(no subject)
Feeling creatively stymied right now on this paper, so an interlude of musings on art. Music, poetry.
Art is not always literal. Not even often literal. Figurative language seems to be the easiest concept for people, even if there's an awful lot of confusion over the differences between similes, metaphors, and symbols. (We won't even touch the difference between synecdoche and metonymy - although, truth be told, sometimes I have trouble with that one.) Irony, on the other hand, often seems to go by the wayside. Or double meanings, shaded meanings, meanings that depend on context, on a work being taken as a whole.
Once I figure out the proper way to get there, I'm going to touch in this paper on the Eminem/Rihanna collaboration "Love the Way You Lie." I've read an awful lot of blog posts about that song in the past few days, and I'm bothered by the people who take Rihanna's refrain, which includes the title, literally. Saying it glorifies, romanticizes, and condones abuse - or the people who are even saying that the song is really talking about a BDSM relationship. Did they miss that the key word is lie? The lies we tell each other, the lies we tell ourselves, the lies we want to believe and the lies we tell ourselves we do believe. Especially when it concerns love. And none of them are actually "all right." If they were they wouldn't be lies. I've never been in an abusive relationship like that and I won't presume to speak for the experiences of people who have. But I spent two years on-and-off involved with someone who lied to me so often I don't know if anything he ever said to me was true. Some of it may have been, I just feel I have no basis on which to judge. And I lied to myself that it didn't hurt as much as it did, that there were sometimes reasons to excuse it, that it wouldn't happen again, that he'd change, that he had changed. I don't want to think about whether I could have done the same thing in a relationship like that song describes. I'm glad I've never had to find out. And even without an experience like that, I wouldn't take those lines literally.
Reminds me of reading a Maiden message board a few years back and seeing the comments on "Afraid to Shoot Strangers." There was even one guy who said he stopped listening to Maiden for ten years after that song came out because it was jingoistic and supported the Gulf War. Ok, maybe you could think that if you stopped listening to the song halfway through. Sure, the narrator (a soldier) starts off conflicted about whether the war is justified and the verses end with the resolution that it is. The only lyric in the entire rest of the song - which is when it takes off instrumentally as well in that incredible guitar line - is "Afraid to shoot strangers." If the narrator is so settled that going off and killing these people is the right and necessary thing to do, why is he so viscerally unhappy about doing it? That reluctance shows that the speaker wasn't successful in convincing himself, even if he thinks he has. Context matters. Order matters. Anthemic electric guitars matter and irony exists.
A famous playwright once quipped that if you wanted to send a message use Western Union. That's not entirely fair, you can certainly send a message through art - but don't sacrifice the art to do it. And as the audience don't demand that every message, every theme and subtext be literal, direct, and spelled out. Usually by that point you might as well have used Western Union.
Art is not always literal. Not even often literal. Figurative language seems to be the easiest concept for people, even if there's an awful lot of confusion over the differences between similes, metaphors, and symbols. (We won't even touch the difference between synecdoche and metonymy - although, truth be told, sometimes I have trouble with that one.) Irony, on the other hand, often seems to go by the wayside. Or double meanings, shaded meanings, meanings that depend on context, on a work being taken as a whole.
Once I figure out the proper way to get there, I'm going to touch in this paper on the Eminem/Rihanna collaboration "Love the Way You Lie." I've read an awful lot of blog posts about that song in the past few days, and I'm bothered by the people who take Rihanna's refrain, which includes the title, literally. Saying it glorifies, romanticizes, and condones abuse - or the people who are even saying that the song is really talking about a BDSM relationship. Did they miss that the key word is lie? The lies we tell each other, the lies we tell ourselves, the lies we want to believe and the lies we tell ourselves we do believe. Especially when it concerns love. And none of them are actually "all right." If they were they wouldn't be lies. I've never been in an abusive relationship like that and I won't presume to speak for the experiences of people who have. But I spent two years on-and-off involved with someone who lied to me so often I don't know if anything he ever said to me was true. Some of it may have been, I just feel I have no basis on which to judge. And I lied to myself that it didn't hurt as much as it did, that there were sometimes reasons to excuse it, that it wouldn't happen again, that he'd change, that he had changed. I don't want to think about whether I could have done the same thing in a relationship like that song describes. I'm glad I've never had to find out. And even without an experience like that, I wouldn't take those lines literally.
Reminds me of reading a Maiden message board a few years back and seeing the comments on "Afraid to Shoot Strangers." There was even one guy who said he stopped listening to Maiden for ten years after that song came out because it was jingoistic and supported the Gulf War. Ok, maybe you could think that if you stopped listening to the song halfway through. Sure, the narrator (a soldier) starts off conflicted about whether the war is justified and the verses end with the resolution that it is. The only lyric in the entire rest of the song - which is when it takes off instrumentally as well in that incredible guitar line - is "Afraid to shoot strangers." If the narrator is so settled that going off and killing these people is the right and necessary thing to do, why is he so viscerally unhappy about doing it? That reluctance shows that the speaker wasn't successful in convincing himself, even if he thinks he has. Context matters. Order matters. Anthemic electric guitars matter and irony exists.
A famous playwright once quipped that if you wanted to send a message use Western Union. That's not entirely fair, you can certainly send a message through art - but don't sacrifice the art to do it. And as the audience don't demand that every message, every theme and subtext be literal, direct, and spelled out. Usually by that point you might as well have used Western Union.