twisting and turning

Friedrich Nietzsche needs to be in this blog. Not because of the moustache, but because of his fondness for both music and aphorisms. His famous quote „Without music life would be a mistake“ is relevant enough here. But what' also interesting is that Nietzsche deployed aphoristics as a means to undermine the fallacious systematicity of traditional philosophical approaches. According to him, philosophical thinking and writing should mirror the subjective and associative character of the human mind, and aphorisms are the appropriate tool to achieve this. In the same vein, I think that aphorisms can serve to break open the formulaic nature of pop songs. There are only so many topics that you can deal with in a traditional pop song, but there are lots of ways in which you can reflect its boundedness by twisting and turning the words, thereby establishing an ironic, self-commenting look-out right in the middle of things. The playfulness and "unconventionality" at the heart of pop music can thus be restored. The best way to illustrate this is with lyrics about love; things being as they are culture-wise, there can hardly be anything more banal than a pop song about love; in fact love is so banal a subject that as a proficient consumer one tends to screen the words off because one is subconsciously certain that there is really nothing worth listening to. But sometimes a gifted mind manages to capture banal truths in extraordinary words, recovering listeners' attention. Witness (and add):

If you wanna hear ‘I love you’, then say it.
(Tonic, “Roses”)

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Lousy lovers do well with their hands but I'll reach you like nobody can.
(Jakob Dylan, “This End Of The Telescope”)

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Love is a lie, which means I've been lied to.
(Maximo Park, “Our Velocity”)

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You can steal what you love but you can't love what you steal.
(Idlewild, “Future Works”)