The Old High Way of Love, Blog #2: All Our Yesterdays

As birthdays came and went and I got to stay up later on Sunday evenings watching TV, I became increasingly aware that there was more to music and language than ancient hymnodies, liturgies, and moralities. There were, in fact, and thanks to Ed Sullivan, “The Beatles!” who combined music, language, and performance in ways that compellingly celebrated a new and, in my case perhaps, more developmentally appropriate religion, that of teenage love. It wasn’t that I loved anyone myself, not yet, not really. I had crushes, but in general I was more interested in throwing around a football with my friends, or shooting hoops, or playing wiffleball all day. What got me thinking about love, though, were these songs, the richness of their melodies, the sincerity of their plangent minor-key bridges, the sometimes haunting modal harmonies, and of course those shockingly exuberant vocal performances, always in front of a non-critical and perpetually screaming mass of teenage girls. It was also the way the music interacted with words, words that were often either scintillatingly witty or heartbreakingly honest, or just, well, vulnerable, even depressing—which, after my mother died when I was twelve, became to me the most appealing tonality of all. Lennon’s songs in particular, prone to wandering around in minor keys, became a kind of soundtrack for my strangely altered life.

I considered Lennon more profound than McCartney, but when at any point in a given day I dropped a nickel into the juke box of my brain frequently it was a McCartney song that got punched up. And no wonder. If the proper descriptor for “Jubilate Deo” is “refulgent,” say, “glorious” even, for a given McCartney ballad it would be, well, “quite lovely.” Not as lustrous as Mozart, for sure, but sinuous and deeply pleasing, performed with such casually assumed conviction as could emanate only from a young man who hadn’t suffered a minute during his mop-topped life, nor certainly during the composition of even the saddest of his several reasonably sad songs. That is, as with the Latinate “Jubilate” to a seven-year-old choir boy, feeling McCartney’s songs, the sad ones even, did not require careful attention to the lyrics except to get a general idea of what the assumed sadness was about. The music made you feel it. While Lennon’s songs—their music, yes, but also their occasionally intelligent and unsparing poetry—made you feel much poignancy of grief and loss, McCartney’s made you feel the richness and beauty of the thing that had been lost. In a pop song, I believe—and this is what I’d like to explore for a moment or three—that’s done primarily through the music, not the words.

McCartney’s iconic lost-love ballad, of course, is “Yesterday,” which I have read is the most covered song ever written, and with good reason, too. The beauty of the melody summons up the beauty of a certain irretrievably lost love—both the feeling and its object—in a way that restores it to the singer in the moment of the singing, as well as to the listener, who experiences both the loss and the restoration almost as if the tragedy were his or her own. This is the power of nostalgia in Proust’s sense of the word and wounded as I was by my own loss I was entirely susceptible to exactly that feeling. Until, that is, I attempted to make sense of the lyrics. If I was in a Lennon-esque mood, the lyrics would trouble me a little, especially as I got older and more critical in my thinking about relationships and love.

It’s a commonplace in Beatles lore that having received the melody to “Yesterday” in his sleep but without accompanying lyrics McCartney spent weeks playing a song called “Scrambled Eggs” on the piano while waiting for more poignant words to assemble in his head. As it was, the lyrics that did eventually come to him were not unlike scrambled eggs anyway—as incoherent as any teenager’s understanding of a failed first love. The song’s refrain—“I believe in yesterday”—is moving enough, but the wisdom of such a stance is undercut by the information we receive in the verses as to both lovers’ maturity levels and the conditions that may or may not have been responsible for the deterioration of their relationship.

McCartney assures us, for instance, that when things were good “all my troubles seemed so far away,” and this indeed is one of the wonderful things about love. But to the extent that it’s a fantasy (the word “seems” is crucial in this regard) it cannot last and may indicate that the motivating factor for him was not love so much as escapism. We hear too that the object of his affections was not communicative enough to say why she left him but that her leaving him, he guesses, had to do with his having said “something wrong”—although he has no idea what that something was. This would suggest either that the object of his affection was unusually open to having her feelings hurt or that he himself was boorish enough to have let drop offensive pronouncements without the self- or other- awareness requisite for identifying which of them may have been hurtful.

Then there is the troubling notion, contradicted by everything else the song says about it, that their affair was “an easy game to play.” That is, far from being a real and vital human relationship requiring attention and care and sometimes the hard work of honest communication, apparently theirs was a casual schoolyard caper of sorts. Or this was how McCartney took it, which would suggest that at least on his end it was a flawed if not silly relationship from the get-go, and that, rather than regret its collapse, the healthiest and most logical thing for him to do would be to forget about it altogether and move on, taking for bitter consolation, perhaps, the thane’s observation in Act V that “all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way. . . .”

Fussing over incoherent pop lyrics, of course, is itself rather silly, like the diligent shooting of fish in a barrel, and to take McCartney to task for being borderline incoherent misses the point of the song, which is not at all about understanding but belief. The one thing the speaker/singer has, in the midst of so much confusion, is faith in the original premise of the lost relationship. This faith is existential, a decision to live by about what is and was true. In believing in “yesterday” McCartney insists on believing against all available evidence in the integrity of both his love and its object, whose lovability was inherent and had nothing to do with her maturity, or articulateness, or self-understanding, or even her overall suitability as a partner. Although the “yesterday” of McCartney’s love is gone, he continues to believe in it—the love, that is—and this belief, while making the loss more intense, redresses it too, keeping the love alive in the most essential way there is in the face of loss: as a song. To lose this belief on top of losing the relationship would mean that, in the words of the Danish prince, “the rest is silence,” in the peculiar sense that there would be nothing left to attest to, to sing about—that is, to live for.

It bears repeating that, in general, pop music doesn’t live or die by its lyrics. Many songwriters actually cobble verses together in the studio while the rest of the band are working out their parts. Tom Petty, one of my favorite songwriters, wrote some of his lyrics in-studio with magnetic word tiles on a music stand. If D.A. Pennebaker’s Dylan bi-op Don’t Look Back is admissible evidence—and why not?—it wasn’t unusual for Dylan to pound out lyrics willy-nilly on a cheap manual typewriter while people partied around him in the same room making lame jokes and laughing loudly together hoping he’d notice how witty they were. The point of a pop song after all is to be a song, not a poem, a rhythmic and harmonic flow of music upon the surface of which the lyrics, such as they may be, veritably float, like sea foam. Whatever belief the music may express needs little by way of substantiation, because the music itself carries it.

Music, one might say, is the sound-language of belief, wordless so in the verbal sense signifying nothing specific but embracing everything about and within the anima humana that is essential to it. Typically, the harmonic/melodic design of a song involves departure and return. A key is established, a melody emanates from the tonic chord of that key through the subdominant chord, the dominant, then back to the tonic again, achieving closure as if re-arriving at its original conclusion, not unscathed, so to speak, but even more committed to its key because finally “back to” it. When you return home from a long absence, as Dorothy found out, it’s not at all the same place you left—it’s better—and that opening chord or melodic theme is even more wonderfully itself when a piece returns to it after moving away. There are many variations to this pattern, including digressions into minor keys, sustained, diminished, and seventh chords, diminished seventh chords, etc., but the basic structure is that of departure and return in the form of a resolution. Lyrics, when they have any structure at all, generally conform to this paradigm, especially in the poppiest pop songs, with the result that the belief statement of the song, its chorus or refrain, gets articulated each time upon the recurring resolution of the melody. The musical resolution, that is, grounds the resolution of the lyrics, their insistence, after all, and despite any ambiguation in the verses, on attesting over and over to the one believed thing.

In this sense, the musical structure of the song is the “ur” statement of its particular belief. Its effectiveness as such is enriched and enhanced by the ways in which the various instruments in the overall arrangement mouth or click or bang out their parts. As such, music is belief untrammeled by conceptual expression. In a religious context, it might be thought of as belief without reference to a theology in all its scrupulousness. The lyrics’ proclamation of the belief—that is, the song’s chorus—wins the day over any complications in the verses because the departure-return structure of the music resonates in the mind of the listener quite before and long after he or she thinks at all critically about the words, assuring her or him that the thought of the song is primarily contingent on the experiential integrity of belief itself.

No doubt the reason for the primacy of a song’s music over its conceptual coherence is that sounds in and of themselves—as opposed to sounds that are codes for ideas—ie., words—elicit responses more quickly and more intensely from us. They speak directly to the more primitive zones of our brains where action and reaction are triggered much more immediately than thought can bring about. In our primal state, the sound of a lion roaring just behind a tree needs to be reacted to, not thought about. For infants, the sounds of a mother’s body as heard through her chest induce to sucking behaviors, unmediated by categorical logic. Music presents one sound sequence or many sounds in harmony, and this sound-modality, along with rhythm, induces not only to the unifying feeling of belief, consisting as it does in a sense of the connectedness of disparate elements, but also to the behaviors we exhibit when expressing or hearing any assertion of a truth to which we fundamentally adhere: head-nodding, hand-clapping, rapping on available surfaces, stomping our feet, swaying our hips or shoulders, or even, in true McCartney fashion, screaming and shaking our hair.

In a song, then, the feeling of belief precedes psychologically and therefore causally any process by which we might arrive at one specific conclusion or the other. In a song we don’t start with confusion and think our way out of it to a belief. Rather, the belief is the starting point, and any confusion in the song’s verses simply serves to reconfirm the belief, to lend it even greater power by leading us back to it by way of the departure and return structure of the melody and its harmonics.

This is a mimetic process in that it imitates a psychological experience.  Since the logic employed by the non-rational areas of our brain is in Sir James Frazier’s special sense of the word “homeopathic,” by imitating the psychological experience of loss and retrieval a song’s musical structure actually creates this experience in us. Additionally, since what’s felt to have been lost is a “believed in” thing, the relief of its being restored to us is actual, in the same way that, as neurologists tell us, a photo of a deceased loved one pinned to our cubical wall at work is felt by us subconsciously as the actual living presence of that loved one. Frazier describes how in early human communities when hunters went off to procure an elephant or a tiger, those who remained back in the village would repeatedly dance and chant out the formal dramatic image of a successful hunt. The purpose of this behavior was to bring about the success of the departed hunters, though they were miles away. In the primary areas of the brain—which, despite our certificates and degrees, our truth protocols, our critical thinking, our disdain for what we call “superstition,” are still alive in us today—we do not experience the image of a thing, its imitation on photosensitive paper or the dancing it out, say, on a stage, as distinguishable from the thing itself. Likeness, in this context, is identity and, as such, a kind of causality.

Since the essence of art has been from time immemorial mimetic, it isn’t surprising that drama, poetry, dance, song, pictorial creation, as well as sculpture, all have their roots in rituals and spells—that is, in what Frazier designates as homeopathic magic—and, later, in religion, which, though inclusive of magic, also involves the mimetic representation and supplication of divinities for the purpose of bringing about desired outcomes. In any case, if just as in love what is retrieved by the mimetic act is not so much an actual phenomenon as an ideal and mentalized image of a remembered thing, the act itself amounts to a felt realization—a making real—a real-ifying—of, for want of a better word, the sublime. It brings the sublime to life for us whether the rational areas of our brain believe in it or not.