For a long time now, I have kept a running list of “Songs That I Would Cut Off A Limb To Have Written.” It’s not a super-long list because my standards are high, but I certainly do not have enough limbs to cover it. Most of the time, I find that it’s the lyrics of a song, and not the composition, that raises it up above the others in my estimation. As I’ve said many times before on this blog, I’m a sucker for three chords and a sad story.
One of the things that I love about songwriting– and also about blogging– is that it requires a committed thriftiness. Standard pop songs only run about 4 minutes long, so (with the obvious exception of rap) you really have to be economical with your words. Distilling a complicated, meaningful, and hopefully universalizable story down to only its most essential parts is much harder work than it seems. When it’s done well, and when it’s put to music, it really is the best of that idiosyncratic human creation we call poetry.
I’m going a little bit meta with my #30DaySongChallenge2018 pick for today. This song is actually a song about songwriting. It’s a song about writing the perfect song. Not only the “perfect” song, but the song to end all songs of its ilk. Here is Sugarland‘s “Very Last Country Song.” Pay close attention to the chorus.
What I love about “Very Last Country Song” is that it is, in its basic form and content, a pretty standard three-chords-and-a-sad-story country song. But when we get to the chorus, both the form and the content are, in the parlance of Continental philosophers, “called into question.” We see that the idea of country music “standards”– not just the standard I-IV-V-I chord progression, but also the mama, trains, trucks, prison, and getting drunk thematic content– have a tendency to, in the words of Jacques Derrida, autodecontruct. That is, at the foundation of the “text” (il n’y a pas de hirs-texte) of country music, embedded in the very grammar of country music, we find a set of possibilities that are only meaningful inasmuch as they are impossible. As a system, country music relies on a set of conceptually-fabricated oppositions that, if they were ever resolved, would bring about its end…
And/yet/but, paradoxically, country music is only meaningful inasmuch as those oppositional tensions are maintained. Let’s look at Sugarland’s chorus again:
If life stayed the way it was,
And if lovers never fell out of love,
If memories didn’t last so long,
If nobody did nobody wrongs,
If we knew what we had before it was gone,
If every road led back home,
This would be the very last country song.
What is being said in this chorus is, on the one hand, so transparent, so obvious, and so intuitively true… and also, on the other hand, so mind-blowingly brilliant, if only for being said for first time.. Sugarland has basically postulated that country music functions as a meaningful text in very much the same way that Derrida showed a number of other concepts upon which we build communities (hospitality, friendship, democracy, giving, and forgiving) function. They are possible in our experience only by virtue of their being impossible to realize in our experience if we abided by the strictest requirements of their conceptual form.
In regular-people talk: country music is only possible, and only meaningful, because life doesn’t stay the way that it was, because lovers quite often do fall out of love, because people do people wrong, and because we can never, ever, really go back home. Country music requires that we all maintain these resolutions qua possibilities-to-come, but in order for the whole enterprise of country music to persist, those possibilities must remain unrealized. And so, as ideal as those resolutions may sound, and in spite of ourselves, we prefer instead the tension, the paradoxically satisfying experience of a desire unsatisfied, a hope unrealized, a fortune implied, and a future delayed and undetermined.
Who knew Derrida was the best resource for understanding country music? I did.
Runners-up for #30DaySongChallenge, Day 22:
- Willie Nelson’s “You Were Always On My Mind”
- Etta James’ “I’d Rather Go Blind”
- Maria McKee’s “If Love Is A Red Dress (Hang Me In Rags)”
- The Avett Brothers’ “I and Love and You”
- Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5”
- Percy Sledge’s “Dark End of the Street” (written by James Carr)