M

ost of us live with a shifting soundtrack, songs that fill

our ears as we go about our days: a workout mix, a
drive-time playlist, the songs we hear in stores, the
music we dance to at parties.
The songs themselves are secondary; they call us to
experiences rather than being experiences. We half listen, but our
attention is elsewhere. Some of us also listen in a different way. We
obsess over a certain song, even over individual words and sounds
in the song. We play songs in remem- brance or in celebration. We
listen live at concerts, or learn to play favorite songs for ourselves.
Sometimes we choose these encounters; at other times they
surprise us, commanding thought and feeling. Such songs
comprise another soundtrack, a collection of memories accessible
only through sound.
These are some of mine:
Im three years old, listening to Little April Shower from the movie
Bambi. I havent seen the flm because my mother says its too scary.
But I have the picture book and I have the LP. I clutch the album cover
close to me as the music plays. The song is confusing. It makes me sad,
yet I want to hear it over and over again. Im captivated by the voicesof
women, then of men, in haunting harmony. I recognize only a few words:
Drip drip drop little April shower. These repeat more times than I can
count. The melody summons a strong and unfamiliar emotion in me. Now
I d call it wistfulness. All I knew then was that this was the frst song
that ever made me cry and made me long for it at the same time.
Im twelve years old, playing air guitar to Guns N Roses Welcome to
the Jungle. No one else is at home, so I choreograph a performance in
front of the living-room speakers. First Im Slash because hes biracial like I
am, then Im Axl Rose because hes a badass. I love the noise, the keening
guitar, and Axls straining voice. Im drawn to the contrast between the
cacophony of the chorus and the calm of the bridge, where Izzy Stradlin
strums chords as Axl sings, And when youre high you never/ Ever
wanna come down./ So. Down. So. Down. So. Downnnnn. Yeah! Axls
yeah melts into Slashs bended note until they are a single sound.
Theres wonder in this noise, then quiet, then noise again. Like a lot of
tweens and teens in the summer of 1987, I listen to Guns N Roses
because something about their music feels like me, or maybe just the
me I want to be.
 I n t r o d u c t I on 3

Im a twenty-three-year-old graduate student, about to take a three-hour

oral exam on the history of Western literature before professors whose
names appear on the spines of Norton anthologies. I spend the night
before the exam in the bathroom, vomiting from stress. In the morning I
leave my dorm room and walk to the test, my oversized headphones
blasting the Wu-Tang Clans Triumph on repeat. I bomb atomically,
Socrates philosophies and hypoth- eses / Cant defne how I be
droppin these mockeries / Lyrically perform armed robbery. Listening
to these lines, Im conscious of their poetry: the fgures and forms, the
rhythm patterns and rhyme schemes that Ive been studying are here
just as they are in Beowulf and T. S. Eliots The Waste Land and
Elizabeth Bishops Roosters. Im mindful of how effortless the poetic
patterns sound in the songs raw beats and hard rhymes. I take my
headphones off as I reach the exam room door. I pass the test.
Im thirty-six years old, a frst-time father, and my infant daughter
wont stop crying. I sing her lullabies to no avail, then switch to pop
songs. I try the Beach Boys Dont Worry Baby, Bob Marleys
Redemption Song, Joni Mitchells Both Sides Now, and the entire
Beatles songbook. Nothing works. Desperate, I sing Hall & Oatess
Private Eyes. It does the trick. As soon as I fnish the song she starts
to cry again. To soothe her I sing Billy Joels Just the Way You Are,
Kenny Logginss Dannys Song, and Christopher Crosss Arthurs
Theme (The Best That You Can Do). She settles happily to sleep. I
reluctantly face the truth: my three-month-old daughter loves soft-rock
hits of the seventies and eighties. So at least once a day for nearly half
a year I per- form a cappella concerts for her. Im no singer, but singing
these songs helps me to appreciate their careful construction, the way
they work in spite of my voice. As I hold her small body against me,
dancing slow circles in near-darkness, a simple fact dawns on me:
Almost all songs have a spark of magic in them.
This is a book about the magic of pop songs and how a significant
part of that magic resides in the language of the lyrics, both on the
page and in per- formance. Few of us first encounter song lyrics on
the page as poetry or as sheet music; instead, we experience lyrics
in sound, sometimes live but usu- ally recorded. Lyrics, no matter
how artfully conceived and constructed they may be, rarely matter
much alone; they exist in relation to the voice that enchants them
through rhythm, melody, and harmony; in relation to the in-
struments that intensify their language or obscure it entirely; and in
rela- tion to the experience of pop songs when heard alone or in a
crowd.
The Poetry of Pop offers the license to look unabashedly at these
lyrics. It asks you to take pop songs seriously without being too
serious about it.
 4 I n t r o d u c t I on

Theres something irresistible about words set in song. In fact,

songs are among the most powerful forms that words take. If all art
aspires to the con- dition of music, as Walter Pater once observed,
then it does so because music achieves a register of feeling
unmatched by any other mode of expres- sion. Words in song can
elicit emotions that plain speech cannot. Some songs render words
percussive and melodic, nearly divested of symbol and meaning. Other
songs enshrine words complex sense, building images and
narratives so durable that they live on for millennia.