Poetic Qualities in Lyrics

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Poetic Qualities in Lyrics
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Outline

• Definitions
• Lyrics
• Ballad
• Theatrical Features
• Persona Modes
• Tone
• Figurative Language
• Simile
• Metaphor

• Synecdoche
• Metonymy
• Personification
• Imagery
• Symbolism
• Figurative Sounds
• Irony
• Allusion

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Lyric

• A brief, subjective poem strongly marked by
  imagination, melody, and emotion and creating a
  single, unified impression.
• The early Greeks defined the lyric as an
  expression of a single singer accompanied by a
  lyre.
• Some types of lyrics hymns, sonnets, songs,
  ballads, elegies.

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Ballad

• A form of verse to be sung or recited and
  characterized by its presentation of a dramatic
  or exciting episode in simple narrative form.
• Examples
• Harry Chapin, Cat's Cradle
• Crash test Dummies, Superman

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• Virgil Spencer's got a nineteen-inch Hitachi
• And many demons lingering
• Friday night he pulled a gun to change the
  channel
• Something that he picked up from the King
• His wife remembers well the man she knew
• Seems the dreams she had have all turned black
  and blue
• She's wasted years
• No time for tears
• Amanda Marshall, Birmingham

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Features of theatre applied to music

• Persona
• (mask, voice) the voice that speaks the poem
  (song) is not identical with the poet (lyricist)
  who writes it the author is counterfeiting the
  speech of person in a particular situation.

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Modes

• Lyric
• expresses the emotions of the narrator, to bring
  about a particular emotional response in the
  listener. Always uses 1st person narrator (I -
  We)
• Dramatic
• consists of a speech or address made to someone
  or something. Uses 1st person narrator (You - I)
  
• Narrative
• tells a story. Uses 3rd person (He She - It)

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Examples

• Lyric
• Why cant I - Liz Phair
• Dramatic
• Harder to breathe Maroon 5
• Are you happy now? Michelle Branch
• Narrative
• After all - Delerium

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• Here in subcity life is hard
• We can't receive any government relief
• I'd like to give Mr. President my honest regards
• For disregarding me...."
• Tracy Chapman's, Subcity
• Lyric mode
• Persona ghetto resident

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Mixed Modes

• She's Leaving Home / Beatles (Lennon/McCartney)
• Wednesday morning at five o'clock as the day
  begins
• Silently closing her bed room door
• Leaving the note that she hoped would say more
• She goes downstairs to the kitchen clutching her
  handkerchief
• Quietly turning the backdoor key
• Stepping outside she is free.
• She (We gave her most of our lives)
• is leaving (Sacrificed most of our lives)
• home (We gave her everything money could buy)
• She's leaving home after living alone (Bye, bye)
• For so many years.
• Narrative Mode / Backup singers in Lyric mode
  (parents)

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Tone

• Attitudes of the speaker (persona) toward
  himself, his subject, and his audience, reflected
  by choice of words, pitch, modulation, etc.
• For example playful, angry, ironic, confidential
• Often tone is detected by the ear rather than the
  eye.
• Examples
• Phil Collins, Another Day in Paradise
• Indigo Girls, Cold Beer and Remote Control

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• Watch out sister, watch out brother
• Watch our children while they kill each other
• With a gun they bought at Walmart discount stores
• Welcome to the hallway, metal detectors just been
  installed
• Hey isn't cops and robbers gettin' to be a big
  bore
• Mary, Mary quite contrary, close the door now
• It's much too scary
• Sheryl Crow, Love is a Good Thing

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Figurative language

• Simile
• a loose comparison items from different classes
  are explicitly compared by a connecting word such
  as like, as, than or by a verb such as appears or
  seems

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Simile Examples

• Rode like foam on the river of pity
• Suzanne Vega, Book of Dreams
• I'm shinin' like a new dime.
• You wave your hand and they girls scatter like
  crows
• All my dreams fall like rain on a downtown train
• Rod Stewart, Downtown Train

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More similes

• And now the infant with his cord is hauled in
  like a kite
• One eye filled with blueprints
• One eye filled with night
• Cohen, Stories of the street

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• Running into you like this without warning
• Is like catching a sniff of tequila in the
• morning
• Crash Test Dummies, I Think I'll Disappear Now

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MetaphorAll the worlds a stage

• A tight comparison asserts the identity of terms
  that are literally incompatible without
  connectives such as like or as
• Your imagination's having puppies
• The Tragically Hip, Something's On

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Metaphor examples

• And you treated my woman to a flake of your life
• Cohen, Famous Blue Raincoat
• If language were liquid, it would be rushing in
• In a silence more eloquent than any word could
  ever be
• Suzanne Vega, Language

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More metaphors

• Talking is just masturbating without the mess
• Happiness is not a fish that you can catch "
• Our Lady Peace, Happiness And The Fish
• If I cried me a river of all my confessions,
• Would I drown in my shallow regret?"
• Sarah McLachlan, Black

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SynecdocheAll hands on deck

• A kind of metaphor in which the whole is replaced
  by the part, or the part by the whole
• We can make it through these waves
• Acid, booze, and ass
• Needles, guns, and grass
• Lots of laughs, lots of laughs
• Sarah McLachlan, Blue

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MetonymyFrom the cradle to the grave

• Another kind of metaphor in which a concept,
  group, etc. is suggested by naming some object or
  idea which is not actually part of it, but
  associated with it.
• Take away our playstations
• And we are a third world nation
• Under the thumb of some blue blood royal son
• Who stole the oval office and that phony election
• Ani DiFranco, Self Evident

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Extended Metonymy

• It didn't get much rest at first,
• the headboard banging in the night.
• The neighbours didn't dare complain,
• oh everything was going right.
• Now there's no need to complain,
• cos it never makes a sound.
• Something beautiful left town,
• and she doesn't even know its name.
• Pulp, Live Bed Show

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Personification

• Attributing human feelings or characteristics to
  inanimate objects
• Solitude stands in the window
• She turns her head as I walk in the door
• Suzanne Vega's, Solitude

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Personification

• A terrible thought has moved into my mind
• Like an unwanted room-mate drunk on wine
• It feeds on my happiness won't pay the rent
• I must take proper measures to evict it
• Poe, Terrible Thought
• I caught you flirting with my memory
• You said she was just a friend
• Wild Strawberries, Fine

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• Extended Personification
• I met this girl, when I was ten years old
• And what I loved most she had so much soul
• She was old school, when I was just a shorty
• Never knew throughout my life she would be there
  for me
• On the regular, not a church girl she was secular
  
• I see niggaz slammin her, and takin her to the
  sewer
• But I'ma take her back hopin that the shit stop
• Cause who I'm talkin bout y'all is hip-hop
• Common Sense, I Used to Love H.E.R

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Imagery

• All the objects and qualities of sense
  perception sight, sound, smell, touch referred
  to in lyrics (literal or figurative) which help
  set up a mental picture in the mind of the
  listener
• You with your silky words
• And your eyes of green and blue
• You with your steel beliefs
• That don't match anything you do
• Cheryl Crow, Anything But Down

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More images

• You in your fancy material world
• Don't see the links of chain Binding blood
• Tracy Chapman, Material World
• The kids are playing in pennies
• They're up to their knees in money
• In the dirt of the churchyard steps"
• Suzanne Vega, Tired of Sleeping

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• Sweeping up the jokers that he left behind
• You find he did not leave you very much, not even
  laughter
• Like any dealer he was watching for the card
• That is so high and wild he'll never need to deal
  another
• He was just some Joseph looking for a manger
• Cohen, The Stranger Song

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Symbol

• An image so loaded with significance that it is
  both itself and something else that it richly
  suggests
• Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward
  dove..."
• Leonard Cohen, Dance Me to the End of Love

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Figurative sounds

• Alliteration
• Repetition of initial consonants. (e.g. Peter
  Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers)
• They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.
  (Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi)

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Assonance

• Repetition of vowel sounds.
• The lonely hollow bones were stowed below

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Consonance

• Repetition of a sequence of consonants, but not
  at the start of a word and with a change in the
  intervening vowel sounds.
• East or West, lust lost least

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• Every sigh, every sway
• You can hear everything that they say
• Something's begun like a war
• Or a family or a friendship
• Or a fast love affair
• Suzanne Vega, Room off the Street
• Our own ancestors
• Are hungry ghosts
• Closets so full of bones
• They won't close
• Tracy Chapman, All That You Have Is Your Soul

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• By fountains. By fishes.
• Writings in ashes.
• Birds. Herbs.
• Smoke from the altar.
• Suzanne Vega, Predictions

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Onomatopoeia

• The use of words which imitate sound.
• Her voice crackled on the old phone

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Rhythm

• Regular recurrence, especially of stresses or of
  long or short vowels pattern of recurring
  stresses in music, designed to induce a special
  effect, often magical or hypnotic.
• Meter refers to the pattern of the rhythm
• iambic -/ hello, trochaic /- open
• anapestic - -/ in the night
• dactyllic /- - diligence
• Each pattern is called a foot

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Rhythm vs Stress

• 'natural' pattern of stresses within sentences
  is often over-ridden by a pattern imposed by the
  songs rhythm
• unstressed syllables are squeezed in between
  stresses
• only strict pattern is that the stressed
  syllables fall on the beat

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/ - / - / - /
- / - /

• Desmond has a barrow in the marketplace
• Molly is the singer in a band
• Desmond says to Molly, girl I like your face
• And Molly says this as she takes him by the hand
• trochaic /-

/ - / - / - / - /
/ - / - / -
/ - / - /
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/ - - / - - / - -
/ -

• Picture yourself on a boat in a river
• With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
• Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly
• A girl with kaleidoscope eyes
• Lucy in the sky-y with di-amonds
• Lucy in the sky with diamonds
• Lucy in the sky with diamonds, ah
• dactyllic /- -

/ - - / - - / - -

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Rhyme

• Similarity in the ending sounds of two or more
  words. Rhyme scheme refers to the sequence in
  which the rhyme occurs. The first end sound is
  represented as the letter "a", the second is "b",
  etc.

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Other rhymes

• Slant (Near or Off)
• bones/homes
• Half
• sincerity/comparatively
• Double
• confirmation/information
• Internal
• Keep a slice of all the advice you give
• Feminine
• A rhyme that occurs in a final unstressed
  syllable pleasure/leisure, longing/yearning,
  waken/forsaken

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• Chasing dragons with plastic swords A
• Jack off Jimmy, everybody wants more B
• Scully and angel on the kitchen floor B
• And I'm calling Buddy on the ouija board A
• I've been thinking 'bout catching a train /C
• Leave my phone machine by the radar range /C
• Hello it's me, I'm not at home /D
• If you'd like to reach me, leave me alone /D
• Sheryl Crow, A Change

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Marry me girl be my fairy to the world Be my very
own constellation A teenage bride with a baby
inside Getting high on information And buy me a
star on the boulevard It's Californication Space
may be the final frontier But it's made in a
Hollywood basement Cobain can you hear the
spheres Singing songs off station to station And
Alderon's not far away It's Californication
A internal
B triple
C internal
B triple
C slant / internal
B
A
B slant
A internal
B slant
C
B
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Irony

• Expressing one idea but meaning the opposite
• How do you cool your lips, after a summer's
  kiss?
• How do you rid the sweat, after the body
  bliss?
• Jann Arden, Insensitive

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Paradox

• A statement which seems on its face to be self-
  contradictory or absurd, yet turns out to have a
  valid meaning
• Even damnation is poisoned with rainbows
• All the brave young men
• They are waiting to see a signal
• Which some killer will be lighting for pay
• Cohen, Old Revolution

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Oxymoron

• A type of paradox which is contradictory in a
  quick, two-part statement. For example jumbo
  shrimp
• Billy Joel, Angry Young Man
• I once believed in causes, too. I had my
  pointless point of view...''

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Hyperbole

• An obvious exaggeration of any sort, added for
  effect
• All the waiters in your grand café leave their
  tables when you blink.
• Billy Joel, Dont Ask Me Why

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Multiple Associations

• the poet (songwriter) juxtaposes seemingly
  unrelated images and allows the listener to
  decipher the relationships between them.

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Moan shock, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock
(makin') Reagan, Palestine, terror on the
airline, Ayotollah's in Iran, questions in
Afghanistan, Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride,
Heavy metal suicide Foreign debts, homeless
vets Aids, crack, Bernie Goetz Hypodermics on
the shore China's under martial law Rock n
roll and cola wars Billy Joel, We Didn't Start
the Fire Also Antonio Carlos Jobim, The Waters
of March
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Allusions

• References to works of literature or other works
  of art
• I strut and fret my hour upon the stage
• The hour is up
• I have to run and hide my rage
• Phoebe Snow, Harpos Blues

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• It's coming from the silence
• On the dock of the bay
• From the brave, the bold, the battered heart of
  Chevrolet .
• It's coming to America first
• The cradle of the best and of the worst
• Cohen, Anthem

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Other Useful Terms

• Apocope the loss of one or more sounds from the
  end of a word.
• "Don't mind telling you, In my humble fash
• That you thrill me through with a tender pash
• Dysphemism a negative expression. Opposite of
  euphemism.
• "an atmosphere that simply reeks of class"

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• Enjambment continuation of a sentence or phrase
  beyond the end of a poetic line.
• I hear her scream, from down the hall
• Amazing she can even talk at all
• She cries to me, Go back to bed
• I'm terrified that she'll wind up
• Dead in his hands, She's just a woman
• Never Again Nickelback
• Epenthesis the insertion of a sound or letter.
  Sign of a desperate songwriter.
• "If you like-a-me like I like-a-you"

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• Euphemism mild or complimentary term substituted
  for an offensive one. Opposite of dysphemism.
• "lady of the evening" instead of whore
• Shibboleth a word or pronunciation that
  distinguishes one group from another.
• "I hoid" for "I heard" in a Brooklyn accent
• Solecism violation of good grammar.
• "I gots rhythm"