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27.6.05 Neutral Milk Hotel, Lacan, transference and the benign unintelligibility of pop lyrics

On the way to the day job this morning I was singing Neutral Milk Hotel's "Love You More Than Life" to myself as I cycled through Hyde Park. This is a more difficult task than you might imagine, above and beyond my complete inability to carry a tune. You see, this song - which may not even exist, it isn't on any NMH album - has only four lines where the lyrics are remotely intelligible. There's the chorus, and then "I'm all screwed up and I feel all right, sinking deeper in the night". Or something. Beyond that, it's just the slow thrum of lo-fi electric guitar and the singer's voice, deep, soft and melancholic.

I'd probably not be nearly so fond of it if I actually understood all the lyrics. But this is a love song, and I can only hear fragments of the story. Nature loves a love song, and abhors a vacuum. I am forced to fill in missing lines myself. At a certain point I stop liking the song because it's a catchy little tune, and start liking it because I have put my own story into it to make up for the parts I couldn't understand.

In Lacanian psychology, this is called transference. And it goes like this: we are all tangled little webs of complication, and at some level we are always trying to untie ourselves. We all want to know what it's all about, Alfie. Who am I? Where am I going? Should I have called her again and tried to explain, or is it better that I didn't? We are always looking for psychoanalysts. But, being cheap, and somewhat ashamed, very few of us actually plump for the man and the sofa and the $500 an hour and the "tell me about your father". Instead we look to a parent, a lover, a friend to transfer into the role of analyst. Or even, a pop song.

This is specious, because nobody can answer our questions except ourselves. Hell, most of the time we don't even know what the questions are, or that we are asking them. The thing about writing is it makes you painfully aware of your own themes and obsessions. You find yourself repeating the same ideas, the same characters with minor variations, over and over. You discover that even your sentences are traitor signposts, defaulting to a certain rhythm.

Every story starts with the self, and a lack, or a desire, and grows from there. And if you create enough stories, and are brave enough, you begin to understand those holes in the fabric of your self as they are reflected back at you. Others aren't immune from this, because even if you don't write things down on paper you are still endlessly creating your own story in the way you dress; who you befriend; your loves, catastrophic and repetitious.

The advantage of art (against people) as agents of transference is simple: books don't talk back. They can't argue with whatever you're projecting on to them. Neither can films. Or pop songs - the most widespread experiential currency of our age. Why the dominance of pop songs? They're catchy, they're vague, and most of all they inspire us to sing along. If you want to aid transference, what better way than to get people to tell the story on their own breath? You are the "I" of the story, because you are singing it.

Not that anyone thinks about these things, or plans them. They just happen: the artist creates a song. It's a story. They all are. It's a pretty vague story, because they've only got three minutes to tell it, and lyrical convention says there needs to be a chorus. And, oh bugger, it's got to rhyme. So the perfect, golden thing that the artist had in mind when he or she sat down to write the song eventually comes out, and it's not perfect or golden any more. It's dented and slightly brassy, but it'll do. (This happens with screenplays too; oh dear God does it ever happen with screenplays.)

So they push their little tune out there in the drift, and it bumps up against your boat. You pick it up and listen. Chances are, the backing music is a bit loud, or the guy's got a funny accent, or it's Rickie Lee Jones and really, heaven knows what she was singing on those early albums, and you can't understand all of it. You latch on to what you can; perhaps there's a nice turn of phrase that reminds you of how you felt when you broke up with whatshisname. And from there, you try to fill in the gaps in the landscape. It's not hard, so you think; after all, it's got to rhyme.

But your lyrics are never theirs. Think about it: how many times have you mis-heard the lyrics to a pop song, and then been terribly disappointed when you found out what they actually were? Have the real lyrics ever been better than the ones you made up? And so the artist has forced us - even the most leaden and uncreative of us - to provide our own answers to our secret questions, to music of his choosing. He didn't intend to, but nonetheless, it's pretty cool that it happens.

It goes beyond pop songs. Take this painting of Cupid & Psyche, below. There are only two parts of the painting which matter: Cupid's red and slightly grubby fingers grazing Psyche's neck in adoring disbelief - we've all been there. Those heady first days, when you can be captivated for hours by that little valley where the skin declines from hip bone to belly of your beloved. See, the painter says, here is this archaic myth about a princess and a demigod, but look, it's your story too.

And then - the most important thing about the entire work - Cupid's face is left in shadow. It's a clever dodge. However handsome or noble the painter made Cupid's face, he knew that all you would think is, eurgh, what a git. You would have related to Cupid as an individual, rather than as a space for transference. The painter could not portray Cupid's face because you yourself do not know what your face looks like at that moment in your story. You're too busy staring at the freckles on her neck, you big soppy fool.

So that's it: sometimes, greatness in art comes down to nothing more than knowing when to shut up. A good set-up, a catchy little rhythm, and then a blank space to put yourself in. Look, it's your story too.

( 2:17 PM )

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