The latest issue of Q Magazine dropped through my door today. It had a full page front cover of Michael Jackson. Well, at first I didn’t give it a second glance because Jackson’s picture has been everywhere. But then it occurred to me that it was impossible that the magazine could have been printed and posted so quickly. Then the horrible truth dawned on me as I ripped oven the plastic cover …

The cover story is billed as “Michael Jackson Unmasked”.

On the masthead page, the editorial declares in large type: “It’s the month of Jacko”. Well, I suppose he wasn’t wrong. Indeed, Editor Paul Rees peers into his crystal ball and editorialises thus:

“At the time of going to press, the self-styled king of pop was due to play the first shows of his proposed 50-night stand at London’s O2 arena within a matter of days. But, as Q has learned in the process of putting this issue together, there are no certainties in Michael Jackson’s world - besides the one that suggests that anything that can go madly, will go madly.”

This is the prelude to a 16-page full colour extravaganza on Michael Jackson billed as “The tale of the biggest comeback in history!”

On 13th July 2009 Michael Jackson is set to play the first of 50 dates at London’s O2 Arena. It is the most ambitious comeback in thehistory of popular music, but several questions still hang in the air. Will he turn up? Will he sing more than a few lines? Can Michael Jackson really survive 50 shows or will his body, mind, both seemingly so fragile, disintegrate under the pressure of it all?

And then the article goes on to talk about the man “gambling his reputation on Jackson turning up for the shows”. Ouch!

As a footnote, the writing on the magazine spine says: “Michael Jackson | The Enemy | The Dead Weather | Spinal Tap | The Horrors | Dead Rock Stars”

Alas, the “dead rock stars” story has a CSI-style forensic investigator re-examining famous rock star deaths, including Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Buckley and Bob Marley. It couldn’t be more ghoulish following the 16-page Jackson extravaganza.

Oh, and its dated “August 2009″. So now bizarrely, Michael Jackson must be the first rock star to have a front page story in a music paper of record announcing a new concert series dated a month after his death. 

Well, it goes without saying that he’s had his ups and downs, with more downs lately, followed by even more downs, but no one can take away his period of sheer pop genius. There’s very little else that can be said.

I think I’ll go and give my 7″ vinyl copy of Billie Jean a spin.

Every morning without fail, I wake up with a piece of music playing inside my head. It could be any piece of music I’ve heard in my lifetime, a hymn, a song, a piece of classical music…

My first thoughts upon waking are to listen. The song is not part of my thoughts or dreams as such but it’s the soundtrack to them. As I become conscious I cling to what the final scenes of the dream that has entertained my sleeping self and the music that my subconscious self chose to accompany it.
Recently I was pleasantly surprised to wake up to the sound of Randy Crawford singing ‘One Day I’ll Fly Away”. this provided the sound bed to a dream of me desperately trying to manouevre my articulated lorry onto the Eurostar train at St Pancras Station. I’ve never had the pleasure of traveling on the Eurostar, nor have I ever driven a large lorry, although I don’t rule out the possibility in the future of either, nevertheless I have long been an admirer of Ms Crawford’s vocal stylings so it was great to hear her first thing in the morning, - singing, as clear as daylight on my internal jukebox.

I have woken up to Motorhead’s “Bomber” (on blue vinyl, of course) while sailing on a small boat in the Med and I’ve woken up to the strains of Mendelssohn’s “Hebrides Overture” whilst desperately trying to finish my Economics A Level. Usually, the music and the dream dissolve as I start the day but occasionally they stay with me until I’ve played the real thing in a conscious state. Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell” is a recurring song, although never used to such great effect as it was in “Pulp Fiction”, as is the simply incredible hymn “Dear Lord And Father Of Mankind” which I have grown to love so much that I often find myself singing it out loud, often at inappropriate times, which reminds me, apologies to anybody I may have startled yesterday evening in the ’10 items or less’ queue in the Portobello Road branch of Tesco Metro.
I don’t know if everyone wakes up with music playing in their head, or if it’s just me, but I’m glad that it happens.

A description of the Italian and Mediterranean Campaigns of World War II:- 

Napoleon once said that the only way to invade Italy was from the top. The Allies did not heed his warning and paid dearly for every inch of ground. Battles compared in their sheer intensity and horror with those of World War One. At Anzio alone the Allies suffered 135,000 casualties and Monte Cassino, over 54,000. In Tunisia, another 45,000 casualties. 20 Victoria Crosses were awarded during the Italy Campaign - 5 at Cassino alone!

So the legend goes, veterans of the Italian campaigns were called “D-Day Dodgers” by Lady Nancy Astor MP in a speech, after she received a letter from a disgruntled British soldier who signed it “D-Day Dodger”.

The words of the song D-Day Dodgers were written as a response to Nancy Astor’s insult by Hamish Henderson, who also fought in that campaign.

The first few verses are sarcastic about the jolly time the soldiers were supposed to be having:-

We landed in Salerno, a holiday with pay,
The Jerries brought the bands out to greet us on the way,
Showed us the sights and gave us tea,
We all sang songs, the beer was free,
To welcome D-Day Dodgers to sunny Italy,

The last verse ends as most war poems must:-

Look around the mountains in the mud and rain,
You’ll find the scattered crosses,
the sum that have no name,
Heartbreak and toil and suffering gone,
The boys beneath them slumber on,
They are the D-Day Dodgers who stay in Italy,

This is the best version I could find on YouTube, with the swearing that you would expect from disgruntled soldiers though those words are not in the official lyrics.

(Link to video as I can’t add it to the post). 

Hamish Henderson was a collector of folk music, poet and lyricist, and played a big part in the Scottish folk revival. Someone else who fought in the Italian campaign was E P Thompson, left wing historian and later one of the leaders of the peace movement during the chilliest days of the Cold War.

He describes the campaign thus:-

In one of his less happy flourishes Sir Winston Churchill described Italy as “the soft underbelly of the Axis beast”.  Soft it was not.  Italy has a singularly rugged spine and the successive mountains and rivers provided barriers behind which the German armies could execute an orderly withdrawal while their well-disciplined rearguard inflicted, day after day, sharp casualties on the advancing Allied armis.  It was a preposterous error to plant large motorised armies in the toe of Italy and then to fight, mile by mile, up the boot.  It may be because the whole campaign was so misconceived that it is rarely mentioned.

(from the essay The Liberation of Perugia.)

Thompson was an officer and recalls three dead troopers who were killed in the tank advance:-

They had shared in the resigned complicity of military life and had joined in the repartee of ironies as we camped in the evenings beside our tanks in the beautiful countryside of May and June.

The “repartee of ironies” is the exact spirit of D-Day Dodgers.

One of my aunts gave my family a burned copy of this album with a photocopied booklet that explained how this album was banned in the US, how the government hides things from us, and how communism was a better system of government.

I have no idea what that was about, but I do know that this is a great compilation.  Unlike another one of their Greatest Hits albums, this really does contain their greatest hits.  Fantastic songs.

I’ll tell you which album he’s talking about in the comments.

Tony Allen has been called ”perhaps the greatest drummer who has ever lived” by Brian Eno for his 1970s work with Fela Kuti, and has remained active and keyed in to modern music since then - playing most prominently as part of The Good The Bad & The Queen project with Damon Albarn in 2006, and on the sublime La Ritournelle by Sebastian Tellier in 2004.

His new album Secret Agent is a relatively straightforward Afrobeat affair, but he and World Circuit records are offering its title track’s constituent parts up for remixers to do as they will with, and I for one am looking forward to hearing what they come up with.

All the info and music files are here: http://tonyallenremixcontest.blogspot.com/

Norm blogged on these guys a year and a bit ago.

If you have Spotify - and if you live in Europe, there’s not reason not to - you can hear the whole album here.

If you don’t have Spotify, get it here. If you live in the US and understand VPN tunnelling, you can probably also tune in, but don’t quote me on it.

I agree entirely with his conclusion, but his analysis is wrong-headed and betrays a deeply ingrained prejudice against song-writing as a legitimate art form that doesn’t need to be compared to poetry in the first place.

If Deacon likes some songs (or song writers) he seems too embarrassed to say it is because he admires their words. So, while he is right - lyrics and poetry are different - in support of this argument, he talks a lot of nonsense.

The first hint that Deacon is a poetry-chauvinist is this quip: “Well, there’s a reason there hasn’t been one before: Morrissey isn’t a poet. He doesn’t write poetry; he writes song lyrics. The two are not as different as chalk and cheese, but they are at least as different as Brie and Dairylea.” 

Dairylea? If he had said “brie and stilton” it would have been a concession that both are good, in different ways and in different contexts. But by likening lyrics to a cheap supermarket cheese, it betrays his prejudices.

The core of his argument seems sound, but when he says…

This isn’t the first time a literary academic has anointed a pop star. Christopher Ricks, formerly the Oxford Professor of Poetry, believes Bob Dylan belongs “in the same category” as Keats. But saying Dylan is as good as Keats is like saying Cristiano Ronaldo is as good as Sachin Tendulkar. They’re both talented, but at different things. By what means can we satisfactorily compare them? Get them to have a crack at each other’s jobs? Ronaldo would likely get bowled first ball by the Australians; Tendulkar would probably balloon his free-kicks into the stands. Dylan is yet to master the sonnet, and Keats, despite his flowing curls, is an improbable candidate for the role of rock frontman.

… why doesn’t he compare like-for-like? Why does he match Keats’s ability with words against Dylan’s (dubious) stage charisma? Dylan is a gifted wordsmith - albeit in a (sometimes*) different medium to Keats. If Deacon chose his examples to support this thesis instead of revealing and embarrassment at considering that Dylan may have a staggering talent for language, his argument might fly further. What he might say (if he could shed his snobbery) is that songs don’t have to work as ‘poems’, just as poems aren’t expected to work as ’songs’.

[* Keats was a keen balladeer, "La Belle Dame sans Merci" being one famous example. Perhaps it would have been interesting to match Merci with 'Hurricane' or 'The Lonesome death of Hattie Caroll'.]

What’s more, some poems, like the famous ”The Love that Dare’s To Speak Its Name” are just awful. What makes this literary catastrophe “brie” while, say, Paul Simon’s - okay, I know it’s a cliche, but for a good reason - “Sound of Silence“, is mere Dairylea?

Okay, here’s an experiment. Forget well known tracts. Is this a poem or a song?

Since the soul of Carmen Miranda had captured the mind of man
Dismissed with her generation for the price of a can-can
Consigned to the sideshows of history, with the patronized orphans of film
She seeded the bait and offered the faint hope of chance to innocent men
In love with the trance of her dances And abandoned by them

Is it Auden or Abba? “Bree of Dairylea?”

Neither. It is of course, John Cale. From his album “Prayer For The Dying”, it is the final song and the odd one out. The rest of the album is an orchestral piece setting the lyrics - oh, dear, I mean, poems, of Dylan Thomas to music.

It was this thought that made me think that Deacon gets it all wrong when he writes:

Poetry is written to fit metre, song lyrics to fit melody. This is why poems look good on paper, and song lyrics almost invariably do not. One of my favourite Morrissey songs is called Speedway. It features this refrain: “All of the rumours keeping me grounded/ I never said, I never said that they were completely unfounded.”

Why does he repeat “I never said” in that clunking way? Why is the couplet so lopsided, the second line much longer than the first, and with no discernible pattern to the stresses? Because the song’s vocal melody demands it. When he sings the couplet, it flows beautifully. But on paper, it’s stone-deaf doggerel.

First of all, does Deacon understand what melody is? Melody itself has to fit a metre, a beat. If melody didn’t, it would be a very messy transcription into musical notation, which, as anyone who reads music knows, breaks everything down into beats and bars. In other words, a very strict metre! Indeed, it is only this strict metre that makes something ‘verse’ - a poem or a lyric - and not prose.

Finding the metre is not always obvious or easy. Those of us who studied Latin, no doubt, will have learned the skill of ‘scansion‘ and had to master the notation. With a bit of effort, Deacon will find that, contrary to being “stone-deaf doggerel”, the line of Morrissey verse he quotes scans rather well. In fact, you can clap the beat out as you recite it - if it helps.

But of course, this is a blind alley. A great deal of modern poetry doesn’t scan at all, or deliberately toys with scan creating jumps and jolts for poetic effect. On the other hand, so much poetry scans so infectiously that it suggests a melody to match its rhythm.

Consider how effortlessly these lines slip into melody:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

If you think I’m stretching it (and you haven’t heard Cale perform it) take a listen to this chap reciting the poem at poets.org - the poor old chap desperately want to break into song. That’s what good language does. It sings.

If a person were unfamiliar with Thomas and misidentified these verses as “John Cale lyrics” when they saw them on paper, would should we encourage them not to consider whether the verses may be poetry for the sole reason that they were introduced to them in a musical form? Wouldn’t that be silly? And if you can can consider a poem a lyric, why should it be a stretch to consider whether some lyrics might not make good poems?

Is this not a debate that might’ve raged when David reached for his lyre and thought “”He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.’  Wow, that really rocks!”

I think it is fair to say that some songs make terrible poems and some poems make terrible songs. There is no shame in this. Both are word-forms that serve particular functions, and in a sense, have different loyalties or priorities. If a lyric looks good on paper, that’s an added dimension, if a poem suggests a melody, that’s an extra joy.

No one is arguing that a lyric like “Uh huh, get in on, make it funky now, you know you wanna, ooh!”  is striving to be great poetry - or any type of poetry at all. But for some writers of song, like Morrissey, like Paul Simon, like many others obviously far too numerous to mention, there is room for consideration. But do we have to ask if the words themselves are poetry, when it is the role of the writer in our lives that is arguably more important. In the world after the Fender Stratocaster, the larks have usurped the role of the Larkens in articulating the landmarks of our lives. Or just to express some intangible beauty.

For example:

I was following the pack
all swallowed in their coats
with scarves of red tied round their throats
to keep their little heads
from falling in the snow
And I turned ’round and there you go
And, Michael, you would fall
and turn the white snow red as strawberries
in the summertime

What splendid verse! What lovely imagery. It’s beautiful and mysterious. And that’s before you’ve even heard the Fleet Foxes sing it.