Categories: uncategorized
Date: 25 June 2008 14:28:28
I wanted to be happy.
There's a song about happiness which I quite like but which my wife doesn't, because, I think, she finds it childish. To my mind it's about taking pills (probably legally, but possibly not) as a means of curing unhappiness, and it's a reflection, or even a rant, about the shallowness that can lead people to doing that or recommending it for others. I hear the singer as a patient being offered anti-depressants and parodying the doctor as saying "Do you want to be happy?", and rejecting the implied viewpoint that being happy is all that matters in life. This interpretation is partly based on knowledge I have of the singer and the fact that he's struggled with depression. This knowledge leads me to interpret the lyrics one way, and read into them things which, objectively, aren't there. Objectively it is simply a song extolling the virtues of being happy. That simple extolling is all my wife hears and why she thinks it's rather less than profound.
To be honest I'm not so much concerned about what the song is supposed to mean. I am selfish so I don't particularly care what the singer meant; all that matters is what the song says to me, and to me it's an anti-happy-pill rant, and I'm happy(!) with that.
What interests me is how the context (my knowledge of the singer's mental health) affects my interpretation of the song, and whether I'm then actually responding to the song at all, or whether I'm just responding to what I know of the singer. And does that make it, actually, a really badly written song? For surely a well-written song should actually say something itself rather than rely on other sources to communicate? If I write a song with a lyric that simply repeats the word "naminanu" then it probably wouldn't mean much to you. But if I spread the word that "naminanu" is a word that American soldiers used in Vietnam to describe the moral vacuum they perceived in their intervention in that country, then the song would acquire much more meaning. But it isn't actually the song that has that meaning, in the same way that the song which I listened to while reading about the deaths of 200 people has become a very sad song to me in a way that has nothing to do with the intentions of the people who wrote the song.
The happy song is a simple case but I'm mulling it over to shed light a) on various songs by a band I like which, I realize, are good songs ruined by awfully-written lyrics, and b) on why most chorus writers seem to feel no need to write a decent lyric, and c) on whether my inability to understand or even parse half the lyrics I hear is due to my ineffable ignorance or due to them simply being badly written.