Can You Feel It? (Guest Post by Bleimann)
The last time I drank, the night began with karaoke. Things were not going well for me, in general. I arrived to the bar having checked in advance the catalogue of songs and knew that they had “Now I’m In It”, by Haim; I imagined singing the chorus and everyone seeing what was going on with me:
Now I’m in it
And I’ve been trying to find my way back for a minute
I’m not sure what reaction I expected in the fantasy, how I envisioned people responding. At the time, that “it” in the chorus seemed like the clearest possible communication of what was going on in my life, and I suppose I imagined that my singing it would be taken as a confession or admission or cry for help. This is, I can see now, not how karaoke is generally understood or interpreted.
If I was expecting the world to intervene in some way and take me out of the it that I was in, it didn’t happen, but something did change, or at least begin to. There are moments in life of which the importance only becomes revealed over time, where it feels like broad arcs or internal shifts or transitions or transformations come to a head or spill over, and that moment in retrospect means many things which at the time you couldn’t understand, and which even years later are easier to feel than to describe. This moment in my memory stands like that, a moment which is dense and tightly packed and somehow nuclear, which seems to touch deeply on certain ways I have of relating to the world and talking about it.
It is something about what happens when we use the words of others; to describe, to navigate, to understand, and to feel.
HIS NAME
“Now I’m In It” is a song which manages to be both incredibly specific about something that is going on, and very vague about what that thing is. I believe it’s just this combination that makes it so successful:
Looking in the mirror again and again
Wishing the reflection would tell me something
I, I can't get a hold of myself
I can't get outta this situation
Walking in a straight line, thinking about last time
This time, I said I would do this right
Said I would never break this promise
But now I'm back to counting on us
There is a wealth of small detail here which is never explained: “this situation”, “this time”, “this promise” could be any number of things, and I don’t believe that the objective is to crack a code to work out what exactly is being described. It’s a specific feeling of being back in something which you thought you had got out of, and not yet seeing the way out of it. The last time I was in this newsletter, I talked about the way different singers approached the same, very precise situation. This is the opposite, with the Haim girls abstracting from the personal, making a permanent marker drawing on a transparency that can be laid over other lives to describe and explain them.
Key to this are those determiners (“this”) and pronouns (“it”, “us”). In linguistics, deixis is the process in which a given context or situation is needed to understand the process of reference. If I tell you, “he was here an hour ago”, where I am and when I’m talking and what you know about me defines what you understand the referents of the phrase to be– the real things out there in the world, beyond the utterance, which are referred to. Deixis gets more complicated when we’re talking about song lyrics, because the situation in question is transposable. The situation of any song is partly an imagined one of the singer or songwriter putting their feelings into words, and partly a very real one which we ourselves create. We hear songs on the radio and in nightclubs and at karaoke and we sing along, and we point at people we want to indicate or we make the phone sign with our hands when “Call Me Maybe” gets played at a wedding and attempt to flirt; or at least, I do all of these things. We would likely find “Man! I Feel Like A Woman” somewhat lacking if we understood it as an account purely of Shania Twain’s mental state in a specific moment; its strength comes from it acting as a room we can live in for a while, where we are the referent of its “I”, and the significance of any one occurrence of the song will come from the particular local effect – sometimes humorous, sometimes empowering, sometimes subversive – produced by a specific individual inhabiting the utterance of feeling like a woman.
The question that “Now I’m In It” provokes is how this works when no final referent is given, and when it’s never made clear what we are talking about. A special effect is produced, I think, when something is not explicitly named but we work it out anyway. Think of the spoken-word intro to Brandy and Monica’s “The Boy Is Mine”:
-Excuse me, can I please talk to you for a minute?
-Uh-huh, sure. You know, you look kinda familiar
-Yeah, you do too. But, um, I just wanted to know, do you know somebody named...? You, you know his name.
-Oh yeah, definitely, I know his name
-But I just wanna let you know that he's mine
-Haha, no, no, he's mine
The lack of naming here serves as a claim to control of the situation: I know that you know who I am and what I’m talking about; in not having to even mention who “he” is, I’m showing exactly how in control of things I am.
“Now I’m In It” is about repetition, finding oneself back in a hole, the need to escape but the impossibility of doing so. This is a fair description of where I’ve been, but it’s the “I’m in it” that sticks with me, that I imagined singing at karaoke, and which I did. An image of my days working in offices comes to me, of someone asking how your day is going and saying everything with a widening of the eyes or exhaling and pushing out your lips, and the sense of being understood without saying anything. It seems illogical to feel understood by a song, but it’s the same process.
A first conjecture, then: the ability to say or understand everything without actually naming what that thing is creates intimacy with a song through the very omission of detailing information.
YOU
In at least one way this story – that of overthinking song lyrics – begins in Provence in the late 11th century. We’re in the age of the troubadours: courtly singer-songwriters whose verses established the Western poetic tradition as we know it today. Troubadours wrote songs which they may have performed or may have entrusted to others; the lyrics frequently praised the lady of the court in question, with the message of love coming ambiguously from the performer (literally, through his mouth), the composer (through his words) or the aristocratic man of the house (through his patronage). The play of tensions and positions is all here from the start, and is one of the fundamental characteristics of song lyrics as a form.
There is a rather cheap way of understanding the tensions around the “I” and “You” of song lyrics which we can call the Taylor Swift school, where we are never allowed to forget that every word is an emission from a specific individual in a specific context, and where the “real” or deeper meaning is to be found through cross-reference to specific details related to that individual’s life experience, not through application or transposition to our own. But other artists play with these dynamics with a little more subtlety. Christine and the Queens’ “Mountains” seems to me to be about precisely what happens when we play with the borders between singer and listener.
The whole song operates on the tension between that which can be transplanted and that which can’t. The entirety of the chorus – “Mountains, since we met” – is missing at least one verb, and gives the impression of withholding information from us, an undisclosed meaning or narrative. But the rest is about what happens when one person – real, out there in the world, fleshy – becomes “you”:
What are you saying?
Do you think there's only one thing to do?
Is write a song about you now
Could make sense for other people too
Why are you leaving?
If I can't touch your body too
I'll write a song about you now
Pretend that you're the one with me
Something quite similar to “Now I’m In It” is happening here. Specific statements are alluded to but are not actually enunciated: it is not spelled out what the “one thing to do” is, or what the “you” is saying, or why they are leaving. The speaker or singer or position, on being left, writes a song about what happens. Rather than understanding what has happened, the song describes a process of doing something with it. First, the vagueness of “you” is used to perform a kind of summoning act, in a strange kind of reverse deixis, with the real physical “you” in bed with the singer only a placeholder or proxy for another “you” which is superimposed upon it, touching someone loved and lost through the body of the one who is there.
The vagueness of the “you” means it can be used to superimpose the absent lover on top of the present one: pretend the “you” with me is, you know, you-you. This might be a quick fix, but does not point towards any kind of moving past someone; trying to get to an old lover through the bodies of new ones is an extraordinarily tempting but not, on the whole, successful strategy for “healing”, at least in my experience. The next verse, however, hints at a way out:
I'll write a song about you now
Let me destroy this will of mine
What are you saying? (Saying)
Do you think now
It's just my fate?
To write a song about you
Late for other the faces than just yours
Turning the personal experience into something universal makes it transposable onto other lovers, but it also does something else: the “I” dissipates (“let me destroy this will of mine”), but so does the you (“the other faces than just yours”). Losing one’s own will is scary, but it can also be powerful. Humility, in one of its senses, is renouncing the idea that I am spectacularly unique and unlike anyone else. At least in my case, that feeling of “specialness” is hard to let go of, but in the letting go the door is opened to being able to identify with others, learn from them, and find help from them.
Here, if a million people sing the words about a million exes, the effect is a diffusion of the original lover, and maybe of the original pain. A community is created among all of those who sing along and place themselves in the “I”, and the power of the “you” is reduced by being spread across a million different faces and bodies. I think of Lorde in “Green Light”, whispering things and a city singing them back to her ex, putting something into words so that her vindictiveness is carried through the megaphone of an entire generation. This is not the mood I get from “Mountains”. I think it touches something quite deep about how I view pop: the generosity of making a personal pain universal, and the intimacy of leaving certain parts withheld, what happened in the mountains or what they mean never quite given away. It’s about the ability to make one’s words a placeholder that others can stay in for a while to express themselves, whilst also retaining humanity, being a real person that exists, who had some kind of relationship in which mountains meant something once.
Second conjecture: the transposability of a song and the ability of an individual – in karaoke, for example – to step into a role of “I” gives us access to a kind of community, and a dissipation of the force that “you” or “it” or “he” has over us through sharing its reference between the different members of that community.
HOW ABOUT
What I remember about my relation to song lyrics as a child is an intense literalism. Me and my sister listened almost exclusively to Smash Hits 1993 for several years, and I remember developing mental images of “Mr. Vain” as some kind of comic strip supervillain, and the subject of “All That She Wants” as a beach-dwelling baby snatcher. Alanis Morissette released “Thank U” when I was ten years old, and it’s one of my first memories of being aware of a wider public discourse surrounding a song. I suppose I had an idea of who Alanis was, I would certainly have been able to identify the hits from Jagged Little Pill, and I remember the sense of something expected, and parodies of the video, and a feeling (either on my part or on classmates or in a wider societal reaction) that someone who was cool was being embarrassing. I think it was one of my first experiences of the learned reaction of cringing at earnestness and sincerity.
Almost thirty years later, “Thank U” has come back to me at multiple moments in my life, both of crisis and of recovery, as well as at points which appeared to be one and in retrospect were actually the other, which works both ways. One of the reasons for this is that “it” in the bridge:
The moment I let go of it
Was the moment I got more than I could handle
The moment I jumped off of it
Was the moment I touched down
At different moments in my life, that “it” has represented a range of different things which I have let go of, or jumped off of, and the multiple different things which I’ve had more than I could handle of. Beyond this, there’s something about the song which makes it, to me, readily applicable without being generic. Part of this is its most distinctive lyrical trick:
How about unabashedly bawling your eyes out?
That “how about” can mean – and has meant, to me– anything from “isn’t it wonderful to…?” to “wouldn’t it be nice to…?” to “have you tried…?” to “if only I could…”. The precepts of “Thank U” – acceptance, gratitude, forgiveness, and so on – are not original, but this framing of them is, and it’s what makes the song powerful rather than trite. The song becomes less about principles which we all know we should be following, and more about our relationship to those principles, and that relationship is not a linear journey. I said just now how humility and solidarity can offer a way through pain, but this is something easier said than put into practice. “Thank U” has been there when I was bawling my eyes out and when I wasn’t able to, when I’ve asked for help and when I’ve steadfastly refused to.
One of my favourite artifacts is this performance where the crowd are sat on the floor and are just all of them, every single one, each in their own way, GOING THROUGH IT. That earnestness of connection with her audience and the sincerity of the message is what made me cringe as a teen and a pre-teen, but it’s inspiring to me now. I would say that as a ten-year-old there wasn’t much for me to understand in “Thank U”, but sadly that version of me was already desperately pursuing dangling carrots and ever-elusive kudos and eating when he was full up and really all of it, to be honest, which I’d have to learn the hard way about, and which today I sometimes do better with and sometimes struggle more with.
Following up on a success is difficult for any artist. Following up Jagged Little Pill, the album which essentially defined the 1990s, sold thirty-three million copies, and which Alanis made when she was just twenty, seems almost impossible. It is also this very fact that adds gravitas to what she has to say. I’ve spent most of my life trying to achieve my way to happiness, and it has never been enough. “Thank U”, as a response to massive success, seems to say that it will never be enough; that even the kudos and validation of one of the most universally beloved and best-selling albums in history is not enough; but crucially, that it is possible to get off “it”, to stop trying to hold on to something which can’t be retained and which no matter how hard you try won’t make you love yourself, and that feeling happy is possible if you look elsewhere.
This is, at least, what it has meant to me. Growing up, or at least starting to, has meant being able to imagine myself as just one more little gay boy sitting on the ground going through it, listening to Alanis Morrissette. The hunger to stand out and be unique is still there, but at least there’s another voice that says: what is comforting to others can also be comforting to you. So let yourself be comforted.
A final conjecture: the transposability of a song not just from one individual to another, but from one life situation to another, strengthens our relationship to it and makes it a tool which we can use to understand and describe our lives; makes it part of the inner world through which we make sense of reality; makes it more like language itself, a tool with which we constitute and describe the world and through which we are constituted and described.
YOU
When you are studying linguistics there are moments where you realise you’ve been completely engrossed in, like, the way names relate to specific people, for approximately 200 pages, in the most mind-bending way. As a discipline it frequently manages to mystify and complicate the apparent and obvious, and reveal the difficulty of getting a grip on what is actually going on. When we talk about language, there are moments where you glimpse, briefly, its limits, and feel like you’ve seen something beyond words, and want, nevertheless, to try to explain it, through words. Fundamentally, it’s easier to talk about words or the world in isolation than it is to talk about how words relate to the world; for me, it’s easier to talk about words, the world, and even that relationship between them, than it is to talk about my own emotions.
So yes, what I’m trying to say here is something which, on one level, is quite obvious – that when we sing a song, its words take on meanings dependent on our circumstances – but which I believe touches something deeper which I feel is just beyond my reach but which is incredibly important to me. That in enacting pop songs, we can find words to express things we are incapable of saying; that those words offer us possibilities of action and choice which don’t simply describe our lives but expand them; and that this mechanism is not simply solace or escape but somehow offers a bridge to other people which in itself makes the world seem less hostile.
Or, to put it into first person, that at a truly awful moment in my life, pop music offered an option or a way out or a choice, actually, materially, in a very literal way, on a karaoke stage, giving me the literal words to ask for help, which I feel obliged to express my gratitude for and to attempt to put into words, even if it doesn’t quite get there.
About a month after that last night, I found myself walking down the street, listening to “The Greatest Love of All”, and singing along and actually, ridiculously, absurdly, meaning it for the first time in my life, not yet loving myself but willing to make a go of learning, but also thinking about how I should write about it, which I did, and I’m grateful to have a record of how pop helped me navigate that moment, and of what and how that music meant to me in that moment.
Because this, I think, is the fundamental thing, the thing which makes me love pop, and one of the specific characteristics of the form: that the meaning of a pop song exists not as lyrics on an album sleeve or on a webpage, nor on a CD or encoded into a file, but finds itself sung and enacted and lived through the lives of millions who don’t just identify with it but actually embody it and use it. And it seems to me that there is an enormous generosity in putting oneself out there, in those who are able to put certain things into words doing it for those of us who aren’t and gifting it to us, in case it “could make sense for other people too”, in cutting off a part of oneself and putting it into the world and seeing it regrowing on the bodies of others.
Accepting the VMA for Best New Artist just a couple of months ago, Chappel Roan dedicated the prize to:
…queer and trans people that fuel pop, to the gays who dedicate my songs to someone they love, or hate. And thank you to the people who are fans who listen to me, who hear me when I share my joy and my fears. Thank you for listening to me.
This is it, isn’t it? Queer people using the words of our divas to describe our own lives, and against those who have, at least in our minds, wronged us. There’s not much for me to add, apart from my own thanks to the artists who have helped me get to the age I’ve made it to, against all expectations, to Joe for giving me a space to put these things into words, and to anyone who has stuck out reading this, on the off-chance it might resonate and describe something they might have intuited or felt, which is all that matters, really, that sense that the world is not quite so lonely as we, as I, can imagine it to be. Thank you.
…
…
Thank U.
This is part three of a trilogy:
Chaos and Form (Dec 2022)
The Last Night and the Next Morning: Marlena, Marina, Ariana (Dec 2023)
Can You Feel It? (Dec 2024)
You can listen to a playlist of all songs mentioned across the three articles here.