Posted by tc on 11/14/2008, 8:16:25, in reply to "Re: Lyrics vs. Poetry"
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There are few rock and roll songwriters who can match real poets. Most of the allegedly poetic lyricists are pitiful. People like Townshend, Plant, etc are juvenile and immature lacking structure or substance.
There has been some crossover like Lou Reed or the Liverpool poets Henri, McGough and Pattern. Then there's occasional glimpses from Cohen, Dylan, Morrison but in general they don't even come close.
The 2 exceptions are Ian Curtis and Mark E Smith. With both of these writers we get images and imagination that match TS Eliot or Rimbaud or the Expressionists. I happen to think that they are rocks only real poets. Firmly in the Modernist camp they moved far beyond the limits of rock music. Even Joy Divisions (and New Orders music) as good as it is (and it is a culmination of the most extended depth, contrast and emotional senses that rock can achieve) is marked by Modernism and Expressionism. But Ian Curtis' lyrics take the admixture of Can, Bowie, Eno and the Velvet Underground on to a new level. Ian wrote about modern society through the prism of the individual. It inspired me to read the likes of Conrad, Camus, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Ibsen, Hemingway, Carver, Eliot, Rimbaud, Mayakovsky, Serge. Hopefully it will inspire you to do that as well. And if you do you'll find that there is more humour in this literature and Ian's lyrics than you realized. I believe the closest you can compare him to is Kafka and unfortunately he is equally misunderstood.
Kafka's work has been misinterpreted as prophesying Hitler and the Nazis and the horrors of totalitarianism and war. He wasn't writing about that, he was writing about 'normal' existence under stable times. The bureaucracy he describes is what we have today in the call centres and the world of banks without money. His work is deeply ironic and funny, almost Pythonesque satire. In the same way Ian wrote not about the world of Vietnam and Apocalypse Now but what happens after, tracing the broken world that we all live in before and after the great catastrophic events. This is his true poetic legacy. Ulimately it is a positive one as it is something we can prevent happening, both the small scale horrors of every day life and the large scale horrors. His tragedy is that having wrote about these things so eloquently, he couldn't escape his own horror of epilepsy.
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