At songmeanings.net, a thriving site dedicated to the unravelling of rock lyrics, a group of regulars have recently been locked in debate about the meaning of Coldplay's inescapable single, Speed of Sound, writes John Harris.
One contributor reckons that "the first two verses are about taking risks and living your life". Another makes reference to "anxiety about the future". One subscriber thinks the third verse provides proof that "Chris Martin believes, with faith, that Jesus is the truth". The thread ends with a 14-word posting that uses altogether more straightforward language: "This song sounds just like Clocks. It's one of my favourites on the album."
For most people, that's probably enough. But the underlying question won't go away: if Coldplay are now the paradigmatic international rock band, clasped to the hearts of millions across the planet, what have they come to tell us? Might their vague thoughts about self-doubt and the healing properties of optimism embody some of the defining currents of our age? Or could their music actually be devoid of much meaning at all, a pallid Esperanto, maximising what people who work in marketing departments would call their "reach"? Try unpacking Speed of Sound, and you probably won't get much further than they've managed on the aforementioned website.
"Look up, I look up at night," sings Martin, "Planets are moving at the speed of light." Having so fancifully subverted the laws of physics, he then suggests we should shift our attentions somewhere else: "Climb up, up in the trees/Every chance you get, is a chance you seize." The gaucheness of the rhyme breaks the song's pace for a moment, but Martin quickly decides to re-engage the listener with a question: "How long am I gonna stand, with my head stuck under the sand?" What happened to the trees remains unclear - as, thinking about it, does the idea of managing to remain vertical while your head has been buried.
There is, of course, no point in trying to understand any of this. It's simply doggerel, nipped and tucked according to the demands of rhyme, and bolted on to the kind of inflated music that serves to make Martin's words sound inexplicably important. In its own way, it works. X&Y crash-landed at number one in the album charts of 22 countries. And besides, Coldplay's serial crimes against narrative sense are hardly unique. One need only listen to the songs written by Keane, Snow Patrol, Embrace and Athlete to understand that, just as rock musicians once opportunistically sang about peace and love, punk-rock anarchy and the 1980s imperative to "go for it", so the latest generation often seems to be united by a fondness for inconclusive songs that try to capture life's most elemental aspects, but end up evoking nothing much at all.
In terms of influence, one can certainly detect the guiding hand of Noel Gallagher, whose peak of success found his songs colonising the public mind despite - or, rather, because of - their apparent absence of meaning ("You gotta be who you be/If you're coming with me"). U2 are in the story somewhere - in apeing their fondness for stadium populism and open-ended songs of angst and redemption, their spiritual offspring similarly fail to find what they're looking for. There's also the global dominance of hip-hop: given the best rappers' emphasis on word-play and storytelling, would anyone of a similar disposition now think to pick up a guitar? The rise of the Streets' Mike Skinner, one of the few young Britons with a clear lyrical gift, suggests not.
And what of the wider socio-economic picture? The age of culture wars, in which musicians felt compelled to adopt the mantle of social critics, is long gone. Economic prosperity and the expansion of higher education seems to have sealed a kind of cultural truce, making us an altogether more well-adjusted society than the one that produced the articulate outsiders. It would be nice to welcome some 21st-century equivalents of John Lennon, John Lydon, Morrissey and Jarvis Cocker, but the chances look pretty slim.
More prickly music is being peddled by the likes of Franz Ferdinand, the Futureheads, the Kaiser Chiefs and Bloc Party. Their stuff comes with satisfyingly jagged edges; the words seem a little more worked-out. Franz's Alex Kapranos, for example, sprinkles his songs with compellingly non-rock words such as "Velcro" and "deference". It might not be up there with the Smiths, but isn't it an improvement? But what's still missing is any real sense of rock consistently engaging in the art of social comment.
Kaiser Chiefs aspire to revive the school of topical English storytelling last represented by Blur in around 1995. Thus, their recent single, Oh My God, attempts to nail the grind of modern low-skilled employment as follows: "You work in a shirt with your name-tag on it/ Drifting apart, like a plate tectonic." And that won't do at all.
To get to grips with the eloquence that British music seems to have mislaid, it seems a good idea to make contact with someone whose reputation was founded on exactly that quality. So, I put in a call to Andy Partridge, whose work with XTC has recently been exhumed by the crop of musicians he smirkingly terms "Future Dogs Die in Kaiser Ferdinand's Hot Hot Car Party". We share our opinions of Coldplay. "They're the musical equivalent of that corporate art you get in Holiday Inn foyers," he says.
Partridge, now 51, is a songwriting auteur. His favourite lyricists include the Kinks' Ray Davies, Lennon and McCartney, Burt Bacharach's partner Hal David, and - naturally enough - Noel Coward. There have been times, he freely admits, when he has tried to reduce their work to something close to maths ("I'd look for formulas - I'd sit and make charts with geometric shapes"), but the secret of a good lyric still seems beyond any rules. All he has ever known for sure is that keeping your eyes fixed on your immediate environment is usually a good idea. "I can't write mid-Atlantic airport lounge music," he said in 1987. "I can't talk about my hot babe with her leather and whip or meeting my cocaine dealer. I like to write about what's going on around the town."
"Understanding what makes lyrics work can be tough," he says now, "but for me, lyrics have to feel like a piece of poetry. They have to feel rich. I like words to have fun with each other. They should jump about in front of your ears a little. Like, 'Whoah - does he mean that, or this?' It's like throwing half a dozen dwarves in a boxing ring and seeing all the combinations of arse-kicking and head-butting."
To illustrate this, Partridge talks me through a random selection of his songs: 1986's The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul ("I'll sound like Tony Hadley when I say this, but it's about the meaning of life"); 1982's Senses Working Overtime ("It's about what it's like to be alive in England"); and the same year's No Thugs in Our House, "a Hogarthian kind of thing" whose lyrics could have been finished last week.
As an example of the kind of song that British musicians ought to be writing, it's perfect: the tale of an anti-social, racist tearaway named Graham whose parents believe he is a veritable angel, until a house-call from the police suggests otherwise. "The insect-headed worker-wife will hang her waspies on the line/The husband burns his paper, sucks his pipe while studying their cushion floor/His viscous poly-paste breath comes out/Their wallpaper world is shattered by his shout/A boy in blue is busy banging out a headache on the kitchen door."
"It's about parents refusing to believe their kids are doing any wrong," he says. "That's still the case now: kids are out there drinking butane fuel and smoking crack and setting fire to cars, and they go home, and even though the parents can smell the crack on their breath, they say, 'Oh, little Lenny hasn't been doing anything bad'. They just want to sit there and watch George and Mildred."
You can sense Partridge's vexed relationship with the place where he still lives: Swindon, the neither-here-nor-there town that has formed the backdrop to some of his best songs. And herein lies a lesson: though success might bring on the temptation to shift your base of operations to Belsize Park or Los Angeles, the clever lyricist might actually be better off staying put.
"Swindon is average-ville," he explains. "I don't actually like the place very much. Whenever I've got enough money to move out, something seems to come along and take it away. But I do like the idea that it's given me something to kick against. I live in a town full of very mundane people who are just apathetic. And it's so enraging, it keeps the batteries topped up."
John Sutherland, a professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, specialises in works from the 19th century. From time to time, however, he puts down his Dickens and Trollope and grapples with texts from popular music. In 2004, he famously compared the Streets' A Grand Don't Come for Free to Dostoyevsky, Pepys and the Bible, while acknowledging that to make such points was "to invite a Skinnerian accusation of generating critical wank".
"Some of the lines in Coldplay are incredibly soppy, aren't they?" he ponders. "'Oooh - that's right/ Let's take a breath and jump over the side/Oooh - that's right/How can you know it when you don't even try?' There's no anchorage at all: no real 'I' or 'you'. But that emptiness resonates, I suppose. It's one-size-fits-all popular philosophy. To some extent, it's just crooning: sounds without meaning. And that's nothing new. They used to call Bing Crosby the Hollow Man, you know. And in that sense, I think Chris Martin may well be a crooner."
We spend an hour or so picking through a selection of lyrics: the entirety of X&Y, gleaming examples of rock's past glories by the likes of Morrissey and Paul Weller, and Radiohead's sense-defying Morning Bell. Sutherland scrolls through the lyric to Morning Bell on his computer. After a couple of lines, his face has screwed into a mixture of bafflement and distaste. "What are they doing? There's no grammar in there - no syntax at all. Even Coldplay have a bit of that: subject, object, verb. There's none here, is there? It's just bits of language, floating loose. There's poetry like that - Ezra Pound, for example. But a lyric like this tells us nothing at all. 'Release me/release me/Where d'you park the car/Where d'you park the car/ Clothes are on the lawn with the furniture.' What is this? Eviction? Prison? TS Eliot said, 'Real poetry communicates before it's understood.' But with this, I'm not sure it does either."
He's more impressed by Like Eating Glass, a song from Bloc Party's debut album Silent Alarm. "This is very like Sylvia Plath," he says. "It strikes me that whoever did the lyrics must have read some of her work. It has the same rather jagged, surprising imagery. It could sit fairly comfortably in a poetry anthology." One of its closing stanzas goes: "It's so cold in this house/Come and show me how it was/We've got crosses on our eyes/Been walking into the walls again."
Kele Okereke, Bloc Party's lyricist and singer, explains. "Cartoon characters have crosses on their eyes when they die. I always thought that was a really powerful image. I was just trying to convey in a childlike way what it was like to be in a relationship that was falling apart - the quality of being completely disorientated."
Okereke, who spent a year studying English literature at university before the prospect of self-expression and international travel won out, is clearly an intellectual cut above a lot of his contemporaries. His favourite lyricists are Thom Yorke and Bjork, who "deals with tricky, complex ideas in the most simple terms. It might have something to do with English not being her first language. There's no artifice or pretension."
When it comes to poetry, he's a fan of Anne Sexton, a contemporary of Sylvia Plath whose serrated words ("I have a knife in my armpit/When I stand on tiptoe I tap out messages/Am I some sort of infection?") have seemingly exerted a strong influence on his songs.
If Andy Partridge has always felt obliged to write about "what's going on around the town", Okereke pitches his words in slightly more mystical territory." The thing about a good lyric to me," he says, "is that it suggests something intangible, something that can't be explained. And yet, it makes complete sense. You're reaching people in the most obvious, simple way without using obvious, simple language. And there should be space for people to find their own interpretations."
And therein lies the problem that so bedevils Bloc Party and their contemporaries. Their self-imposed challenge, it seems, is to leave the everyday world to someone else, and attempt to articulate what probably can't be articulated. Okereke's his next album, he says, will "explore a more linear narrative style" - but for now, he rather puts me in mind of a couplet written by Chris Martin: "Am I part of the cure/Or am I part of the disease?" At least one group, however, may have stumbled upon an antidote.
Arctic Monkeys are a young quartet from Sheffield, whose debut single has just been released. Fake Tales of San Francisco is an evocative snapshot of an evening in some hell-hole indie venue, where the night's entertainment revolves around a local band who choose to speak in American accents. The early part of the evening finds "the weekend rock stars in the toilets, practising their lines"; by the song's end, the narrator is exploding with rage. "I'd love to tell you all my problem," he spits. "You're not from New York City - you're from Rotherham."
The lyrics are the work of Alex Turner, a 19-year-old whose musical tastes represent a bridge over at least one of the fault-lines that may have caused rock's verbal decline. "I used to be into hip-hop at school," he says. "I really admired rappers: the ones who seemed to have something to say. I still really like Roots Manuva." Of late, he has also immersed himself in the work of some of music's great social commentators. "I love the Smiths' lyrics," he says. "And I think Paul Weller did some great things in Jam songs. Down in the Tube Station at Midnight is my favourite: 'I fumbled for change/And pulled out the queen/Smiling, beguiling.' They're real kitchen-sink dramas."
I e-mail some of Turner's lyrics to John Sutherland. "There's a kind of disconnect there from normal narrative that's really quite interesting," he says. There are two slightly more straightforward qualities. Arctic Monkeys' songs are obviously rooted in a specific time and place - "around the town", if I'm not mistaken - and they make coherent sense. As Coldplay continue to boom from every open window, it's a start.
- Guardian Service
