There was a post I did awhile ago in which I mentioned a quote in which Roddy Woomble from Idlewild said, basically, that he was just writing catchy songs, and that the only really poetry to be found in music was in the very greatest artists (I must disagree with his current taste, personally. To me, Roddy and people like Blake Schwarzenbach, Neil Halstead, Mac McCaughan, and whoever wrote the lyrics for Slint are miles ahead of anything Bob Dylan wrote). This isn't something he just now decided. Hell, one of Idlewild's earliest songs, "Self Healer" says, "a song is a beautiful lie" again and again (speaking of which, I was reading Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being and it had a line that went "the song was a beautiful lie", and now I wonder where "Self Healer" came from). Then there's "American English", which is all about this, says, "And if you believe that now I understand why words mean so much to you. They'll never be about you" and "I sing a song about myself". You could even make "Idea Track" ("Pretend it works awhile, it's transmitted live") or "I am what I am not" ("Calling places, collecting careless sentences, I write them down so I ignore them, and you should too. You should ignore every word") mean the same thing.
Of course, Idlewild was never known for the same self-aggrandizing that bands like Oasis and Guided by Voices have participated in (and nor do I blame Liam and Noel for making things interesting outside of the studio), and I think I've already talked about how powerful music, and Idlewild's is no exception, can be. All I'm saying is that for all his philosophical rejection of the idea that a song could be something more than a piece of saccharine troubadourship, his lyrics, even if not poetry, say a whole lot, and so I have to wonder if he really believes that "a song is a beautiful lie" always?
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