The Mad Poets Blog

Last week, I wrote this post over at my personal blog, on my personal website winterspringsummer.com, and afterwards I thought to myself, “Hey, wouldn’t it be fun if other people got in on this action.”

So, here’s the idea.  Take something you love — and I mean LOVE — despite its questionable poetic or artistic value, and justify it.  Poetic Justification.  We are writers, poets, artists… but we are also humans, susceptible to wiles of overly sentimental movies, cheesy pop music, or velvet wall hangings of dogs playing poker.  (As you’ll read in the first installment, I’ve got a penchant for 80s hair bands.  I just can’t get enough of that crap!)  I’m open to anything, as long as it genuinely inspires you. I personally think its more fun to dissect the written/spoken/sung word, but then again if you can make a case for why Top Gun is one of the best movies of all time, go for it.

I’ll be justifying for the first few weeks.  But feel free to add your own justifications in the comments, or you can email them to me if you’d like to be featured:  autumn (at) winterspringsummer (dot) com.

So here goes.

The other night I was wondering:  if you can’t be a good poet, is it better to be so profoundly awful or to be just mediocre. Mediocre is always mediocre.  But sometimes, and just sometimes, bad is SO bad that it almost becomes good.

I started thinking about this whilst washing dishes and listening to Monster Ballads, one of my favorite CDs to sing along with.  The CD reaches its zenith for me a little more than halfway through when Damn Yankees’ “High Enough” kicks in.  God I love that song!  LOVE it!!  It’s the kind of song that I will listen to at least 2 or 3 times any time I hear it.  And I know it’s terrible.  It doesn’t even really make any sense.  But something about it makes the blood tingle in my veins.  So, I started thinking, There’s got to be something to this.  There has to be some poetic value — and I’m going to dig right into the lyrics and find it.  So here we are.

Before we get started, you might want to familiarize yourself with the song, if you’re not a hairband fanatic like me.  You can read the lyrics here, and you can listen to it here.  I recommend listening.  As I’ll soon explain, the lyrics don’t have nearly the same impact….

…Welcome back.  If you weren’t a fan before, you’ve been converted, no?  It’s such a rousing song, and I’m a bit confounded as to why.  But I’ve got a few ideas.  First of all, if we’re looking for poetic value, we can forget about finding it in these lyrics.  They are generally cryptic & nonsensical.  It opens harmlessly enough, if we can forgive rhyming “anymore” with itself: “I don’t wanna hear about it anymore/It’s a shame I’ve got to live without you anymore.”  Typical girl left guy love song.  That’s fine.  But what happened to break them up?  Did he cheat? Did she cheat?  No.  This poor guy just made one mistake:  “I didn’t know what to say when you called me baby.”  Huh??? What does that even mean???  And what makes even less sense is why, if he made the mistake, he would be asking he lost love:  “Can you take me high enough/ To fly me over (fly me over) yesterday?”  I mean, if you’re begging her not to leave, begging her to forgive you, do you really think its wise to be asking for a ride in her flying machine?  I’d start smaller dude.  But maybe that’s just me.

Okay, so that’s how the song totally fails on the poetic front.  But where it succeeds is in some of the little poetic devices it employs musically throughout.  Before those less-than-stellar opening lines, the song begins with a soft orchestral prelude.  Okay, I’m a sucker for violins in a rock music.  But I think it works here.  It announces the song as a love song immediately, but it also offers a counterbalance to the “metal” to come.  I actually think this is one of the really successful elements of hair ballads in general.  There’s an inherent tension between the hard energy of the music and the sweetness of the ballad that somewhat reflects the emotional imbalances that come with falling in love.

In “High Enough,” I also like the use of repetition, in the form of the background lyrics.  Although I’m not sure any of the lyrics are really strong enough to bear repetition, I believe the repetition helps to build and sustain the energy in the chorus.  The lead singer asks, “Can you take me high enough/To fly me over yesterday?”  And the background singer’s echo (”fly me over”) emphasizes the desperation, turns the request into a plea.  The pleading is strongest in the last round of the chorus at the end of the song:  “Won’t you fly me over (won’t you fly me over)…” Oh, my heart is breaking with both of them!  There’s also some effective repetition in the last line of the chorus, although there I think it works a little differently.  “It’s never over/Yesterday’s just a memory (yesterday’s just a memory and),” the lead & backup singers croon.  This repetition strikes me as insistent, however untrue.  It’s that idea that if you say something enough times it becomes real.  That’s why we’re repeating.

“Yesterday’s just a memory.”
“Yes, that’s right, yesterday’s just a memory, so it shouldn’t matter that you didn’t know what to say when she called you baby.”
“Yes, because yesterday’s just a memory.  So, why don’t we just move on, right.”
“Right.”

See, if you compare my inane mock conversation to the final line of the chorus, Damn Yankees clearly come out on top poetically.  That’s not exactly say much, but you get the point.

And that’s all I’ve got.  I mean, I think the music rises and falls to great effect, swelling and releasing emotion at all the right intervals.  And I think all the “woh oos” are expertly employed.  But that’s pop music 101, right?   Otherwise, let’s be clear, the song is pretty crappy.  But I love it — it gets me every time and there’s something to be said for that.

Crossposted on winterspringsummer.com.