Poets of Pop

The New Statesmen discusses the lyricism of pop music these days.

From the piece...

In many ways, the survival of the lyric makes sense. After all, we listen to pop music today on MP3 players and headphones, creating a private space for ourselves in which we can ingest its meanings. Artists today operate in a similar way, burrowing inside themselves to find ideas with which they can snare our attention. And many artists in love with language have found their way into the mainstream.

Consider the American folk-inspired singer-songwriter Joanna Newsom, who sells out huge venues in minutes and has made the top ten album chart with her recent triple-LP, Have One on Me, despite her lyrics being more of the Emily Dickinson school than the "awopbopaloobopalop" academy. She writes sturdy, structured poetry influenced by nature and nurture. Take this lyric about a rabbit from the song "Baby Birch": "But I caught her and skinned her quick/Held her there/Kicking and mewling/Upending, unspooling/Unsung and blue". The song's half-rhymes and soft rhythms demand as much attention and unpicking as good poetry.

Bands such as Arcade Fire create alternative worlds with their words. For their 2004 debut album, Funeral, they constructed a snowy dystopia full of dead adults and young children, and a dark psychedelic poetry far removed from the Edward Lear-influenced surrealism of the Beatles. In 2004, in a frightened and fractured America, the lyrics of their biggest hit, "Wake Up", resonated widely : "If the children don't grow up, our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up/We're just a million little gods causing rainstorms/Turning every good thing to rust".

Here's an Arcade Fire song, by the way: