Repeat Stuff
There’s a moment in Bo Burnham’s musical treatise on the banality of contemporary pop music “Repeat Stuff” where he skewers the vague nature of lyrics “Designed by a marketing team/cashing in on puberty and low self-esteem.” He continues with his own version:
I love my baby and you know I couldn’t live without her
But now I need to make every girl think this song’s about her
Just to make sure that they spread it like the plague
So I describe my dream girl as really really vague, like
“I love your hands ’cause your fingerprints are like no other”
“I love your eyes and their blueish brownish greenish color”
“I love it when you smile, that you smile wide
I’ve always felt that Burnham’s broad side here is probably aimed more at pop music specifically because pop music is the easiest target, the most easily ridiculed, both because of who listens to pop music and its genuine (at times) soullessness. I take umbrage at Burnham’s insistence that young women are the unwitting marks of pop overlords, because it devalues the musical opinion of a massive subset of the population, one which is already often told that their opinions on things are not important or knowledgeable.
The reason this is irritating is that the very real problem of corporatized music he’s singing about is nearly universal, as Burnham’s later “Country Song” shows. Across the board, we accept the vague platitudes we are offered and try to squeeze our own complications between the lines. Humans are very good at this. Ask anyone who’s gone through a bad breakup. They probably heard echoes of their beloved in every song on the radio and also that Wendy’s commercial jingle. We’re self-centered creatures.
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Which brings me belatedly to my point: songwriters should lean into that self-centeredness. The best songs aren’t vague, but are deeply personal. It is, counterintuitively, what makes the best songs have an earned universality. Take “This Year” from The Mountain Goats’ 2005 album The Sunset Tree. It has four million more streams than the next most popular tMG song on Spotify. It is, by any metric, a (pop)ular song. It’s shouting chorus, memorably yawped by John Darnielle goes:
I am going to make it through this year
If it kills meI am going to make it though this year
If it kills me
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more universal sentiment in any year, but especially in the year of our lord 2020. But! The best part of “This Year” is how spectacularly specific it is. Darnielle’s public comments about the song attest to its roots:
This is a song about how sometimes you are living in a house and you’re in high school and your stepfather is abusing your mother and you, and it really sucks. You have to take a lot of drugs to deal with that, right, but you don’t have to, I should say. But you probably do. And when you do, they make you feel marginally better but the main thing that makes you feel better is the company of other people who are as damaged as you are or will shortly become as damaged as you are, and you can sense it, because there is an internal sensor if you bear some damage, you have this sensor that says ‘That person is either damaged or is getting there, and I think I will hang out with her until things get a little brighter.’ I play this for a lovely person who wore a cape to school.
Does a listener need to know the specifics behind “This Year” to enjoy it? To connect with it and feel it working on something within them deep down? Of course not. But its’s worth understanding that great works of art made from the artist’s own material struggles can mean just as much to Stephen Colbert or your little cousin in the suburbs of Cedar Rapids equally. And Darnielle accomplishes this without pandering, or doing his best to make sure there’s enough wiggle room in his story for you to fit yourself in there comfortably.
I drove home in the California dusk
I could feel the alcohol inside of me hum
Pictured the look on my stepfather’s face
Ready for the bad things to come
I don’t come from a broken home. I’m not from California. I’ve never had a stepfather. Should Darnielle have watered down his story out of a fear of alienating half of his listeners? No. We don’t all have the same problems or fears or loves or tastes and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. There is no perfectly-engineered song that can appeal to the greatest number of individuals. Songwriting isn’t meant to be a utilitarian enterprise.
Empathy is what makes us human, and our ability to connect with Darnielle’s trauma in a way that is unique to each listener is what makes his specificity the true universality. In other words, we inevitably bring ourselves to bear on the art we consume. Objectivity is a myth best left at the door. The sin that mediocre, vague songs commit is a failure of empathy. They imagine that their listeners are “stuck in second gear” if you will, and are not capable of doing the work of listening to a song with more than seventeen words in the lyrics. John Darnielle’s Mountain Goats categorically refuse to underestimate their listeners. They believe their listeners are equally capable of critical thinking as they are shouting the chorus.
One more time for all the people in the back:
I am going to make it through this year
If it kills me
I am going to make it though this year
If it kills me
