On Cliche: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Song

My name is Matt, and I'm a novophiliac.

I think I always have been, right from when I was a kid. It's actually pretty common, although it's not something that's talked about very often: but I just love new stuff. The old is dull, bring me something shiny. Most of the time, I've got it pretty much under control, but there are a couple of areas where the desire for newness can be a bit of a problem, and one of them is music.

Modern life is saturated in pop music. The format - everybody knows it, three minutes of words and music - is part of the sea we swim in, completely unavoidable, like shopping trolleys, Ikea furniture and adverts for credit cards. However, unlike reading credit card adverts or going to Ikea, it's actually a lot of fun getting together with like-minded people and singing these songs; but when I see these songs written down there is a little part of me that starts to itch. I worry that if I mention it people will think me petty and small-minded, but sometimes it's hard to keep quiet. Oh, hell, I'm just going to come right out and say it.

 When they're written down, most pop lyrics are rubbish. Some of them don't even make sense.

Now, I'm the first to admit that I could be cleverer, so it's possible that there are subtle allusions I'm missing, or that I'm not picking up on some of the finer feelings expressed. And there are honourable exceptions (one of my favourites is Paul Simon, who writes some lovely stuff - I rather like this from his 'Rhythm of the Saints' album:  He says, hard times, I'm use to that / The speeding planet burns, I'm used to that/ My life's so common it disappears). But sometimes I see lyrics written down, and I just think, 'I'm sorry, what?' Call me a philistine, but anyone trying to shoehorn some meaning into, for example, "it's a terrible love that I'm walking with spiders" is stretching the bounds of credulity. Try it. I dare you.

 So, naturally, I start to brood. I mean, this is truly part of modern life, we listen to it all the time - and yet when you see it written down it is a grab-bag of cheap cliche, thrown together into a baffling list of non-sequiturs. How has this taken such  a hold on us? Presumably we must hear something we recognize, something that speaks to us. Is it just that we pick up the occasional phrase that rings true? Or perhaps (and I must have been in a dark mood when I considered this possibility) is it that our lives have that same structure - a series of semi-disconnected cliches?

But that's not the weirdest thing. The weirdest thing is that all these words are rammed into an even more cliched format. How many notes are there on the Western music scale? Thirteen? How many times can you reorganize thirteen notes? (That's one for the maths pedants). Well, okay, but once you've eliminated the hideously discordant options, and thought about the fact that most pop songs follow a startlingly strict recipe (four-four time, verse, chorus, middle eight) and considered how many pop songs are produced every week, you can see there's an awful lot of recycling going on. Which just brings me back to that central mystery: how is it that this endlessly regurgitated pap has managed to keep such a hold over us for so long?

I think the answer is in two parts. First of all, I've been terribly sniffy about cliche so far. But cliches are cliches for a reason. After all, what is a cliche, but an apt description of a common experience? In the endless stream of music and words that roll past us every minute of every day, they crop up time and again because they do a good job of describing something. So to hear them sung back to us should not be a surprise - and it should not be a surprise that we hear some echo of our own lives in them.
More importantly, though, is the fact that a song is not just words, and not just music, but the combination of the two. I read somewhere that humans are the only animals that can appreciate rhythm, which sounds wrong to me because it feels like this stuff goes deep into some pre-human, warmly mammalian part of the brain. A song is the best definition of synergy I can think of, because the whole is infinitely better than the sum of the (cliched, repetitive, sometimes nonsensical) parts. I have to confess, those Paul Simon lyrics I quoted earlier are from a climactic part of their track, right at the peak where the music has been building to and the trumpets kick in. So it's not surprising they've stuck in my head, is it?

So it's okay that there's nothing new under the sun. Maybe it speaks to me because I've been around a while, too. And if some of the expressions are a little careworn, well, maybe not all of my emotions are completely unique. Maybe that's the point.

I still fast-forward past Coldplay, though.