Music as Literature II - Idea Post

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?

Quick Commentary I

I often think of random and disjointed things, and have decided to record some of them here:

- Having finished In Search of Lost Time, I went back to Swann's Way and noticed that in the beginning of the book, the Narrator mentions that he has stayed, at one point, with a Mme. de Saint-Loup.  I vaguely remember when I first read it and thinking she was probably some random old woman with nice furniture
- Byron and Keats died at 36 and 26 respectively, as did Pushkin and Lermontov.  I thought this was a strange coincidence.
- Describing Eric's Trip to someone: is Slowdive meets the Stooges accurate? Or simply a Lo-fi Slowdive (for whatever reason I think the dynamics of both bands were very similar)
- If Chris Osgood does end up in the Hockey Hall of Fame, no member will have been so consistently out-played that I can recall.  He's lost his starting job to Mike Vernon, Garth Snow, and Ty Conklin in addition to CuJo/Hasek and finally Jimmy Howard.
- I really should read some Balzac at some point, but I'm not particularly sure which part of La Comédie Humaine I should read (since I likely won't have time for all of it)