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| From | "Sager, Greg" <greg.sager@bankofamerica.com> |
| Subject | all alone in the Sea of Tranquility |
| Date | Mon, 28 May 2007 02:23:02 -0500 |
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<<Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 19:23:20 +0100
From: Bob Hutton <bobhutton@btinternet.com>
To: audities@smoe.org
Subject: Re: audities-digest V5 #368 (9 msgs)
Message-ID: <4655D818.5060507@btinternet.com>
"Bob, I think in Sir Macca's defence it's actually:
"And if this ever-changing world in which we're living ... "
In light of the revelation that what I interpreted as poor grammar from Macca was actually a mondegreen (is that the word?) on my part, I will quietly don my idiot cap and go stand in the corner.
But not before offering up my favourite clunky lyric:
"Two lovers missing the tranquility of solitude" ... so eloquent, so wordy, so ... erm ... 6th form schoolboy poetry.
Can you name the guilty party? No cheating now ...>>
Clunky, yes, but what always struck me about this particular line from "That's Entertainment" was how pedantic it was. I mean, really ... "the tranquility of solitude" in a pop song? Funny thing is that this song, and this line in particular, serve to paradoxically illustrate how in his salad days Paul Weller's pedantry went hand-in-hand with his charm. The music of The Jam crackled with so much life, and Weller was so naïve and earnest, that it was easy to forgive him when he verged upon rhetorical bombast.
Contrast Weller with his contemporary and compatriot, Sting, in what stands for me as perhaps the worst lyrical clunker ever, from "Walking In Your Footsteps":
If we explode the atom bomb,
Would they say that we were dumb?
The premise of the song, which is that the extinction of the dinosaurs is a good object lesson for this planet's current dominant lifeform, *Homo sapiens*, is a good one. But Sting's consummate gracelessness as a lyricist drives home the point like a sledgehammer pounding a finishing nail into particle board. This couplet is merely the most egregious example within a song in which Sting's heavy-handedness completely ruins the usefulness of the premise. It's not only leaden and obtuse, it doesn't even rhyme.
I wish that Sting hadn't been experiencing the tranquility of solitude when he wrote the lyrics to "Walking In Your Footsteps".
Greg Sager
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