Beware the Transcendence-Killing Lyric of Your Favorite Songs

My experience is that most modern music follows the 80/20 rule. 80% of it is rank awful. And 20% of it is just bad. Your mileage may vary, but this rule of thumb has saved me from hours of misery, tut-tutting, and grouchy old man sky-fist-shaking. It also has the marvelous effect that once I stumble upon a timeless masterpiece, I hold it in that much greater esteem for the stark relief (and aural relief) it gives me from the morass of unlistenable which surrounds it.

And it is in this spirit that I gave repeated listens to Daft Punk’s magnificent “Instant Crush.”

I know what you’re saying, “Old Timer, you’re almost 2 decades too late to opine on this out-listened wonder hit of the early 2000s.”

Guilty.

But if I may blame the aforementioned “morass of unlistenable” that has distracted me for decades like spam in my Spotify for so long, please be generous enough to give me that out. Because in fact I’d heard “Crush” in The Great Din, but I had never listened to it until recently. And wow does it reward.

There is so much to adore, yes adore, in this masterwork that it deserves an article of its own. And it’s early yet, but it may be getting just that.

I can’t remember the last time I force reloaded the same track so many times in a row. It eventually plays out but just barely. And after a week’s respite, it self renews like sore muscles after a hard workout.

Let me preface by saying that the use of Auto Tune in the track is masterful. Far from a hackneyed gimmick for the young or intonationally challenged, Daft transmogrifies this trite and cloying effect from the cheap to the sublime. Like vibrato, Wah-Wah or any other powerful effect, it can be used to cover up a slew of artistic sins and omissions. But in the hands of a master, it can elevate an otherwise beautiful piece into a transcendent experience.

And such is Instant Crush.

First of all, special plaudits must be given to the vocal stylings of Julian Casablancas. Holy hell. Plaintive, heartfelt, vaguely British, and sensitive throughout, they almost give Daft a 12 point handicap in the quality of canvas he gets to paint upon. There is so much to work with in the raw vocal here that one can imagine even without the defining autotune, it would still be a gorgeous listen.

His rhythmic sprechstimme perfectly punctuates and balances the pleading - but not at all cloying - cries, and for a moment of a moment, one can almost imagine a parallel world where white people invented rap music.

It is a stunning work of breathy, angsty, syrupy young male desire that stays *just* on this side of the desperate and disgusting begging-for-pussy purveyed by the modern, grinding hip hop “crooners” who have cashed out the hard won street cred of their elders and betters in the genre for beta male troubadour lyrics of needy, childish sucking up. Blech. And it is a miracle that the beauty of Casablancas’s vocal moves our hearts rather than our bowels in his execution of the lyric. But more on that in a moment. . .

One reason this article is about this particular hit and not the higher listen count “Get Lucky” that features Pharrell Williams and someone I haven’t heard of (#geezer) is that rather than beating you over the head, feet, throat, neck, and backside with endless hook repeats, the present masterwork only leaves us wanting a few more to prolong the joy of anticipating future listenings.

Now, as I have written elsewhere, I am an economist and a marketer, and I appreciate the non-Schenkerian value of repetition in music from a commercial perspective. Command-V is a producer’s best friend both in terms of how much actual content he needs to create (not much) and also in how much branding buck bangs he gets by stuffing the listener’s ear full of his junk so many times that he can’t but replay it in his head for the rest of the week. But in “Lucky’s” case, it sounds as if Daft accidentally left his bong on the keyboard and repeated the micro hook literally ad absurdum. Perhaps there is a logic to this that escapes my meager appreciation skills. Perhaps there is an extra-musical wink and nod that only those more plugged in than I could appreciate. I am willing to give Daft the benefit of every doubt, because he has earned it. But with “Lucky,” he takes a song that I really like and makes it unlistenable to me. Shame.

By contrast, in “Crush,” Daft & Casablancas mix up the iterations with octave leaps, extensions, and all the tricks of the trade that made Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, and other timeless delighters so, well, timeless.

More on Casablancas: The counterpoint to his own vocals (which Daft reduces to the merest shadow of a ghost accompaniment at 2:48 - you really have to listen for it) is a wonderfully emotive, exasperated contrast to the lead vocal.

The higher octave extension at the end of what we classical nerds might call “the development” (sorta) around 4:00 is a true delight, underpins the structure, and is very likely supported by the lyric (more on this in a moment as well) and perfectly marks the finality as it leads into the priceless “coda” outro that Daft generously gifts us.

To wit, structurally the piece is over at this point. He’s said everything he needs to say, and all that is left is the good-byes. This is a precious moment in any musical score that allows for whimsy, frenzy, or touching adieus at the composer’s true artistic discretion.

Rossini was famous for the frenzied, accelerating codas, hurrying the audience towards an excited ovation as the movement wraps (listen to almost any of his overtures). Tchaikovsky could write a coda that would wring the last drops of pathos, patriotism, and pride from the final, drawn out moments of his masterworks - with the occasional frenzy to really bring down the house (The finale of the 5th symphony comes to mind here). And Beethoven would often fill his codas with jokes, surprises, carrying on, head fakes, and yes, the occasional frenzy (his own 5th Symphony).

As unlikely company as this is for Daft, the coda of Crush (4:57) is to me so marvelous in its subtly that it deserves at least an honorable mention in the company of such titanic masterworks that most of you probably have never heard of. All it does is signal its sad good-byes with the addition of a completely new sound effect. It is a different “color” altogether from the rest of the piece, has nothing remarkable about it in terms of strut or glamor, and almost sounds like a click track, computerized beep boop, or other innocuous noise. Yet it is so delightfully underplayed with its duo-tone “melody” that it signals the end of the song, completely without fanfare, but with the certainty that gives the listener a few moments to collect himself, process the previous 5 minute experience, and then gently move on. It is, in a word, perfect.

What else can be said here?

The subtle addition of the homophonic backup vocal in the second verse is delightful, giving us all those delicious major 2nds that give the piece so much of its direction and particular flavor, and perfectly sets up the expansive - yet still somehow intimate vocal extension that precedes the “guitar solo” section (3:02). Listen carefully for the stylistic diversion of the quiet “backup” vocal here. It is exasperated, almost gritty for a moment, (the unconscious angry snarls to offset the lonely boy vocals) which no doubt underscores the drama of the lyric.

And then of course there is the hook itself. Like the first bite of Bar-B-Q soup,, it is so tasty it leaves you wanting bite after bite after bite, not just for the juicy contrapuntal flourish of the keyboard that you can never quite get your head around, but for the perfect rhythmic pitter-patter of the vocal and the reappearance of the unresolved Major 2nd that stimulates and teases us into a desperate need for further iteration (whereas the “Get Lucky” copy/paste work over-resolves, sucking rather than infusing life into the song’s timeline and our desire to have it go on forever.) There is an interesting parallel here in the unresolved melody in the “Waltz” of Mahler’s 5th symphony. A melody that hints at an end yet never delivers is the lover’s trick to swell our desire and develop our lust for just one more iteration and a chance to bite the apple. Both Daft and the great Maestro are Tantric masters of this sort of titillation.

And that’s all I can say about that. Listening to this work enough to buy Mr Punk a cappuccino with the Spotify royalties, I am perfectly satisfied.

Or at least I was.

In a pique of not leaving well enough alone, I entered into a Quixotic voyage this morning, a voyage I both regret and abhor, leaving, as it were, a splinter in the side of my mind, a fly in the ointment of my ear, and a blemish at the heart of my soul. I may yet have recovered from the error, but gentle reader, as of this moment I can not guarantee that the stain of my foolhardiness will ever wash away.

I only got so far. Maybe midway through the first chorus when I shut the tab on my laptop and attempted to erase even the memory that I had been so foolish as to download the lyric of this song.

Like so many lyrics of our favorite works, we kinda sorta think we know what they are, even if the singalong version in our head is grammatically incorrect, emotionally incoherent, and, in some cases, not even real words.

This serves us well, I think. The left brain lyric will never match the power of the right brain transportive ability of music. Never. It will bury us in the mundane, the logical, and the sound, tethering us to our mortal coils long enough for us to process and “understand,” whereas the music releases us from same, freeing us to wonder and wander among the spheres whence it derives its cosmic power. Who would not prefer such an experience over the one you’re having now of reading dull words on a colorless page?

Paying too close attention to the words, be it in Opera, Lieder, or even Mass is a distraction from the experience of your heart that is the true raison d’être of the art. In fact it was the pivotal technological innovation of tonality (and its pinnacle in Sonata Allegro Form) that allowed music to liberate itself fully from the confines of reason, lyric, and libretto to tell its full emotional story unfettered and free to stir our souls without the clumsy translator and imperfect psychopomp interpreter of our rational minds. This really was one of the great innovations in history for the liberation of the human soul which sadly has been debased to grunts and sound effects by latter day “poets” who exploit the music for their message rather than the other way around. But exploring that tragedy is for another time.

For I am still caught up in the current tragedy of how horribly banal I found the lyric of “Crush.” So much so that I have no idea if it got any better and if the musical drama - like a great aria - transpors the music to fly hand in hand with the lyric like dancing eagles in the sky, or if they are simply weighed down by it, at best providing the base tools for Casablancas to work his magic.

Don’t know, don’t care as the kids say. But it occurs to me that in many instances, avoiding touching the concrete “truth” of an artwork is well advised. We should never meet our lyrics. Watching the “how it was done” tradecraft of a sci-fi masterwork like Star Wars or The Matrix does nothing but drain the magic from the creations. Hearing “President Bartlett” talk himself a fool as mere “Martin Sheen” on the Jay Leno show (as was) sucks the majesty out of the character just the same. And reading the terrible lyric of “instant Crush” threatened to desaturate and detract from the delight I have experienced so many times from this glorious tune.

For some, this may be a risk worth taking. Reading the lyric of “Civilian” by Wye Oak fills out the beauty of the song with the longings for the lost possibility of love. For me this had the opposite effect of Crush by placing the heart’s desire even farther from the world. But from what I can remember from having blotted it out, there is no such transportation from the mundane in Crush. It is banal all the way down, tragically reminiscent of dickless Hip Hop single mommy pop love that is 50s rock without the charming diversion of melody.

So maybe the 80/20 rule is stronger than I think. Maybe when you find those gems “not of this world” it is best to leave them there. Hold them lightly, to let them live as long as they can in your imagination without yanking them too forcefully down to earth. Nothing is more deadly to the ephemeral than the “need to know.” Our control mechanisms long to tame the imaginative, to bind and tie it down so it can share in the misery of limitation to which it has leashed its own self. Security, certainty, domination. . .these are the fears that crush the golden song goose who only and innocently wants to gift us the beauty from above. Why can that not be enough?

I don’t know. But if tragedy is love’s handmaiden, then the love of transplendant beauty may not easily live in this world without crushing reality stalking it just a few steps behind. So enjoy the moments of joy while they shimmer before us and before the Sun above and Rocks below drain the mirage too soon before our very eyes and our hearts have had their fill. And at least for now. . .never meet our lyrics.