Listening to Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey singing "When you believe". One line is "We are not afraid, although we know there's much to fear"--which strikes me as nonsense, because it doesn't make sense that you are not afraid of what is fearful. This kind of thing goes on all the time in songwriting. I wrote to Sting the other day complaining to him about the logic of one of his lyrics: "A simple act of faith, Of reason over might, To blow up his children, will only prove him right." Of course, blowing up his children won't prove him right at all--it will prove us as wrong as he is. The logic of this lyric resolves into some of the worst hate speech ever published, suggesting that we should blow up children to be right. I don't know how someone intelligent and responsible can countenance that kind of writing so I said I thought he should rerecord the song and change the lyric. He didn't reply. Sometimes I use "Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree" to illustrate conditionals to my students: I write up "I'm coming home, I've done my time, And I've got to know what is and isn't mine, / So if you received my letter telling you I'd soon be free, Then you'll know just what to do, if you still want me. Whoa, tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree.." and I ask, "Why would he be a fool to conclude that she doesn't want him if he doesn't see a yellow ribbon round the old, oak tree?" Silence. Various fanciful suggestions. Eventually one says, "Because he's not sure that she got the letter." It's one question I would like answered in life: How meaningful are songs, really? "Life is a roller coaster" means a lot me, but then I juxtapose that with "We levitate, our bodies sore, Our feet don't even touch the floor..." e.t.c. and I guess what bothers me is that the pronouns in songs are like money which are freely circulated and taken by anybody who listens and applied to themselves without shame or embarrassment. So when Whitney sometimes sings "I will always love you" her "I" becomes "me" and "you" becomes whoever I happen to be in love with at the time. It's because the pronouns in songs are circulated like money, that I think songwriters deserve the vast sums of money they get. I think you could turn that to your advantage--basically because people, when they hear a song, they want to hear pronouns (personal or possessive) that they can apply to themselves.
