The Shape of Sentence, or, Yes, How You Say Things Matters: Ed Sheeran "The Shape of You"

So now I'm going to go from raving about an interesting deployment of the pronoun "you" to a really frustrating one in Ed Sheeran's "The Shape of You."

Now I know I'm going against popular taste here, as this song has billions of views on youtube and got an overwhelming amount of radio play, but I just can't stomach it. Most of the song is just unremarkable, but I really hate the central line of the song: "I'm in love with the shape of you." That phrase, "the shape of you," sounds really clunky.

What do I mean by "clunky" ? Well, yes, it is grammatically incorrect, but grammatical correctness is not really that important when it comes to lyrics. There are plenty of songs that mangle grammar and sound good while doing it. But its bad grammar does have something to do with the problem. For one, it just doesn't sound like anything anyone would say. From a grammatical standpoint, we can see that it should be "I'm in love with your shape," or maybe "I'm in love with the shape of your body." The lameness of these two options tells us why Sheeran's version sucks. "I'm in love with your shape" falls flat rhythmically; there is something to the rhythm of two beats followed by the stress on "love" and then another two beats and the stress on "shape," but even still the "of you" just feels rushed. I prefer the similar rhythm as it plays out in the line: "I'm in love with your body"

Contrasting these lines also highlights how unsexy the word "shape" is--its way too abstract and geometrical. We might as well say "I love your outline!" or "I love your profile!" Sure, "I'm in love with your body" is kind of trite and boring, but that didn't stop Sheeran from using it a ton of times too. Plus, part of the reason why I don't like the actual version is it feels incomplete, as if I keep expecting Sheeran to sing "I'm in love with the shape of your body," which feels more normal if perhaps too wordy for a pop song.

I will just trash a few other lines which, if not as prominent as the main offender, are still pretty awful. Consider: "Your love was handmade for somebody like me." That's just a weird thing to say, the combination of specific customization ("handmade") with vague generality ("for somebody like me") is just an odd way to go when talking about love. It's the kind of thing you might hear in hawking some product: "You there, sir, try this, this love was handmade for somebody like you!"

Also, let's not forget the awkward phrase "Grab on my waist and put that body on me"-shouldn't it be "Grab onto my waist and put your body on mine," or at least "put that body onto mine" ? (Or is there a corpse in this song that she wants to hide under: "Quick, put that body on me!" I know I'm quibbling a bit here, but these are just really bizarre choices.

Let me finish with this gem:

"I'm in love with the shape of you
We push and pull like a magnet do"

It's always cute when wordsmiths decide to get fancy and go all rhymey, but that's a terrible line. "We push and pull like magnets" is still stupid but at least it is grammatical (the other easy way out that keeps the rhyme is "We push and pull like magnets do" even though the "do" is totally unnecessary). Both options also avoid raising questions about how two people are like one magnet. Is there an attraction-repulsion thing going on between them and other objects? At least if they were attracted like magnets they would be together, but I guess you don't get the vaguely suggestive "push and pull" part. Maybe Ed Sheeran has been getting lessons on magnets from the ICP.

There isn't too much else I really have to say about the song. It's a simple song in a way that The Shins' "Simple song" isn't.

More Perils of Indeterminateness: Our Lady Peace-"Somewhere Out There"

Thinking over my previous post, I'm less than confident that I've got the meaning of "The End of Medicine." The song is pretty oblique, but that's not necessarily a defect. Despite my interest in those that do, songs don't have to have a clear, discursive meaning, or even just one (or one overarching) meaning to be good, and many resist anything approaching a full elucidation of whatever they do mean. But that does not mean that anything goes: cliche and triteness are as bad in songs as they are anywhere else. The most vexing things to me though, are when the lyrics to a song are incredibly vague and indeterminate, as if the songwriters thought that evoking the hazy impression of an emotion were enough. I can't get behind a song that is simply "I love you baby because you are beautiful" because there's nothing to hold onto there, either in terms of the love or the beauty. If it's "I know I hurt you but I still love you" scenario, then at least there's some content to the emotion. Now I know I've gone over this territory before, but there are ideas worth reiterating, and there are distinctions worth reinforcing, such as how vagueness is different than ambiguity: the latter means it is difficult to choose between specific meanings, the former that it is difficult to pin down anything specific meaning at all (the distinction between indeterminateness and indeterminacy follows similar lines). 
 
Now, I say this as a preamble to bashing Our Lady Peace's song "Somewhere Out There." Like so many Canadian teens in the 90's I was a fan of Our Lady Peace (and I do still like their early work); they could rock, their lyrics, if somewhat inscrutable, were still interesting and the vocal style of their singer, Raine Maida, if unorthodox, was capable of delivering an honest and powerful delivery of emotion. That might be a lot of commas and ifs, but they were one of the first bands I got into when I was getting into music and they were the first concert I ever went to on my own (unaccompanied by my parents that is, I went with friends), so they hold a special place in my life for that as well. Their first album, Naveed, still holds up as a really good post-grunge rock album, and their next two albums had some great moments too. Their fourth album, Spiritual Machines, is where things started to get a little dicey (in retrospect, their interest in Ray Kurzweil, faux techno-prophet, on that album says that something isn't right) and their work after that has been, as far as I can tell, a steady slide in radio rock mediocrity. The song that I want to talk about now, "Somewhere Out There," fits into that latter period.

Now, given my dislike for vagueness and indeterminateness the title admittedly looks like a bad sign. But I'm actually not going to trash that aspect too much, the song works with themes of outer space and the alienation of distance (it might be a drug thing, there is an early line about them being "strung out," though its not really developed) that makes that vagueness appropriate, although still way too overwrought. No, my beef if with a particular image from the chorus that just gets stuck in my craw every time I hear it. Here's the chorus:

You're falling back to me,

You're a star that I can see, yeah

I know you're out there

Somewhere out there

You're falling out of reach

Defying gravity, yeah

I know you're out there

Somewhere out there

What I don't understand is the movement being described here. At first this person is "falling back to me" but then they are "falling out of reach," and this second falling is "defying gravity." I suspect that the two directions to the falling (back to and also out of reach) is just a matter of muddled writing, but it is the relation between falling and defying gravity that I find really puzzling. Maybe there is some arcane principle of physics I am missing? If you are orbiting around something and you escape from its orbit does that count as falling? It always seemed to me that falling was something largely passive on the part of the one falling and involved being pulled towards a gravitational centre, whereas escaping orbit is something active and requires a force opposing the gravitational one. If this person is falling out of reach because they are being pulled by some other force (say, drugs, if that's what's going on here) then they aren't really defying gravity, they are succumbing to it from another direction. Yeah, it drives me crazy because it's not thought out at all, it must have sound poetic and that was enough. Seriously, if Our Lady Peace wants to get a clue about what it means to defy gravity they should do a little more research, there are better songs that explore the relation between liberation and the defiance of gravity.

The Perils of Indeterminateness Part One: James Blunt--"You're Beautiful"

Ok, so as a change of pace after the earnestness of the Fleet Foxes I have decided to pick on some terrible music. Now, while the pace may change the issue at stake will not: just like the first verse of "Helplessness Blues," the songs I will deal with here are all about indeterminacy and vagueness. However, while "Helplessness Blues" deals with indeterminacy, these songs deal in it. But hey, there's nothing like the levity that comes from criticizing the ineptness of others to ease thoughts of the predicament of modernity.

Anyway, first up on the chopping block is a song that oozed steadily from the radio a few years ago, James Blunt's "You're Beautiful." To be blunt (I'm sure that joke's been overused, but he's all about overuse, over-emoting, and overkill so it's fitting), this song is about as beautiful as a Hallmark card. But then again, it is designed to appeal to people for whom bland simplicity and sentimentality are the hallmarks of beauty (clearly a different kind of terrible beauty than Yeats' kind). I've included the version with lyrics so you can gaze at them and tremble, mortal.



Now, just as the bizarre mixture of childishness and adult sexuality in Fergie's "Big Girls Don't Cry" made for a telling if probably unintended example of the unthinking sexualization of young children, the fit between form and content in "Beautiful" is likewise unintentionally apt. The shallowness of this song, musically and lyrically is only matched by the shallowness of its theme: love at first (and only) sight.

Skipping past the less than brilliant opening, the first verse chronicle's the singer's encounter on the subway with a woman:

My love is pure.
I saw an angel.
Of that I'm sure.
She smiled at me on the subway.
She was with another man.
But I won't lose no sleep on that,
'Cause I've got a plan.

This verse perfectly illustrates why I am suspicious of claims of love at first sight. The "purity" of the love involved here is the purity of nothingness (or pure horse shit). After all, what basis is there for this outpouring of song? Nothing but a brief smile, which I am inclined to think was more a social nicety (or an awkward reaction, since "She could see from my face that I was, Flying/Fucking high," and there's nothing sexier than drug-addled creep leering at you on the subway) than a come hither stare. The love on display here is unrelated to everything actually important about this woman (who she is, what she's actually like, or what she thinks and feels, for instance) other than her beauty. But this beauty--and this is where the significance of this post's title kicks in--is itself utterly meaningless and empty. The problem with "beautiful" is that it the way it is used here it is really more of an evaluative rather than a descriptive term, i.e., it tells us less about the object than the speaker's relation to the object. That relation is extremely tenuous (and maybe a little creepy as well) so we are left with a love song that, like most love songs, is mostly about the shallow ego of its singer. The best he can come up with is to describe her as an angel, but that only works since there is really nothing human about her so she might as well be some kind of imaginary/mythological figure.

So, rather than being romantic this song is actually quite misogynistic in the way that it reduces her to an occasion to fantasize. The indeterminacy of "you're beautiful" means that it ends up being an insult instead of a compliment.

Fergie - Big Girls Don't Cry (Personal)

While I am certainly a lot more likely to want to write about music that I actually like since those are the songs that I actually want to listen to enough times in order to get engaged with the meaning of the song, that doesn't mean that I have to ignore some of the particularly egregious songs that come my way. The "hits" of the summer are particularly bad in this regard, as they tend to be nearly inescapable. Take Fergie's "Big Girls Don't Cry (Personal)" for example. In the summer of 2007 this song played on the radio continuously, and since I spent a lot of time driving around for work that summer that meant that it was seemingly everywhere I was. Or, to characterize one waste land in terms of another: "Fergie in the morning blaring behind you, and Fergie in the evening rising to meet you, I will show you fear on the FM dial." (Not to mention the horror's of Rihanna's "Umbrella," Bon Jovi's "Making a Memory," and the Plain White T's "Hey There Delilah," among others.) Of course, one benefit of writing about things you dislike is that's it's particularly easy to find the humor in it, and there is plenty of humor to be found in the menagerie of (often contradictory) cliches fighting for airtime in this song.



Now, I realize that artists don't always have to sing from personal experience and are free to inhabit different situations, personalities, etc. in their songs, but freedom in the choice of subject matter does not equal freedom of presentation when it comes to actually writing a good song. So, this means that there need not be anything wrong with a woman in her thirties singing a song with a title like "Big Girls Don't Cry" that immediately suggests pre-adolescence. After all, there is nothing out of the ordinary about looking back at one's childhood. However, this is where the whole issue of presentation comes in, and I have to say that in this regard the song is a bit of a mess.

Without discussing the video, which (as you will soon see) would inject a whole other level of weirdness into the song, let me focus on the strange combination of sex and childhood innocence throughout the song. On the sex front, Fergie (god knows what a search for the terms "sex front Fergie" would turn up) sings things like "The smell of your skin lingers on me now," but then spends most of the song singing about things from a very (very) young girl's perspective in the chorus: "I'm gonna miss you like a child misses their blanket." The little girl in this song has an idea of romance that has nothing to do with sex: "Like a little school mate in the schoolyard / We'll play jacks and Uno cards, / I'll be your best friend and you'll be mine, / Valentine."

The real weirdness is how the song begins to merge these two, and its in the merging that things get really creepy: "Yes, you can hold my hand if you want to, / 'Cause I want to hold yours too, / We'll be playmates and lovers / And share our secret worlds." Although perhaps Playboy has ruined the term "playmates" for good, I still see a big age discrepancy between the mentalities behind being playmates and lovers (and unless "secret worlds" is just a silly euphemism straight out of bad romance novel sex scenes--"love grottos" and such--then its very out of place as well). There is definitely something very off-putting about the juxtaposition of these two perspectives, particularly if they belong to the same person at the same time. Anyone who has such a childish emotional life might want to consider refraining from sexual relationships until they grow up some more.

Of course, we could give Fergie some credit and postulate that the collision of sex and childhood is meant as some kind of critical reflection upon the increasingly early sexualization of young children (a more subtle version of Dishwalla's "Pretty Babies" perhaps?) or at least a reflection of the contradictory impulses that mark the difficult transition to adulthood. But this is the "artist" who gave us the song "My Humps," so I'm not sure how far we can go with that one; if anything, she's probably just carrying on the project of increasing the trend of sexualizing the young which makes songs like "My Humps" generate even more money by expanding the market for them.