Cultural

Robert Palmer

What Pop Lyrics Say to Us Today

Robert Palmer (b. 1945) is a musician, music critic and professor of American vernacular music at Brooklyn College. His books include A Tale of Two Cities: Memphis Rock and New Orleans Roll (1979), Deep Blues (1981), and The Rolling Stones (1983). In the essay that follows, he assesses the significance of rock lyrics in the 1980s.


Bruce Springsteen became the first rock lyricist to be courted by both of the major candidates in a Presidential election last fall. First Ronald Reagan singled him out as an artist whose songs instill pride in America. Walter Mondale retaliated, asserting that he had won the rock star’s endorsement. “Bruce may have been born to run,” Mr. Mondale quipped, quoting the title of a Springsteen hit, “but he wasn’t born yesterday.”
Rock is part of adult culture now, to an extent that would have been unthinkable as recently as a decade ago. It is no longer the exclusive reserve of young people sending messages to each other. But pop music has always reflected and responded to the currents of its own time, and today’s pop music is no exception. What does it seem to be telling us about our own time? Part of the message is in the music itself—in the insistence of the beat, the shriek of heavily amplified guitars. But lyrics remain the most accurate barometer of what makes these times different from, for example, the 1960’s and 70’s.
Today’s pop music is sending several dominant messages. Material values are on the ascendant, but idealism is by no means a spent force. Most pop songs are love songs, as always, but today’s versions try to look at relationships without rose-colored glasses. Romantic notions are viewed with some suspicion; so are drugs. And important rock artists and rappers, while no longer anticipating radical change, are addressing issues, and challenging their listeners to actively confront the world around them. There have probably been more angry protest lyrics written and recorded in the last three or four years than in any comparable period of the 60’s.
In the 60’s, it would have been unthinkable for a politician to seek endorsements from rock musicians; rock was rebel music. Stars like Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones  wrote and recorded outspoken lyrics that urged sweeping social change and an end to war and flirted with the rhetoric of revolution. They sang openly about sex and drugs. The music was the voice of a new generation and a constant reminder of the generation gap. The battle lines were drawn.
The rock lyricists of the 60’s were fond of talking about “love.” To the Beatles, “love” was transcendent, and irresistible force for good that could accomplish practically anything.

There’s nothing you can do that can't be done
There’s nothing you can sing that can't be sung
There’s nothing you can say, but you can learn how to play the game
It’s easy. All you need is love.

Love is still something one hears a great deal about in pop lyrics, but the contemporary version is more hard-headed and down-to-earth than the cosmic, effulgent Love of the 60’s. Many of today’s songwriters argue that romance isn’t as important as material values or sex. “What’s love got to do with it?” Tina Turner asked in a heavy-breathing hit of the same title. And Madonna, whose come-hither pout and undulating style have made her pop’s hottest video star, serves notice in her hit “Material Girl” (written by Peter Brown and Robert Rans) that she won’t worry much about love as long as there’s money in the bank.

Only boys that save their pennies
Make my rainy day . . .
We’re living in a material world
And I’m a material girl.

Madonna’s carefully calculated image has struck a chord among many of today’s more affluent young listeners, though she is perhaps too one-dimensional to be Queen of the Yuppies. And she will never be the darling of the feminists. Nevertheless, during the past decade, the hue and cry against rock lyrics that demeaned women seemed to have a broad and salutary effect. One didn’t hear many songs of the sort the Rolling Stones and other 60’s bands used to perform, songs like the Stones’ “Under My Thumb.”

Under my thumb her eyes are just kept to herself
Under my thumb, well, I can still look at someone else
It’s down to me, the way she talks when she’s spoken to
Down to me, the change has come, she’s under my thumb.

The title tune from Mick Jagger’s solo album, “She’s the Boss,” is sung like a taunt or a tease, but that doesn’t disguise its message; Mr. Jagger seems to have experienced a shift in values since he wrote “Under My Thumb.”

She’s the boss! She’s the boss!
She’s the boss in bed, she’s the boss in my head
She’s got the pants on, now she’s the boss.

Still, many of today’s pop lyrics continue to celebrate male dominance. Aggressively macho rock has been making a comeback. Heavy metal rock, which appeals almost exclusively to white male teenagers and tends to treat women as either temptresses or chattel, is more popular than ever. Women like Tina Turner and Cyndi Lauper, who project a certain independence and strength, are helping to counter this trend, but sometimes one can't hear them very well over heavy metal’s sexist thunder.
Amid these changes in attitude, the old-fashioned romantic love song, always the staple of pop lyrics, continues to flourish. Prince, another of today’s biggest-selling artists, has progressed from early songs that dealt explicitly with various sexual situations and permutations to love lyrics of a more conventional sort. “Take Me With U” [sic],  a song from his phenomenally successful album “Purple Rain,” could have been written decades ago or yesterday.

I don’t care where we go
I don’t care what we do
I don’t care pretty baby
Just take me with u.

Pop songs can do more than chart changing attitudes toward love and romance; they can address topical issues and appeal to our social conscience. In the 60’s, Bob Dylan and other songwriters composed anthems that were sung by civil rights workers as they headed south, and by hundreds of thousands demonstrating for peace and equal rights. “How many deaths will it take till we know that too many people have died,” Dylan asked. “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.” And, he added, in a line in another song that provided a name for the radical faction within Students for a Democratic Society, “You don’t need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind blows.”
By the late 60’s, the peace and civil rights movements were beginning to splinter. The assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King had robbed a generation of its heroes, the Vietnam war was escalating despite the protests, and at home, violence was on the rise. Young people turned to rock, expecting it to ask the right questions and come up with answers, hoping that the music’s most visionary artists could somehow make sense of things. But rock’s most influential artists—Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones—were finding that serving as the conscience of a generation exacted a heavy toll. Mr. Dylan, for one, felt the pressures becoming unbearable, and wrote about his predicament in songs like “All Along the Watchtower.”

There must be some way out of here, said the joker to the thief.
There’s too much confusion, I can't get no relief.
Businessmen they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth.
None of them along the line knows what any of it is worth.

Many rock artists of the 60’s turned to drugs before the decade ended. For a while, songs that were thought to be about drugs, whatever their original intentions (Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High,” the Rolling Stones’ “Get Off My Cloud”), were widely heard. Bob Dylan sang that “everybody must get stoned,” and many young people seemed to agree. But le dernier cri (French, the latest cry, the latest fashion) for drug lyrics was short-lived. They were never again as prevalent as during that brief Indian summer of the counter-culture. One hears few drug references in today’s pop lyrics, and when drugs are mentioned, listeners are usually advised to stay away from them; “Don’t do it,” Grandmaster Flash and Furious Five cautioned listeners about to experiment with drugs in their rap hit “White Lines.”
The mainstream rock of the 1970’s produced little in the way of socially relevant lyrics. But toward the end of that decade a change began to be felt. The rise of punk rock in Britain brought to the country’s pop charts angry songs about unemployment and nuclear Armageddon.  In America, the issue of nuclear energy and the threat of nuclear war enlisted the sympathies of many prominent rock musicians. But attempts by Graham Nash, John Hall, and other anti-nuclear activists to turn their concerts into anthems were too self-conscious; the songs were quickly forgotten.
Rap, the new pop idiom that exploded out of New York’s black and Latin neighborhoods in the late 70’s, seemed to concern itself mostly with hedonism and verbal strutting—at first. Then, in the early 80’s, came “The Message,” the dance-single by Grandmaster Flash and Furious Five that provided listeners with an angry, eye-witness account of inner-city neighborhoods and people abandoned to rot, prey to crime, poverty, and disease. “It’s like a jungle/Sometimes it makes me wonder/How I keep from going under,” chanted the group’s champion rapper, Melle Mel.
The rap records of the last several years have confronted similar issues head-on, and they have been danceable enough to attract a sizable audience. Run-D.M.C.’s hit single “It’s Like That” ticked off a list of some of the daily horrors many black Americans have to contend with. But you can't give up, Run-D.M.C. insisted to their young, predominately black and urban audience. You have to make something of yourself, to rise above “the way it is.”
Bruce Springsteen’s recent songs have also been topical and deeply felt. They have also been the most popular music of his career. He is writing for and about the America of his dreams and the America he sees around him, and his lyrics are followed closely by a huge audience, as last year’s Presidential campaign references made abundantly clear.
The narrator of Mr. Springsteen’s hit “Born in the U.S.A.” is a Vietnam veteran who returns home to confront harsh realities.

Went down to see my V.A. man
He said ‘Son don’t you understand now’
Had a brother at Khe Sahn fighting off the Viet Cong
They’re still there he’s all gone.

Other songs on Mr. Springsteen’s most recent album suggest that there is a pervasive gloom hanging over the country’s decaying inner cities and factory towns. But their message is a positive one. “Hold on,” the songs seem to say, “you’ve got to have something to believe in.” The laborer in “Working on the Highway” is certainly hanging on to his dream:

I work for the county out on 95
All day I hold a red flag and watch the traffic pass me by
In my head I keep a picture of a pretty little miss
Someday mister I’m gonna lead a better life than this.

Mr. Springsteen’s songs look at America and find both despair and hope. And like Chuck Berry and so many other rock and roll lyricists, past and present, he finds a source of strength and inspiration in rock itself. Singing of his schooldays, he captures rock and roll’s heart:

We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school
Tonight I hear the neighborhood drummer sound
I can feel my heart begin to pound
We made a promise we swore we’d always remember
No retreat, no surrender.


Suggestions for Discussion

1. On what grounds does Palmer argue that rock is “part of adult culture now, to an extent that would have been unthinkable as recently as a decade ago”? Do you agree or disagree? Explain.

2. How do rock lyrics in the 1980s differ from those of the 1960s and 1970s?

3. How does Palmer characterize the recent songs of Bruce Springsteen?


Suggestions for Writing

1. What themes do you discover in the lyrics of a favorite contemporary song?

2. Palmer claims that contemporary rock is still often sexist. To what extent does your examination of the work of a contemporary performer support or modify Palmer’s observation?