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One Hundred Million Eyes Posted 00:44 (GMT) 12th April 2008 The next chapter in this incredible tale is available for you to skim over for about twenty seconds and maybe laugh a little. In the meantime, I am going to continue my tirade against sloppy lyrics by going against an even bigger offender or, to look at it another way, an even easier target. It's a more obscure target, drawing again upon the world of British shitpop. I know the majority of my readers live in the Americas so they will have to bear with me. All this needs is a little backstory. Back in 2002 there was a BBC programme called Fame Academy which was a trite talent show/reality carcrash churned out just as the format was getting boring. Very similar to American Idol, it was a process-of-elimination whittle-fest with the aim of finding a winner who would then (somehow) become famous after the studio lights had gone out. For reasons I can't explain, the effort was so fruitless they should, with hindsight, have called it Working In Dixons Academy. Such is life. Anyway, the point is that no American readers will have heard of this show because they only get imports of our hits in a sort of Sopranos-Doctor Who tradeoff, perhaps conducted at gunpoint, and people living in this country won't remember anything about the first series of Fame Academy because it was 6 years ago. I was 15. When I mention that the two finalists were Ainslie (good name, bad spellcheck) Henderson and David Sneddon people who at the time were fans are probably saying "Who?" Such was the failure of this show to elevate either one to fame, at least with any lasting effect. In part two of my rant about how lyrics make the difference between a real song and a non-song, I would like to put forward that both singers failed to make it big because the songs they themselves wrote for the Fame Academy final had lyrics that didn't make any sense. Some people might be wondering why I'm returning to songs which were written 6 years ago. Well, for a start I didn't have a website 6 years ago. Secondly, these are the worst two songs in the past 6 years of human history. Finally, on a more personal note, my cantankerous misanthropy can be traced back to the year these songs came out. Try explaining to a 15-year-old girl why the song she likes doesn't make any sense. Try listening to it every day on the radio on the way to school and think about how it doesn't make any sense. It was at this time that I first felt the now-familiar feeling of being smart enough to realise something was stupid and the sheer alienation that comes from realising the rest of the world either hasn't figured it out or doesn't care. I felt like the eye of the storm. These are the two songs that did that. First up, 'Keep Me a Secret' by Ainslie - seen here having some sort of seizure in a hotel room. Watch him in that video. Watch him writhing and twitching like a crazy person, grinning smugly at the camera like the self-satisfied little prick he is. The crazy person simile works particularly well, since the lyrics to his song are a series of non-sequiturs sung as if they make sense by a man whose mind clearly teeters on the obsidian brink of madness. He sounds like he's trying to make up his own language - this is 'Chasing Pavements' cubed. It's tempting to just go through the song line by line and dissect exactly why it doesn't make sense. So I will. "I'm
trying not to feel you What does he mean, "I'm trying not to feel you?" That's not the context in which you use that word. Feeling something (or someone) is either a passive response (as in "I felt her heel digging into my shoe") or the process of actively feeling someone up i.e. groping them. In either case, you can't just try not to feel someone. In the first sense it's impossible not to feel and in the second sense... well, it's very easy not to do it. How hard does he have to try? Does he also have to try hard not to strangle people? I hear there are medicines and padded rooms to help with this sort of thing. "And
if you dare to cross that line you know Is that a threat? Cross that line and I'll step on some fire. Or... my toes will. Or they would. You know they would. It doesn't make any sense on a sentence level. Anyway, if she's crossing the line he's not stepping anywhere. Don't get me started on the fire. Why is there fire? It sounds like he meant to say "catch on fire" or "set on fire" but got confused. "Oh
sizzle when it's face on face When what's face on face? The fire? Yeah, you'd sizzle then. Semantics aside for a second, a few lines ago she'd just brushed by and there was a line (perhaps made out of fire) neither of them had crossed. Now they're skin on skin. Did I miss something?
"I'm trying to keep you out We can only assume he means trying to keep her out of his head in the first bit. "Trying to keep me in" just sounds like he's trying not to ejaculate. I'm sorry but it does. "One
hundred million eyes What? What the hell is this? Was this part of the song written by H. P. Lovecraft? And since when could eyes hear? Or know? And what does this have to do with the line and the feeling and the sizzling? Anyway, let's take it to the chorus! "Keep
me a secret Why do they both need keeping secret? And if you keep yourself a secret is it possible to divulge other secrets whilst in a secretive state? Is "lock up all your doors" a phrase? No, it is not. It's "toes would step on fire" all over again. What about that whole "keep my kisses off your lipstick" thing? That's weird. I mean, it's technically accurate that when you kiss a girl and she's wearing lipstick you're kissing her lipstick but by that logic he should have sung "keep me out your sleeves" instead of "arms". Either that or he's just sitting in her room kissing tubes of her lipstick whilst she's not around and, presumably, swallowing her enchanted jewellery. This guy's insane. I'd lock up all my doors too if I knew he was in the neighbourhood. "I needn't not to notice you" I need not not to notice you. Okay, let's try making that into a sentence. "I don't need to not notice you." So, she's really easy to ignore - he doesn't need to deliberately ignore her. Phew. That should make it easier to not feel her, right? Another bullet dodged. "But you grab my eye" Oop, he lied. By the way - "grab my eye"? I did a Google search for the phrase "grab my eye". Four results. Three were song lyrics, of which two were the lyrics to this song. The fourth was a link to some fan fiction and on closer inspection it was used in the context of physically grabbing an eyeball. Maybe that's the sense that Ainslie meant it in. The freak. "Don't
let embraces linger Embraces tend to linger when your arms are tied together. Luckily, it's very easy to keep your arms untied. Just run away from people who approach you holding bits of old rope. And that in itself is pretty easy since it almost never happens. Hardly any effort involved, really. "Trying" to prevent arm bondage is like trying to "keep breathing". Also, it's a non-sequitur. "See
there you go again Don't make twitchy mad. He'll kick down all your doors and eat your lipstick. And feel you. That would be the danger he's referring to. Ainslie has discovered that "making me mad" rhymes with "making me mad"! Yay! Heh, he's right, that does rhyme. Then the sad realisation dawns: Ainslie couldn't think of anything to rhyme with "mad". Here are some: bad, sad, fad, glad, cad, 'nad, clad, pad, tad, rad, lad, had, dad. In fact most letters of the alphabet + the '-ad' suffix = a word. Here's a suggestion for a new lyric: "So there you go again/You're fucking my dad." It's that easy! Try it yourself. "One
hundred million reasons to ignore I just did a double-take. "One hundred million reasons to ignore wanting to be with you" is the song's first completely coherent sentence! What does it mean? He's got a million reasons to not want to go out with her! Yay! Then more Lovecraftian eye-horrors, their omnipresent stare piercing thought and flesh. Then we get the chorus again. Then the bridge: "All
I'm asking is for nothing Wait, if he's asking for nothing and she's happy with nothing... they both have nothing. What's that got to do with anything? Nothing. This song is like a Zen koan but instead of wisdom it imparts baffling stupidity. And unless that whole "if..." line trails off he's saying "if nothing is for enough for you keep me inside your head", which seems to suggest he's been a figment of her imagination this whole time. Forget the whole inside head/under breath paradox - it's now just one of a long list of nonsensical phrases. Then, as with 'Chasing Pavements', in lieu of a third verse we just get the chorus repeated ad nauseam. Throw in an awkward key-change and Ainslie singing louder and more emotively to convey just how much he wants to be kept secret and boom - we're done. And that song doesn't make any sense. The (three? four?) lines that are written in coherent English still don't follow on from what's gone before. All we're left with is a vague sense that this song is about a secret couple being watched by millions of eyes - the rest is just gibberish. Well, you've seen for yourself. It's nonsense. It's just like 'Chasing Pavements', in fact, in that the nonsense lines are written by some schmuck who thinks Yeah, this is the sort of thing they sing in songs and scribbles any old shit down, producing only a close approximation of coherent English which somehow misses the mark and includes phrases like "grab my eye", "step on fire" and "lock up all your doors". It's as if someone wrote a song and then sung it through a thick wall whilst a man on the other side who had recently received a head injury wrote down everything he thought he heard. I can think of no other way this could have happened. Now, if Ainslie lost the contest, the guy that beat him must have written a much better song, right? Well, yes and no. Enter David Sneddon. The Sneddmeister. Equally brown-haired, equally smug, equally inept at writing lyrics. If anything he's smugger. See for yourself. That smirk. You just want to lamp him. His song 'Stop Living The Lie' is better than Ainslie's in the same way that mass murder is better than genocide. For instance it has a coherent narrative, or rather two coherent narratives: one for the chorus, one for the verses. Here are the lyrics. As you can see, the verses are about a crying man and a girl who's dead inside bumping into each other in a coffee house. "We could all learn from them," Sneddon sings, without explaining what we're supposed to have learnt. I suppose we've learnt that crying in Starbucks is a good way to score with vulnerable women but personally I've found that openly weeping in a public place just makes women avoid me so really we've learnt nothing. That aside, there's some chronic 'Chasing Pavements' syndrome on display here. "Drowning his tears"? Tears are liquid, they can't drown. Is he drowning his sorrows, then? Is this Irish coffee? What about "vanish the frame"? What the fuck is that supposed to mean? They turn around and vanish the frame. He's missing a preposition. You can't just do that. You can't make sentences without all the words, whether it's a song or not. "That's me corner. That's me spotlight. Losing religion." I think not. How about the fact that the verses don't rhyme? Let's take a look: cafe/coffee - Ouch. God no. thoughts/knots - Requires an American accent but we'll give him that. him/him - Woops. name/frame - Fine, if the line made sense. pride/inside - Great. her/her - Oh no! Same problem again. It goes on like that for the rest of the song. The best one is "He sits alone and looks up to the eyes of an angel/She catches him staring and smiles the smile of an angel." Yes, "of an angel" rhyming with "of an angel" there. Lesson to be learnt here: don't use an angel metaphor unless you can think of something to rhyme with angel. We could do this all day. She smiles the smile of an angel, her mouth being the mouth of an angel, on the face which is the face of an angel. She gets up from the chair of an angel, crosses the room on the feet of an angel and leaves her lipstick on the table. Ainslie enters the Starbucks and starts kissing the lipstick of an angel. Chorus time! "I can't believe that you pull on a sleeve when you cry." I can't quite believe it either. Whose sleeve is this? His? Hers? The crying man's? It can be any sleeve - it doesn't matter as long as sleeve-pulling can take place during the moment of crying. Sneddon is incredulous. How could you pull a sleeve whilst crying? How could you? Classic 'Chasing Pavements' right there - it sounds like it means something, but it means fuck all. And he keeps going on about living The Lie. I've heard of living a lie. Living The Lie implies there is a single lie lived by everyone. The Lie. What is this Lie? Is it the Matrix? Is Sneddon the One? The Lie. Maybe it's a reference to Zoroastrianism. All Snedders will say by means of elaboration is that living THE LIE involves sticking in the knife, then giving the kiss of life. So, contradictory hot/cold behaviour is THE LIE.... somehow. What does this have to do with the crying coffee man and the dead-inside angel? Nothing! Neither of them is pulling on sleeves or starting knife fights. Verse and chorus are entirely separate - he even changes from the third person register to the second person. He's just changing the subject. Any bearing the two distinct narratives have on each other is purely coincidental. It sounds like it means something but it doesn't mean anything. Maybe this sounds like nit-picking... but, as with 'Chasing Pavements', the song is called 'Stop Living the Lie'. Lie-living is what the song is about. And once you unpack what that means and find that it actually means nothing, what are you left with? The whole song crumbles around you. Whatever you say about the song after that - it's got a beat, you can dance to it, the video's good, he's really playing the piano - is all irrelevant as far as I'm concerned because the lyrics are shit. You can't argue with sentence structure and grammar. It doesn't matter if these songs sound like good songs when you don't pay attention to the language they use. In the same way, today's strip might look like a good strip without reading it - but without reading it and understanding what it means it's just a load of pretty pictures. If I filled the speech bubbles with utter gibberish that sort of sounds right but means nothing, I can't really say I've written a strip as such. I've just pretended to. It's the difference between understanding the meaning behind something and just experiencing it on a superficial level. Because if you only focus on the surface, not only do you miss out on what's really important, you might be living The Lie and not know about it. And then someone might set you up the bomb. I'll stop. |
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