I used to write a music column for the Harvard Crimson back in 2000 and 2001, as fellow blogger Balderdash has discovered. That made me think of resuscitating some old ones, adding in the hyperlinks that a print column could never use and making minor amendments. I’ll start with these thoughts on Eminem’s “Stan” and Steely Dan, first published in March 2001 after the Grammys.
THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS
The habit of sitting around discussing the meanings of songs people find cryptic has been a longstanding pop tradition. From “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” to “25 or 6 to 4,” nothing has been taken at face value. Everything is subject to exegesis, as though any use of symbols, no matter how obvious, made a song deeper. How could “Puff the Magic Dragon” be a children’s song? What does “Puff” mean anyway?
There’s a trace of that crypto-divination in Eminem’s “Stan” (for my money, one of the finest singles of 2001). “Stan” alludes to a fairly common urban legend, that Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” is about Collins helplessly standing in the distance watching a friend drown and seeing that someone else nearby could’ve saved his friend but didn’t. (“You know that song by Phil Collins, “In the Air Tonight?” / About that guy who could have saved that other guy from drowning?”) In reality, the Collins song is little more than a song about his impending divorce from his first wife. It’s a little ironic, isn’t it, that Eminem, a person who complains about overly literal interpretations of his text , gives in to the same thing?
Me, I’m ornery and I never believe in conspiracy theories. Best one I’ve heard, though, is the ludicrously elaborate one that claims the Pet Shop Boys stands for “Pray Eternally To Satan, He Offers Peace, But Owns Your Soul.”
DECONSTRUCTING STEELY
What does Eminem share with Steely Dan? They’re among some of the finest users of role play and distance in their songs.
That’s not that minor or obvious a claim. In the pre-Grammy weeks, “He’s just playing a role” was the most common defence of Mr Mathers, repeated ad infinitum, ad nauseum, as though that were the most natural thing for artists to do. But if you think about it, it isn’t natural at all: what rock and rap music share is that they are rarely about telling someone else’s story or inhabiting a character. They’re musical forms that depend on direct experience – unsurprisingly, given the influence of the blues on rock, and of soul on rap, and given rap’s emphasis on growing up in the street – so artists in both fields usually write songs that derive their power from the immediacy of having lived through what they’re singing about. Part of why people love Public Enemy is that at some level you felt they knew “911 is a Joke” was a song of personal experience. (The ludicrous Duran Duran cover of that same song illustrates my point.) Even songs about other people are sung in one’s own voice (“She Loves You”). That’s probably part of why writing your own original material is given such cachet in rock. Consider, by contrast, vocals and standards: whoever blamed Sinatra for not writing his own material?
That’s where Eminem and Steely Dan are rather different from their respective peers. There’s little doubt that Eminem is street, and it’s true that many rappers put on a stage persona – in all probability there’s a gap between “Dr. Dre” and Andre Young. But those rappers tend to try to never show any cracks in the public persona, while Eminem often revels in the multiple personas he adopts – Slim Shady, Eminem, “Marshall Mathers” (quotes deliberate).
While Steely Dan don’t use explicit personas, the duo’s approach to rock is so deliberately dispassionate and cold – this is a duo named after a dildo (from Williams S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch), after all – that there’s very little sense that they have lived through what they’re singing about. Even in an ostensible love song like “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” their detachment makes them sound like they’re imagining someone else singing. Compare this with the norm in rock music: where “Mick Jagger” the strutting hypersexual musical persona ends and Mick Jagger the strutting rock star begins is hard to tell. I’m not sure Mick himself knows.
That’s not to say no other musical stars ever separate their personal selves from their work (David Bowie springs to mind). But for critics to assume that it’s common for a pop music star to be detaching themselves from their words may be missing the point.
RETURN TO SENDER
Come to think of it, “Stan” is that rarity: a fully epistolary pop song. I tried to think of another pop song that told the whole story in letter-writing, and the closest I came up with was Pat Boone’s “Dear John”, and even that has a segment that isn’t a letter. Any suggestions?