AT the risk of sounding like a superannuated rock hack, banging on interminably about the bloody past, it does seem to be the ease that you just don't get a good lyric anymore.
First in the dock are one of the best guitar bands in the world right now, Oasis, and poor old Noel by his own admission just can't get a handle on lyrics at all this is the band who in one memorable couplet rhymed the girls name "Elsa" with the analgesic "Alka Seltzer". Back to the rhyming dictionary with you young Gallagher.
Blur, by contrast, probably think they're being very arty altogether by rhyming the popular drug of choice, "Prozac" with the name of the French social realist auteur, "Balzac" but they sound just as fake and contrived as ever.
Jarvis, from Pulp, has more than a bit of lexical ability ... but it's a sorry state of affairs indeed when a song by someone whose first language ain't even English elevates the whole sordid word rhyming affair to something a tad more edifying.
The woman in question is Bjork and her new single, Hyper Ballad, which was written in Icelandic and then translated into English, is as close as it gets to that word poetry.
Don't know about anybody else but there's touches of Sylvia Plath (ask your parents, pop kids) when Bjork tells us that she lives on top of a mountain and on waking every morning the first thing she does is walk to the edge of the mountain and throw little things off, things like "car parts, bottles and cutlery or whatever I find lying around ... it's become a habit, a way to start the day".
Later on, she informs us "I'm back at my cliff, still throwing the things off, I listen to the sounds they make on their way down. I follow with my eyes 'til they crash, imagine what my body would sound like slamming against these rocks". The next song on the album, The Modern Things, shows her flexing her imagination in a more surreal manner when she writes "All the modern things, like cars and such, have always existed. They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment ... the right moment to come out and multiply and take over. It's their turn now".
The great Dublin poet Morrissey is rightfully credited with reconciling the previously opposing forces of literature and indie rock. On Everyday Is Like Sunday (you won't find a better lyric, anywhere) he "samples" from John Betjeman's line "come friendly bombs and fall on Slough" before coming up with the line about "the sea side town, they forgot to close down". On Now My Heart Is Full he dips into Graham Greene's novel, Brighton Rock, name checking the "rain coated lovers' brothers ...Dallow, Spicer, Pinky, Cubitt ... every jammy Stressford poet ... loafing oafs in all night chemists".
A tad better than being implored to "roll with it" or informed that someone lives "in a house in the country". Call me old fashioned etc ...
THE Mad Professor (Neil Fraser) was particularly inspired when he got his mixing desk around Massive Attack's Protection to come up with the dubtastic No Protection. He's coming in to do the groove weekend thing in Galway and you can catch him at The Warwick at 10 p.m. tonight ... The Canvey Island sound, in the form of Dr Feelgood (with a new lead singer, obviously) hits the Olympia tonight at mid night while at the same venue tomorrow night the ironically distant Mike Flowers Pops and the Sounds Superb Trio will be lounging around for your delectation. Watch out for the show stopping Do You Know The Way To San Jose.
