THE ERRORS OF STYLE


and the sins of musical syntax.

The always intrepid Adam Mackie, FlexMode music connoisseur and King of All Superlatives, writes today to lament the sorry state of grammatical clarity and construction in a new song from System of a Down. Lonely Day, the eleventh track on the CD, features a lyric — repeated, Adam tells us, about 10 times in less than three minutes — bemoaning the most loneliest day of my life. While acknowledging that even the best rock singers rarely run every last line through the pages of Strunk & White, Adam suggests that some syntactical sins are too grave to forgive. I think I hate the song, he writes, because the grammar annoys me so much.

I hear his pain. And I share it. I simply would not be able to listen to that song. Ever. It might kill me if I did.

Now, I realize that a little poetic license is often necessary to hold the rhythm and keep the beat. I don’t think it would have been quite the same to hear Elvis sing, You are only a hound dog, or to hear Bo Diddley ask, Whom do you love? And I sure as hell can’t imagine Mick Jagger complaining, I can’t get any satisfaction. But some lines should not be crossed, and some lines should never be composed. And the most loneliest day of my life surely proves both.

It’s not impossible, of course, to hold the rhythm and honor the grammar. I’ve always admired Michael Penn’s proper use of the subjunctive tense in No Myth: What if I were Romeo in black jeans / What if I were Heathcliff, it's no myth / Maybe she's just looking for / Someone to dance with. And I forgive him for ending the last line with a preposition, not only because that hard and fast rule has significantly slowed and softened in the last few years, but also because I’m just not sure that Someone with whom to dance is a line along with which I want to sing.

Another of my favorite bits of proper pop grammar appears in Bruce Springsteen’s I Wanna Marry You: I see that lonely ribbon in your hair / Tell me am I the man for whom you put it there. Whom! In a rock song! That he can pull that off is just one of many, many reasons why he’s the Boss.

One of the many reasons that John Mellencamp, for all his occasional bursts of lyrical goodness, is not and never will be the Boss or the Grammarian can be heard in one regrettable, unforgettable lyric from Small Town — and no, I’m not referring to the last line, in which, after declaring that he was born, lives, and will die in a small town, the narrator suggests that a small town is prob’ly where they’ll bury me, as if his family might still decide to cart him off to a cemetery in Chicago. I’m referring to this grammatical hernia: No, I cannot forget from where it is that I come from.

From where it is that I come from?! Where the hell is that, the Land of Terrible Syntax?

That line is all the more unbelievable when you consider that the rhythm barely supports it anyway. Or when you consider that he could have easily dropped the second from, elongated the delivery of the I, and made it work perfectly. Oh, yes — and grammatically too. Every time I hear it, that line feels like someone’s driving a screwdriver straight through my ear and into my poor cerebral cortex. Why Mellencamp wrote it, or how he and the rest of his musical entourage could allow it survive all the way through the recording and release of the album, is still a major mystery. It's baffled and badgered and bewildered me for almost twenty years now.

You might even say it's the most daffiest lyric of my life.

Posted: Tue - November 29, 2005 at 11:01 PM          

©