Author Archives: Amina Shareef Ali

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“Fire and Rain”: how to say the unbearable thing without really saying it

My partner warned me against following up my first post with one about James Taylor, for fear that I would pigeonhole myself into frumpiness.  I would probably take her advice if my post were analyzing the lyrical intricacies of a song like “Shower” (What else would you shower the people you love with?  Don’t answer that).  But there’s nothing much more gut-wrenching than a song about a recently passed companion, and “Fire and Rain” is undoubtedly among the best in this category (see also: “You Never Know” by Immortal Technique).

There are a few nice moments in the verses that I appreciate: the grim reliance on faith in the second verse, for instance, stirs a note of pity even in the heart of this lifelong atheist. But really, it’s all about the chorus. Specifically, the last line. Let’s go to the transcript:

I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain
I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end
I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend
But I always thought that I’d see you again

Before I knew what this song was about, I used to listen to these lines, finding them sweet and somber but not knowing quite why they had such hurt wrapped up in them. Sure, he surveys the hard stretches along the path he’s walked, but it’s implied that because he’s endured them, the good at least somewhat balances out the bad. Then I noticed: the construction of the last line is a bit awkward, at least in terms of rhetorical convention. If he begins by declaring, ‘I’ve seen this, that and the other’ and then halts us with a ‘but’, what follows should properly be in the negative. Which is to say:

“But I never thought that I’d never see you again.”

Which is a far more awful thing to state. To me, it doesn’t seem like much of the song’s sadness comes from the ‘lonely times’ at all, but from the fact that the speaker had been counting on seeing his friend again, probably countless times again for years to come, and this hope had given him strength through all his trials. Not only will he never take comfort in that again, but chances are he’s been in the red for some time, and the rug has been pulled out.

Whether the construction was conscious or not, I suspect that James Taylor found it unbearable to admit this fact outright, but our understanding of syntactical expectancies fixes it for us in the same way that our brains fix the upside-down view of the world captured by our eyes. We’re aware of his loss the same way he’s aware of the sun: ever-present, incontrovertible, impossible to face directly.

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“The Rose” and the oft-attempted, rarely well-executed ‘message’ song

Lately I’ve been really into “The Rose”, penned by Amanda McBroom but made famous by Bette Midler. For a long time, this song carried an aura for me of something that was closely associated with childhood and at one time quite familiar but hadn’t been brought into my consciousness for over half a lifetime, like a lullaby or old family photos in storage. I was reminded of it last month at the Starry Plough open mic, when Cortnee Rose did a chilling version of it.

Some say love it is a river
that drowns the tender reed
Some say love it is a razor
that leaves your soul to bleed
Some say love it is a hunger
an endless aching need
I say love it is a flower
and you its only seed

It’s the heart afraid of breaking
that never learns to dance
It’s the dream afraid of waking
that never takes the chance
It’s the one who won’t be taken
who cannot seem to give
and the soul afraid of dying
that never learns to live

When the night has been too lonely
and the road has been too long
and you think that love is only
for the lucky and the strong
Just remember in the winter
far beneath the bitter snows
lies the seed that with the sun’s love
in the spring becomes the rose

In thinking about what tags I will be using in this blog, I have the notion that it may come to resemble an amateurish taxonomy of songs. This song is definitely what I would call a ‘message’ song, a generic speaker urging a generic listener to embrace a particular lifestyle or belief that will ostensibly lead to a happier, more ethical, or more enlightened existence. I feel it’s safe to say that I think most message songs convey some pretty terribly contrived and dumbed-down ‘messages’ (e.g. “Let Love Rule” by Lenny Kravitz): the songwriter, entertaining no small degree of narcissism, wants to pen something that will be universally recognized as a beautiful rendition of a central truth in our human experience, but from fear that their own song won’t be celebrated similarly, makes certain that the gospel imparted is something that the listeners already know, or think they know. (Super important note: “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five is amazing, but not a message song by my criteria, despite its name).

One of the challenges about writing a message song that’s actually good, besides having to actually possess some wisdom about life, is that for the tone to be right, it almost requires that no personal experience, trial or struggle, whether first- or third-person, be related. In “The Rose”, the speaker only enters the song once (“I say love, it is a flower”), but this declaration could easily be that of a detached commentator; there’s no admission of vulnerability or of her own experience of heartbreak (female songwriter + female performer = feminine pronoun). Far more intimate and disarming is when the second-person enters the song in the third verse: “And you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong”. By using the second-person, we are pulled into the song and made vulnerable: it is not Amanda’s or Bette’s but our faith that has been shaken.

There are a number of other elements here that makes this song deeply moving to me. I love the characterizations in the first verse of love as an amoral, unconcerned agent of nature (not unlike my own “Plant Food”, although somewhat less apocalyptic). Maybe even more effective to me is the repetition of “Some say love…” because it gives me a pretty tragic image, of dreary, jaded masses of a society brusquely rumoring about love, like it’s a mythical creature or a fugitive like Emmanuel Goldstein. I’m not sure if it’s known whether there are more of these types of people than the other kind, that is, those who have been drinking the kool-aid since at least adolescence (count me among their numbers). But by portraying a world populated mostly by the latter, the speaker creates an environment where her message is especially dire and perhaps even a bit radical (as opposed to the well-worn saw that it often is). And certainly when considering the scared, hurt soul of the third verse, who believes on some gut level that they are not worthy of loving and being loved (and there are many of these), the message does seem quite urgent.

Finally, the central metaphor of the song, love as a blossom, is quite beautiful, and not just because flowers are purdy. What she is saying, in essence, is that each of us is empowered to let beauty spring forth from ourselves, for our sake, for the sake of others, for its own sake. And while the song is quite gentle and kind to the damaged heart, there is to me a sort of an imperative call-to-action (“you, its only seed”). As if to say, ‘You must sacrifice and make yourself vulnerable so that beauty may flourish.’

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Preamble

Every new blog seems to start out with a sort of shrugged-shoulders ‘I guess this is my statement of purpose, or theme, or whatever’, so here’s mine. I’ve been thinking of starting a blog for some time now, even went ahead and claimed shareefali.wordpress.com for my own months ago (I wasn’t about to let that fucker from MySpace and YouTube take my shit again). But I’ve sat on it, not knowing quite which of my quotidian thoughts were worth rendering, at least at greater length than 140 characters. But now I think I’ve got something to latch on to.

I, Shareef Ali, am a songwriter, so this will be a songwriter’s blog. I envision my starting point will be to record some of my reflections about moments in particular songs that I find particularly poignant, clever, well-constructed or what have you (yes, I do have a few examples already mentally lined up). Coming from a compositional background as well, I will also look at how the music supports the meaning of the song. Dare I assert that there is a dearth of serious theoretical analysis of highly lyrical music, attending equally to both its musical structure and literary content? I do, quickly adding that I won’t be doing too much to fill that void. In fact, I imagine I may waste valuable time and bandwidth discussing some pretty insipid stuff, because there was a line in there that somehow just did the trick for me. I also may at some point start discussing my own songs, whether already established in my repertoire or in the pipeline.

Important to note that this will not be a ‘new music blog’; in fact, it will probably be decidedly ‘old music’ or at least last year’s jams. I’m not so interested in breaking/promoting new things as I am in bringing fresh eyes to familiar ones, especially if they seem mundane or taken for granted. Also, I can make no guarantee that politics, life philosophy, or some other random bullshit won’t find its way into this record. I’ve got to amuse myself sometimes.

Final note: I was jolted from my blogging inertia by a conversation today with Cyrus St. Rid, wherein we swore to a challenge. Each of us starts a blog today, and writes an entry every other day until one of us drops the ball. Loser has to visit the other (Cyrus is in Portland, Oakland is my home). Taking a road trip to see a friend in a supposedly lovely part of the country I’ve never been isn’t much of a disincentive, so I’ll just have to be on the ball with this thing for its own sake.