Category: Music

Songs and Tweaking Our Understanding, Part 2

Let’s look at three songs: “Cabaret” (from the musical of the same title), “Is That All There Is?” and “More Than a Woman” by the Bee Gees.

In “Cabaret” the character Sally Bowles sings, “Start by admitting from cradle to tomb / It isn’t that long a stay / Life is a cabaret, old chum…” She asserts that life is so short that one shouldn’t take it seriously and should be treated as boisterous fun.

Earlier, she sang:

I used to have this girlfriend known as Elsie
With whom I shared four sordid rooms in Chelsea
She wasn’t what you’d call a blushing flower
As a matter of fact, she rented by the hour

The day she died the neighbors came to snicker:
“Well, that’s what comes from too much pills and liquor”
But when I saw her laid out like a queen
She was the happiest corpse I’d ever seen

Does the idea of a happy corpse ring true? As a corollary of this, is it plausible that a smile survives hours after death?

While “Cabaret” compares life to the titular cabaret, there are many other songs with simplified comparisons of life, none of which cover the full breadth of human experience. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that the world is inexhaustible, and to extend this, so too is life.

In “Is That All There Is?” each question has several levels. When confronted with the fire that claims her childhood home, the disappointment of the circus and finally the loss of her love, the song echoes “Cabaret” with the chorus:

Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball

Much like the way “Cabaret” repeats “Life is a cabaret, old chum / Come to the cabaret”.

In “More Than a Woman” by the Bee Gees, they sing, “We can take forever, just a minute at a time”. Can we visualize this in the concrete terms of the song? In Western tradition, we often associate the search for forever with young love. What does it mean to fuse the momentary and the forever?

The Bee Gees song gives us an entry to the changing sense of time experienced by a living person, as contrasted to the objective time of a fossil carbon-dated by a paleontologist.

Songs and Tweaking Our Understanding

In any public place, you’re likely to be surrounded by faces reflecting an unshakeable puzzlement of people who have sleepwalked through life. Songs capture this perplexity. Take “Hier encore” by Charles Aznavour, which has subsequently been translated into a myriad of languages and covered by many artists.

Yesterday, when I was young
The taste of life was sweet as rain upon my tongue
I teased at life as if it were a foolish game
The way the evening breeze may tease a candle flame
The thousand dreams I dreamed, the splendid things I planned
I always built, alas, on weak and shifting sand
I lived by night and shunned the naked light of day
And only now I see how the years ran away

Yesterday, when I was young
So many drinking songs were waiting to be sung
So many wayward pleasures lay in store for me
And so much pain my dazzled eyes refused to see
I ran so fast that time and youth at last ran out
I never stopped to think what life was all about
And every conversation I can now recall
Concerned itself with me, me and nothing else at all

Yesterday, the moon was blue
And every crazy day brought something new to do
I used my magic age as if it were a wand
And never saw the waste and emptiness beyond
The game of love I played with arrogance and pride
And every flame I lit too quickly, quickly died
The friends I made all seemed somehow to drift away
And only I am left on stage to end the play

There are so many songs in me that won’t be sung
I feel the bitter taste of tears upon my tongue
The time has come for me to pay for yesterday
When I was young
Young, young…

Notice that “Yesterday, when I was young” is a poetic conceit discussing his youth. Orbiting this thought is a song by Crosby, Stills & Nash, the first of which is “Wasted on the Way”, regretting the singers’ wasted lives. Another is “We May Never Pass This Way (Again)” by Seals & Crofts. These songs tweak our understanding by reminding us in a painful, yet melodious way, that we are all swept along by life’s pressures and events.

Imagine that one is aware of this trend early enough to avoid it and attempts to sidestep this fate. However, there’s a danger on the other side of mindless snarling rebellion, in the vein of Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell”.

Finally, there are musical styles such as Portuguese fado, characterized by mournful tunes and lyrics that straddle the loss of one’s true love and the loss of Portuguese influence in the world, such as Latin America supplanting Portugal as the center of Portuguese culture. In all of these, the “once upon a time” is at the level of youth, one’s romance and eventually life, which “never comes again”.

Perhaps the most sobering line in popular music is “all we are is dust in the wind” (from “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas). One might benefit from a moment of quiet reflection on this lyric.