Notes from Upstream: What Makes A Good Song? (Number 4)

Songs of Scorn

Do song lyrics like these offend you?

“And sometimes when we touch,

The honesty’s too much.

I want to hold you till I die

Till we both break down and cry”

As you read these lines, do you ask the questions I ask? Do you wonder how he’s planning to cry after he’s already dead? And how hard would it have been for the songwriter to put the dying after the crying instead of before it? That’s how crying and dying work in real life.

My wife (Comedian Susan Vass) performed an entire routine about the treacly love song MacArthur Park.

She had a lot to say about these lines:

“Someone left the cake out in the rain.

I don’t think that I can take it

‘Cause it took so long to bake it

And I’ll never have that recipe again.

Oh no!”

She asked some good questions.

“Someone left the cake out in the rain – Alrightie. It’s not a picnic – there’s no mention of fried chicken or potato salad – just a cake. Now, if you were outside, eating just cake and a sudden squall came up out of nowhere, couldn’t you have said, “Hey, somebody, grab the cake?” For that matter, since the cake is so all-fired important to you, why didn’t YOU grab the cake instead of blaming this mysterious someone? Remember, as my mother always said, when we point a finger at someone else, three fingers are pointing back at us.”

These are only a few of her probing questions. If you want to hear more, along with more comedy fun, deep thoughts and great live music, come to CC4 at Cragan’s Resort in Brainerd, Minnesota, Sunday August 17 through Tuesday August 19 (for more information, contact antoinepetrofsky@gmail.com).

By the way, my personal favorite part of that verse is the mysterious “Oh No!’ at the end. What’s it for? Up until then, the song is insufficiently histrionic?

In 1992, the great Dave Barry conducted a Bad Song Survey among his thousands of alert readers. In 1997, he published Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs.

As one of Dave Barry’s alert readers, I feel entitled to update. After all, a lot of bad songs have annoyed me since 1997. I’ll list one verse I wonder at, from only one song, Life by Des’ree:

"I'm afraid of the dark,

Especially when I'm in a park

And there's no one else around.

Ooh, I get the shivers.

I don't want to see a ghost;

It's a sight that I fear most.

I'd rather have a piece of toast.”

Prefers toast

Except for a few outliers, most American songs since about 1880 have been love songs, and most of these songs have been sappy or cliched or both. After tens of thousands of songs, it’s hard for songwriters to come up with anything new.

Why should they? The songs I’ve quoted so far have made a lot of money.

And maybe like me you’re searching for an alternative. How about instead of love songs, what I call “songs of scorn”?

Scorn can be more fun than love anyway. Scorn doesn’t make you crazy; scorn doesn’t drive you to drink; scorn doesn’t leave you aching with regret.

“Gangsta rap” doesn’t count. The entire genre seems to me nothing but a torrent of scorn. But I admit I’m not the target market demographic, which consists mostly of noodle-armed teenage white boy wannabes, like this inspirational young role model, soon-to-be-ex Democrat National Committee Vice Chair David Hogg, seen here giving a “Nazi” salute.

Representative Gangsta Rap Fan

According to the rules I’m making up even as I’m writing this, to qualify as a topflight song of scorn, the song must convey a contempt which is entirely justified, is rational, is undistilled by any reluctance, remorse, or regret, and is expressed not with cliché or obscenity, but intelligence and wit.

And of course the music must be good.

Sometimes the song will progress beyond mere scorn into hatred, the kind of hatred my wife (Susan again) says “burns with the white-hot heat of a thousand suns,” which approaches the hatred many of us feel towards the legacy media.

I’ll start with our Nobel Prize Winner, who means every word he shouts. He had a hit with this record. My personal favorite stanza is:

“I wish for just one time you could stand inside my shoes

And just for that one moment I could be you.

Yes, I wish for just one time you could stand inside my shoes

You’d know what a drag it is to see you.”

I like to guess that “Fourth Street” refers to the street where Bob first performed in 1959, at a coffeehouse called “Ten O’clock Scholar.” The venue was located on 4th Street SE in Dinkytown, a Minneapolis neighborhood on the Mississippi River’s East Bank.

Someone must have said or done something nasty to young Bob on Fourth Street sometime, long before he got rich and famous, back when he was just another guitar-slinging schnook, and years before the world dubbed him a genius.

Reelin’ In The Years

Steely Dan

Speaking of geniuses, the following lines may resonate with our Substack host Steve Hayward, who must have met a lot of geniuses in his years teaching at university:

“You’ve been telling me you’re a genius since you were seventeen

In all the time I’ve known you I still don’t know what you mean.

The weekend at the college didn’t turn out like you planned.

The things that pass for knowledge I can’t understand.”

Here’s a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)

Travis Tritt

I have a friend who has labored in theater for decades. He summed up his world this way: “Nobody wants you till everybody wants you.”

Travis Tritt had just finished a phone call with his soon-to-be ex-wife. They had completed their divorce proceedings. Everything had been hashed out, but now all of a sudden she wanted to reconcile. Maybe she feared that, now that she was letting go, everybody would want Travis.

He wrote this song in fifteen minutes.

“Call someone who'll listen and might give a damn,

Maybe one of your sordid affairs.

But don't you come 'round here handin' me none of your lines—

Here's a quarter, call someone who cares.”

Thank God And Greyhound She’ Gone

Roy Clark (And Floyd Cramer)

My wife (still Susan) suggested this song. It’s not quite as scornful as some others, but since we’re already visiting country music, we should pause a few moments to enjoy Roy Clark and the tasteful licks of piano ace Floyd Cramer. Cramer was part of the Hee Haw band and was the first-call Nashville session pianist of his time. When it comes to piano players, attention must be paid.

These are my current favorite lines:

“That big diesel motor is a playing my song
Thank God and Greyhound you're gone.”

Your Mind Is On Vacation and Your Mouth Is Working Overtime

Mose Allison

Someone must want to push invidious stereotypes. The United States Supreme Court now includes four female justices, all four of whom vote consistently to project and protect the power of the federal courts, and each of whom speaks more and longer at oral arguments than any of the five male justices. Here’s the evidence:

Even Chief Justice Roberts might have heard enough. In recent deliberations, the Wise Latina kept interrupting U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer as he tried to answer her questions. Finally, Roberts interrupted the interrupter, pleading, “Can I hear the rest of his answer?”

These lines say it all:

“If silence was golden,

You couldn't raise a dime,

Because your mind is on vacation and

Your mouth is workin' overtime.

They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Any More

Kinky Friedman

In 2021, New York Times editors forced science reporter Donald McNeil, Jr. to resign. He had worked for The Times since 1976. That’s 45 years, by the way.

Two years earlier, McNeil had been chaperoning some precious high school students on an expensive field trip to Peru. At dinner, a student asked whether one of her classmates should have been suspended for using the “n-word” in private conversation.

Here’s how McNeil described his response:

“To understand what was in the video, I asked if she had called someone else the slur or whether she was rapping or quoting a book title. In asking the question, I used the slur itself. I should not have done that.”

This single utterance of the forbidden word was all it took to bring destruction down upon him. By contrast, it took God two Hebrew words to start the universe: “Yehi Or (Let there be light.)”

Editor Dean Baquet and Managing Editor Joe Kahn wrote, “We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent.”

Anyone who can write or can even read will find it hard to come up with a statement stupider than that one.

Of course, Baquet had to retract this idiocy after it was pointed out that some Times writers used the same word whenever the mood struck them.

But many of these same n-word-spouting writers exerted all their social and political power to get their colleague fired. The entire dispute revolved around power, and in the Times political climate, they were the ones who had the power, and, unlike Congressional Republicans, were willing to exercise it.

The Times editors and publishers—each of whom is better educated and more sophisticated than you or I could hope to become—folded like a cardboard accordion and fired McNeil despite his 45 years of loyal subservience to the Times and its Covid virus panic mongering, in which he joined exuberantly, and for which he had already received yet another of the Times’ bogus Pulitzer Prizes.

Intent meant bupkis to Kinky Friedman, who fronted the band Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys. In this live performance, he let the slurs rip and followed them up with these immortal lines:

“They ain't makin' Jews like Jesus anymore.
We don't turn the other cheek the way they done before.
You hear that honky holler as he hit that hardwood floor
Lord, they ain't makin' Jews like Jesus anymore.”

Max Cossack is an author, attorney, composer, and software architect (he can code). Always indifferent to the power mad machinations of language police, he wrote Social Credit: A Comic Novel Of Globalist Proportions. He lives in Arizona with his wife, whose name you may have guessed by now is “Susan.”