretty much everything we read this past semester contained some manner of broken hallelujah. In Leonard Cohen's song, the phrase distils the speaker's sense of love as he considers his fading relationship with his lover. You might also think, though, of Keats's speaker disconsolately trying to recover the glories of the nightingale's song; or of the concertgoer in Woolf's "The String Quartet," who is returned to the mundane, banal everyday world when the last note disappears into the air; or of Mrs. Ramsay, who laments the disintegration of the perfect moment (a hallelujah by candlelight) of the dinner party; or of the male speaker in Springsteen's "The River," who mourns the untarnished beauty of his young romance, which now haunts him "like a curse"; or of Wordsworth in "Tintern Abbey," who returns to the Wye as an older, more subdued, more weighted human being; or of the hopeful idyll and harmony that is momentarily created between the terrorists and the hostages in Bel Canto. So many of the writers (and musicians, too, I guess) we experienced this past semester were in their various ways trying to bridge the gulf between the holy and the broken hallelujah. And all of this ties in with the point we frequently made that some of the most exquisite music and beauty is intertwined with sorrow and sadness (perhaps because we know the moment is time-saturated, and must always pass).

Better yet, here is how one of your classmates explored the phrase on the final exam: "A 'broken hallelujah' is a bittersweet feeling, or a sense of triumph or love accompanied by an equal sense of loss or pain. This idea is expressed in Leonard Cohen's song "Hallelujah" (covered by Jeff Buckley) in which he sings, 'love is not a victory march / It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah.' He feels love, and as a result he becomes vulnerable to the pain of its loss. In the song, the speaker of the lyrics loves the woman at whom the lyrics are directed, but that love is a sad, broken love. In U2's song 'Sunday Bloody Sunday,' Bono asks the question, 'There's many lost, but tell me who has won?' This is also a kind of broken hallelujah in that the triumph of winning is colored with irony, sadness, and a sense of loss. 'Laughter [...] is an explosion that tears us away from the world and throws us back into our own cold solitude' (Kundera 199). The idea of the 'singing pain' (Morrison 158) Golden Gray feels in Toni Morrison's Jazz is another example of the broken hallelujah. Golden thinks to himself that only once he knows he has a father does Gray 'feel his absence' (158). He both rejoices at the thought of knowing a father and feels the pain of this father's absence in his life. Ann Patchett's Bel Canto also has a broken hallelujah at the end of the novel. At the very beginning of the novel, the hostages all want to return to their homes and not be held hostage in the vice-president's mansion, but after a while they realize that they are happier with this disparate group of people, hostages and terrorists alike. When the government finally intervenes and the terrorists are all shot and killed the public would probably not understand the bittersweet feelings of the survivors as they return to their families and their homes. This ending seems to evoke the same question asked in 'Sunday Bloody Sunday' -- 'There's many lost, but tell me who has won?'"

Expansion

One way of measuring the passage of these three months is to consider the aggregate additions to my cd collection. Some of these (Beck, Springsteen, Shorter, the Shins, Travis) are titles I purchased myself over these three months, but most of the bounty traces back to you (something I neglected to thank you for yesterday during our last class meeting!). This in itself is reason enough to teach the class at least every other year, eh?!

Tom Waits Beautfiul Maladies; Modest Mouse This is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About.; Ben Harper and the Blind Boys of Alabama There Will Be a Light; The Arcade Fire Funeral; Wayne Shorter Alegria; Spearhead Home; Neutral Milk Hotel In the Aeroplane Over the Sea; The Lemon of Pink Books; a Dwight Yoakam collection; a Mike Doughty collection; a Kristin Hersh collection; a Jack Johnson collection; Bloc Party Silent Alarm; The Shins Oh, Inverted World and Chutes too Narrow; Beck Guero; Travis The Man Who; Michael Allen Quartet Live at Cecil Green House; a Sidney Bechet collection; The Album Leaf In a Safe Place; assorted songs by Loreena McKennitt, Franz Ferdinand, the Futureheads, Devendra Barnhart, Talib Kweli; Low The Great Destroyer and Things We Lost in the Fire; Bruce Springsteen Devils & Dust.

I'm sure in some ways the music listed here will also one day constitute a "library of lost sensations."

U2 2U?

Well, you all have heard enough variety in the music offerings in this course to know I’m not just a one-dimensional, U2 lover. But I can hardly resist a chance to supplement my comments in class regarding U2’s significance with a blog posting.

I’m always rather confused by the term “selling out” when I hear it (whether referring to U2 or to most bands). What does this mean? Because U2 follows up the overly-earnest Joshua Tree with a big, bombastic, multimedia, sensory overload, postmodern spectacle like ZooTv and PopMart, does that mean they’ve “sold out”? Isn’t that to ignore that those tours were mostly about being satirical and parodic regarding the excesses of rock stardom (hey, we just saw clips from This is Spinal Tap, after all), as well as to interrogate (and at times celebrate) the influence of technology and global connectedness represented by satellites, the circulation of cultural productions, the fraught notions of “home” and identity construction, etc.? Or is it “selling out” when they depart from the big, supposedly overdone tours and return to their traditional influences and styles on their two most recent cds (and accompanied by a pair of very stripped down tours)? Is it “selling out” when they try to get their music in the heads of today’s young people (new fans, from their perspective, who might give them the ability to say that they’re still “relevant”) by debuting a snippet of their new single in an I-Pod commercial for which they do not get paid?

Did Dylan “sell out” when he put the electric guitar around his neck at the Newport Folk Festival? Are the Shins selling out when they allow their song “New Slang” to appear in the Garden State movie and on the accompanying soundtrack? Not to give myself previously underground academic “street” credibility, but am I selling out by posting flyers around campus for a Literature and Music class? I guess it’s just rare that I understand what that term actually implies.

I think a lot of the U2 antagonism that exists might be residual feelings from Bono’s period of more overt and occasionally uncomfortable pontificating (the “am I bugging you? I don’t mean to bug ya” lines from Rattle and Hum, for example). If he’s on the cover of Time magazine now for his work on behalf of the world’s poor and disenfranchised, is that his fault? The guy was, after all, just nominated for a Nobel peace prize (the only individual to win a Grammy, and Oscar, and to be nominated for a Nobel prize, incidentally), so it’s no longer possible to claim he’s putting himself in the limelight for selfish, egotistical, self-righteous reasons, etc.

I will always think Achtung Baby was the pinnacle of their career, and that “One” will go down as their most memorable, endlessly interesting, and perfectly constructed song. But when you hear a song like “In a Little While” on “All That You Can’t Leave Behind”—a song that is supposedly about a hangover but that becomes something of a beautiful and ravaged gospel song the more you listen to it (especially when you contemplate the fact it was the song Joey Ramone chose to listen to before he died)—it’s hard to argue they’re no longer writing brilliant music.

Others want to enter the arena on this one? Bring it on!

(By the way, if you ask me in class (again) to perform the indignity of showing you that moment 22 years ago when I was Bono in a high school air-jam, I’ll project the picture (and probably immediately go hide); if nothing else, it’ll give me some data that someone is still visiting this blog!)

Music and Film

You know by now that I had been planning to show "O, Brother Where Art Thou?" as part of our proceedings this semester. I thought that film would have nicely picked up some of the strands of our discussion regarding Dylan and the folk tradition, as well as the ideas of wandering and homelessness that have inhered in much of what we've read and listened to this semester. It would also have served nicely as an introduction to our discussion of the jazz aesthetic and the Morrison novel, and it would have anticipated the ideas of music as resistance and music as signifier of cultural authenticity. And then there's the wonderful way that music works as a form of storytelling in that film.

Even though our two film days are now off the schedule -- which I regret, but which I think was the right decision in this case -- I remain curious about what springs to your mind when you consider the convergence of music and film. What films are memorable to you in terms of music (and why)? You might respond with films that to varying degrees include music as their subject matter, or films that are almost unimaginable without their soundtracks or scores (can you imagine "Jaws" without John Williams's score??), or films that use music to advance or augment narrative, or films that use musical technique as a structuring device, etc. What film might have fit particularly well in the schedule for this course (and why)? Sara recently reminded me of the conversations about jazz that occur in Michael Mann's recent film "Collateral" (with Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx), which would be a good example to share (and as I remember Mann's use of rousing Irish music during that pulsating flight to the waterfall sequence in "The Last of the Mohicans," clearly here's a director who consistently uses music memorably in his films).

(incidentally, y'all, there's still plenty of good stuff you might respond to nestled within this blog ... even going as far back as the very first posting, which asked you to nominate the all-time most melancholy songs! Simply click on "comments" and add your voice to the chorus!)

Waving Goodbye (again)

I may be creating more false endings than you see in a bad Hollywood slasher film, but not only is it tough to leave Woolf behind, but her novels and her concerns are a landmark in so many ways for the pursuits of this course. They are like that fin rising out of “the waste of waters” for Bernard, the vision that momentarily and partially lends flashes of ecstatic meaning and coherence. I’ve always been a big fan of Kundera, but somehow I can’t help but feel we don’t do him any favors by reading him next to Woolf: there’s a thinness and near inconsequentiality to The Book of Laughter and Forgetting coming as it does on the heels of The Waves. But that’s just me. It’s just that when you give yourself over to Woolf’s novels, you can experience such an extension and, to use Keith’s word, such an “amplification” of your being in the world; aesthetically, too, a novel like The Waves is experienced as if it were a painting or a piece of music: you tend to feel it with your whole body.

As another gesture towards bidding adieu to The Waves – and for those who may be interested in consolidating (and helping me create?) some additional notes and thoughts – allow me some final (yeah, right) and perhaps ultimately rambling musings:

First of all, as we did for To the Lighthouse, how about examples of memorable lines, similes, or generally stunning writing? How about Bernard contemplating the calibration his wife brings to his life and being: “I am inclined to pin myself down most firmly there before the loaf at breakfast with my wife, who being now entirely my wife and not at all the girl who wore when she hoped to meet me a certain rose, gave me that feeling of existing in the midst of unconsciousness such as the tree-frog must have couched on the right shade of green leaf” (260). Or this metaphor describing the conversations and confluent minds of Neville and Bernard: “There we talked; sat talking; sauntered down that avenue, the avenue which runs under the trees, the trees that hung with fruit, which we have trodden so often together, so that now the turf is bare round some of those trees, round certain plays and poems, certain favorites of ours—the turf is trodden bare by our incessant unmethodical pacing” (272). Or the type of line that induces self-reflection, such as when Bernard recalls “being in love for the first time” and notes “I made a phrase—a poem about a wood-pigeon—a single phrase, for a hole had been knocked in my mind, one of those sudden transparencies through which one sees everything” (241). What have served as sudden transparencies in your life? Along the same lines, and with only slightly different vocabulary, Bernard realizes that he and his five friends “all had their rapture; their common feeling with death; something that stood them in stead.” After noting that “some people go to priests; others to poetry,” Bernard reaffirms “I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken” (266).

And this, finally, is what this novel ultimately seems to be about: finding something to shore against our ruins (to recall Eliot), something to at least create the illusion that things might be unbroken. Thus the consolation Bernard finds in realizing “what a sense of the tolerableness of life the lights in the bedrooms of small shopkeepers give us!” (233). They’ll get up the next morning and open the shop, Tuesday will follow Monday, etc. For a while, Bernard’s wife, family, and domestic routines do the trick, causing him to think that “what was fiery and furtive like a fling of grain cast into the air and blown hither and thither by wild gusts of life from every quarter is now methodical and orderly and flung with a purpose.” But then that oh-so-fateful appendage: “or so it seems” (262).

A line that could nearly apply to anything we’ve read (and will read) this semester: “It is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams” (274). It has been a course about hauntings. From the younger selves of the narrator of “Tintern Abbey,” to Keats’s dead brother who permeates the two odes we read, to Michael Furey and the vast hosts of the dead, to the spectral spirits of “The Waste Land,” to the animating presence of the late Mrs. Ramsay, to the incomprehensible loss of Percival – the living dead return to nourish, to challenge, to force self-reckonings, to console … Wordsworth is all over the place as a seeming influence in this novel, too, isn’t he? It makes me realize that one of things I love about courses like this is the serendipitous threads, associations, and conversations that end up being created across disparate texts. At one point Bernard observes that “visual impressions often communicate thus briefly statements that we shall in time to come uncover and coax into words. I notes under F., therefore, ‘Fin in a waste of waters.’ I, who am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement, make this mark, waiting for some winter’s evening” (189). Doesn’t this sound like one of Wordsworth’s “spots of time,” one that’s stored away until “emotions recollected in tranquility” lead to artistic inspiration.

As for music, well, I don’t think Keith will mind if I import text from one of his emails; it’s too good not to share, and it suggests we can benefit from using the language of chamber music and the language of the symphony/sonata form to understand the formal and thematic concerns of Woolf’s project: “How like listening to a concert the experience of reading her (and others who do such thinking on the page) can be once you focus (instead of multi-task or zone out) and see what she's up to. Specifically, if you think of the standard quartet as four voices speaking a musical language, it's not difficult to find the parallel with Woolf's sextet of characters. Look at how, by the third section of The Waves (sun risen, characters now college age), the soliloquies stretch out and the language deepens to reflect the expanded awareness of the characters. Voila -- exposition to development! And then, when the group reunites for the first time post-college, Woolf makes the next masterstroke. She has them speak in much the same way – same short bursts, full of metaphor -- as they were when they were kids. The awareness is greater, but the constructions and rhythms of language are absolutely similar. Sounds like the first round of recapitulation to me.”

Musical language and identity: what friends, what family members – what notes – do you need in your life for balance, for completion? Consider Bernard in this two-page sequence, when we understand that he’s both a musical note in a fugue AND a composer and arranger: “To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people’s eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self … With them I am many-sided. They retrieve me from darkness … Yet they drum me alive. They brush off these vapours. I begin to be impatient of solitude—to feel its draperies hang sweltering, unwholesome about me” (116-7). And then, sentences later, it’s Bernard as composer: “I could describe every chair, table, luncher here copiously, freely. My mind hums hither and thither with its veil of words for everything. To speak, about wine even to the waiter, is to bring about an explosion. Up goes the rocket. Its golden grain falls, fertilizing, upon the rich soil of my imagination” (117).<>

There’s also the despair dueling with resolve and heroism in The Waves that recalls the dramatic shifts of emotion and tempo in Beethoven’s late works. And there’s the significant fact that when Bernard is pulled out of his reveries in the restaurant near the end, it’s sounds that summon him back, positively: “Listen: a whistle sounds, wheels rush, the door creaks on its hinges. I regain the sense of complexity and the reality and the struggle” (294). It may be he’s hearing an urban version of the music of the spheres. And will Bernard leave the world “not with a bang but a whimper,” like Eliot’s “hollow men,” or will he, like Gabriel Conroy, ride out the last wave with the awareness that it is “better to pass boldly into the next world than to wither dismally with age”? We know the answer to that one, of course: “Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!” (297).

Remembering Rhoda

This posting comes less from a need to fill in Rhoda's story than to share a wonderful poem. Do you all know Stevie Smith's 1957 poem "Not Waving but Drowning"? We can create our own pun on Woolf's novel there in Smith's title, but more importantly we get a kind of vivid mini-drama that suggests a person (consider Rhoda) whose gestures have been tragically misinterpreted throughout his (her) life:

Not Waving but Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

It's a shattering poem when you think about the contrast between the dead man's inner torment and the image of good nature his friends saw in his comings and goings (his "larkings"). Like The Waves, it's a work that suggests many of us don't always feel at home in the world, and that we have to try to convince ourselves and others that we do. And sometimes, alas, we can't call upon that resolve Bernard summons at the end of the novel.

"Desert sky, dream beneath a desert sky ..."

Ah, well, I have taken a rather long hiatus from the blog, and I've been happy to see a couple others holding down the fort for a spell. I actually just returned from five days in Palm Springs, where I took my mid-semester, weary, half-sick self for some restorative high desert air, hiking in Joshua Tree National Park, Mexican dinners at Las Casuelas, and the aroma therapy of blooming citrus trees. Then again, how much restoration one can expect when your luggage includes a one year-old and a three year-old is another matter!.

Such an excursion suggests its own soundtrack, right? Certainly (and obviously) there would be U2's "The Joshua Tree." I think I read somewhere that the tree featured in that album's insert burned some years ago in a wildfire (lightning strike?), so I was spared the quixotic journey of trying to seek it out. Incidentally, since we were recently discussing lyrics as poetry, that album makes me think of the poetic, intensely moving elegy, "One Tree Hill." Written as a tribute to the band's friend, Greg Carroll, the song is memorable for its lyrics (another one of those songs using the "river to the sea" metaphor), for its slow burning emotional intensity, and for the way the Edge's guitar revs up to mimic a motorcycle late in the song (Carroll died in a motorcycle accident), which then yields to a plaintive prayer from Bono as the song concludes. Always a favorite of mine, lyrically and musically ...

Back to the High Desert soundtrack. We didn't have a convertible in which to listen to it properly, but you can be sure I brought along my copy of "Sinatra at the Sands," which was recorded in 1966 with Count Basie's band and certainly evokes a bygone world (fortunately, a world that can still (even if just barely) be summoned via current-day Palm Springs, which seems to be getting some of its hipness back). And, wow, talk about some tight, sincere musicianship, and such old chestnuts as "Come Fly With Me," "I've Got You Under My Skin," "Fly Me to the Moon," "Angel Eyes," etc. I've always loved Dean Martin's line: "It's Frank's world; we just live in it."

I didn't bring it with me this time, but every time I drive to Joshua Tree I think of Robert Plant's "29 Palms," a song I've always found to be irresistible. In terms of memory and music, too, driving on Interstate 10 reminds me of the first time I ever heard David Gray's terrific cd, "White Ladder," which probably has to rank up there as one of the best driving cds. Music and the open road, music and the inside of a car. Now there's a topic for a lexia in your multi-genre essay! In his book, Traveling Music, Neil Peart writes that "in the unique zen-state of driving for hour after after, music didn't just pass the time, it filled the time, with pleasure, stimulation, discovery, and memories."

So I guess your prompt in this case -- and here we may be back to one of Hornby's "Top Five" lists -- is what ranks high on your list of best driving cds, or best "traveling music" memories??

Hornby: the anti-Adorno?

I had meant to read a couple short selections from Nick Hornby's Songbook that were germane to recent discussions (and humorous as well). Hornby is one of the few critics to write convincingly about why it's ok to love pop music. And given Simon Frith's sense that we should develop a critical language that allows us to sort out the good from the bad, the banal from the clever, the fresh from the stale (easier said than done, of course, when it comes to value judgments), I thought of the following:

"And yet I suspect that there is a musical, rather than pathological, explanation for my early dalliance with Zeppelin and Sabbath and Deep Purple, namely that I was unable to trust my judgment of a song. Like a pretentious but dim adult who won't watch a film unless it has subtitles, I wouldn't listen to anything that wasn't smothered in loud, distorted electric guitars. How was I to know whether the music was any good otherwise? Songs that were played on piano, or acoustic guitar, by people without moustaches or beards (girls, for example), people who ate salad rather than rodents...well, that could be bad music, trying to play a trick on me. That could be people pretending to be The Beatles when they weren't. How would I know, if it was all undercover like that? No, best avoid the whole question of good or bad and stick to loud instead. You couldn't go too wrong with loud.

"The titles helped, too. Song titles that did not contain obvious heavy-rock signifiers were like music without loud guitars: somebody might be trying to part you from your pocket money, fool you into thinking it was something it wasn't. Look at, say, Blue, by Joni Mitchell. Well, I did, hard, and I didn't trust it. You could easily imagine a bad song called "My Old Man" (not least because my dad liked a song called "My Old Man's a Dustman") or "Little Green" (not least because my dad liked a song called "Little Green Apples"); and God knows you couldn't tell whether the record was any good by listening to the &$*&#@ thing. But the songs on Black Sabbath's album Paranoid, for example, were solid, dependable, immediately indicative of quality. How could there be a bad song called "Iron Man," or "War Pigs," or -- my cup ranneth over -- "Rat Salad"?" (20-21).

Reminiscent of our discussion this past Thursday on the merits (or not) of repetition, which also had me thinking of those walking, repetitive, ostinato figures heard in the background of "The Rite of Spring" at times, consider this:

"I discovered, sometime during the last few years, that my musical diet was light on carbohydrates, and that the rock riff is nutritionally essential -- especially in cars and on book tours, when you need something quick and cheap to get you through a long day. Nirvana, The Bends, and The Chemical Brothers restimulated my appetite, but only Led Zeppelin could satisfy it; in fact, if I ever had to hum a blues-metal riff to a puzzled alien, I'd choose Zeppelin's 'Heartbreaker,' from Led Zeppelin II. I'm not sure that me going 'DANG DANG DANG DANG DA-DA-DANG, DA-DA-DA-DA-DA DANG DANG DA-DA-DANG' would enlighten him especially, but I'd feel that I'd done as good a job as the circumstances allowed. Even written down like that (albeit with uppercase assistance), it seems to me that the glorious, imbecilic loudness of the track is conveyed effectively and unambiguously. Read it again. See? It rocks." (22)

More seriously, and explaining why I thought to put this lyric on the handout last week, here's Hornby's take on Aimee Mann:

"What makes listening to Bachelor No. 2 such a treat is Mann's sinuous, Burt Bacharach-like melodies and her verbal facility. "Ghost World" has the kind of lyrics that people don't write very often: simple, direct, sweet, resonant -- in other words, proper lyrics, instead of tenth-rate poetry. 'Finals blew, I barely knew my graduation speech / With college out of reach / If I don't find a job, it's down to Dad and Myrtle Beach,' runs the first verse; I've read entire first novels that cover similar territory less effectively. (The song, an achingly pretty lament for a nothing-happening teenage summer, also offers a respite from all the typical Mann finger-pointing)" (162)

And here's Adorno, Keats, and some of the questions of our course reconstituted in a discussion of pop music and lyrics:

"This frequently happens in pop music, of course -- all sorts of people knock up a neat tune and then can't furnish it with anything but a few tatty secondhand lines about eagles flying and love dying -- but one is struck here by what seems like Mann's inability to tame and control her melodic gift. It is, perhaps, the curse of the trade. 'All art constantly aspires toward the condition of music,' Walter Pater said, in one of the only lines of criticism that has ever meant anything to me (if I could write music, I'd never have bothered with books); music is such a pure form of self-expression, and lyrics, because they consist of words, are so impure, and songwriters, even great ones like Mann, find that, even though they can produce both, words will always let you down. One half of her art is aspiring toward the condition of the other half, and that must be weird, to feel so divinely inspired and so infallibly human, all at the same time. Maybe it's only songwriters who have ever had any inkling of what Jesus felt on a bad day." (49-50)

Song as Poetry, Poetry as Song

Thanks for your various comments regarding the Leonard Cohen and Bruce Springsteen lyrics; that was an interesting discussion. One can talk about lyrics as poetry, certainly, and, indeed, that's pretty much how popular music first made its way into the academy (i.e., under the guise of literary studies). Or one can talk about the embeddedness of popular music (its relation to the social conditions determining its production and consumption, its response to history, its response to the conditions of modernity, its response to monologism of various forms, etc.). Or one can talk about the structure of the pop song, which, like the novel, to some can be said to have an "ideal" form (3-4 minutes long, verse-chorus-verse, etc.). Or -- and this seems especially relevant to the discussions we've been having all semester regarding the literature we've read and the music we've listened to -- one can talk about popular music's ability to shape individual and collective memory, to organize our sense of time, and, if not actually to "stop" time, at least to focus our attention on the feeling of time. It's really not a stretch to argue that we can bring Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," Keats's odes, Springsteen's "The River" and Cohen's "Hallelujah" into the same orbit. All you might say (and here I'll privilege Cohen's formulation for a moment), seek to unite the holy and the broken hallelujahs. All seek to understand time (past, present, and future) in such a way that life can be affirmed. All reflect an astonishing admixture of romanticism, idealism, resignation, bittersweet irony, and consolation. And the meaning of each lyric, in diverse ways, is to some degree intimately related to the lyric's structure and form.

Joni Mitchell rather memorably claimed that with the appearance of Dylan's "Positively Fourth Street," the pop song had grown up. Since then we've encountered musicians who've nearly aspired to be poets (e.g., Dylan, Van Morrison, Mitchell, Paul Simon, etc.) and poets who've aspired to be musicians (e.g., Cohen, Patti Smith, etc.). We've talked through some examples in class (Cohen, Springsteen, Michael Stipe, Ryan Adams, Aimee Mann), but given the fact that music lyrics are all-too-often criticized for their banality and worthlessness, can you share other examples of song lyrics that function as poetry?