by Hamid Khanbhai
Only months before Rubber Soul, their first strong album, The Beatles released Help and that lyrical nadir, Another Girl. The song appears to be void of psychological and narrative interest. We are introduced to a nameless, amorphous and uncharacterised trio, the components of a scarcely delineated love triangle. The singer has found ‘another girl’ who is ‘new’, ‘sweeter [than quite a few]’, and while he ‘[doesn’t] want to say’ the current situation has made him unhappy, he has been persuaded to jump ship by the potential longevity of the alternative - ‘who will love me till the end/through thick and thin/she will always be my friend’. At the risk of over-reading, one could detect a faux-naivety in the chasteness pretended for the new relationship, or even a callous insouciance in the lazy sketchiness of the whole speech-excuse which is, after all, directed at the girl he is about to dump. In addition, there is an insistence in the song’s ratiocinatio that fails to convince, but does he believe he can get away with it? Has he that much of a hold on the girl that she will obediently let go? ‘I ain’t no fool’ he proclaims twice; quite truthfully, the zealous listener might reckon, when educing the genuine, licentious motivations in ‘Nobody in all the world can do what she can do’, with all its laid-back implications of supinely superior. Under, on top, every which way. But in continuation it becomes unclear who is under whose thumb. The singer almost pleads, ‘so I’m telling you, “this time you’d better stop” / For I have got another girl. Another girl’. This punter has a history of trying to push off, but for a pole always stuck in the mud. Who is he kidding anyway and what is stimulating this outburst: is the one whom we mistook for the hapless, (frigid?) girl actually the master of ceremonies, the real paramour who maintains silent control and wears the trousers when it boils down to break-up sex? Is Another Girl being sung to a coital rhythm where, naturally, the intonation and breathing of normal speech are impossible? If this were a tenable reading then the verse would structurally be better placed at the end. But it’s not.
Later in 1965 The Beatles tried their hand at writing some respectable lyrics¹. Norwegian Wood tells of yet another triste tryst. It was, however, such a departure from the saccharine chimes of previous albums and enough of an anomaly even on Rubber Soul to provoke speculation about whether Lennon and McCartney had fallen under the spell of someone like Bob Dylan. Blonde on Blonde, released the very next year during Dylan’s prolific early electric period, would have critics rewriting the score: who was influencing whom? Fourth Time Around was too evocative of Norwegian Wood for it to be a coincidence. Then again, it was seamlessly integrated into an album that was, in terms of the orchestration and the use of language, unmistakably Bob. Did Dylan play his song for the band when they met in 1964 at the Delmonico Hotel in New York? Were contemporaries right to read into the last lines a note of censure about borrowing compositional styles - “I never asked for your crutch; now don’t ask for mine”? Who really cares? This question of influence imposes too unidirectional a schema on the fertile ferment of the mid-sixties and is not important. Had Christopher Ricks paid any attention to the songs in his self-pleasuring, self-parody of a book, Dylan’s Visions of Sin, I’m sure he would have claimed that what does matter is that they are patently analogues².
Norwegian Wood
I once had a girl //3
or should I say //2
she once had me… //2
She showed me her room //3
isn’t it good //2
Norwegian wood? //2
She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere, //5
so I looked around and I noticed there wasn’t a chair. //5
I sat on a rug
biding my time
drinking her wine.
We talked until two
and then she said
“It’s time for bed”
(instrumental verse)
She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh.
I told her I didn’t and crawled off to sleep in the bath.
And when I awoke
I was alone
this bird had flown.
So I lit a fire
isn’t it good
Norwegian wood.
Fourth Time Around
When she said,”Don’t waste //3
Your words, they’re just lies,” //2
I cried she was deaf. //2
And she worked on my face //3
Until breaking my eyes, //2
Then said, “What else you got left?” //2
It was then that I got up to leave but she said, “Don’t forget, //5
Everybody must give something back for something they get.” //5
I stood there and hummed,
I tapped on her drum and asked her how come.
And she buttoned her boot,
And straightened her suit,
Then she said, “Don’t get cute.”
So I forced my hands in my pockets and felt with my thumbs,
And gallantly handed her my very last piece of gum.
She threw me outside,
I stood in the dirt where everyone walked.
And after finding I’d
Forgotten my shirt,
I went back and knocked.
I waited in the hallway, she went to get it, and I tried to make sense
Out of that picture of you in your wheelchair that leaned up against…
Her Jamaican rum
And when she did come
I asked her for some.
She said, “No, dear.”
I said, “Your words aren’t clear,
You’d better spit out your gum.”
She screamed till her face got so red then she fell on the floor,
And I covered her up and then thought I’d go look through her drawer.
And, when I was through
I filled up my shoe
And brought it to you.
And you, you took me in,
You loved me then
You didn’t waste time.
And I, I never took much,
I never asked for your crutch.
Now don’t ask for mine.
The musical structures are almost identical. Both use quick three time in E Major. The principal motif in each case spirals down an octave from the tonic and is supported by a simple chord structure moving from tonic to subdominant and back again. Neither song has a refrain and every verse comprises two instances of the spiralling melody, each lasting seven bars or three lines of 3, 2 and 2 bars as printed above³. This is followed by a rhyming couplet spread over ten bars that in Fourth Time Around completes the verse, whereas in Norwegian Wood it has the feel of an intercalated or secondary verse structure. Dylan’s final verse replaces the ten-bar couplet with a third repetition of the main melodic phrase.
Both songs make use of a highly allusive idiom; they are replete with the are-we-aren’t-we anxiety of bedroom cut and thrust. ‘I once had a girl / or should I say / she once had me’. ‘To have’ is to hold but also to hoax. To fool around with. Every syntactic proposition could be (mis-)interpreted as a sexual proposition. Being asked to sit in a room without chairs might be an invitation to lie on the bed. However, the future arsonist is at pains to convince us that he has not dipped into the Ars Amatoria, and plumps for ‘a’ rug instead. The indefinite article draws attention to itself - which or whose? But let’s not get carried away, since he is ‘biding his time’, expectantly and preparatorily lapping up her wine. Then “it’s time for bed” and she, not he, is the early riser, prompting us - primed for erotic connotations - to revise our parsing of the line with a new understanding of non-consummation. There is, however, an instrumental verse suggestively inserted in between. Perhaps time enough for a quickie or two before dropping off in the bath.
Dylan’s hero would have us believe from the start that this is his fourth time tonight. There is just as much sass in both these protagonists as there is in the cackling cock-tease of Norwegian Wood, but the man makes no bones about being firmly in control. He does not get punished for passivity. If anything, he is guilty of saying too much, making suspicious any amorous reassurances that precede the start of the narrative. The language of love continues to be allusive - tapping on drums, peeking through drawers - but it is also elusive, evasive: ‘“your words aren’t clear”’, or should I say, ‘“your words they’re just lies”’. Her frustration is caused by the belief that love should be an analogue of equitable commerce - language and goods in transparent flux. Analogy, ana- (according to) logos (ratio; word), implies not only keeping things in proportion but also meaning what one says. However, he doesn’t believe in tit for tat, whether pledging fidelity or, possibly, funds. The proffered gum is interpreted unequivocally as an insult: your breath smells.
And yet, why are we hearing these songs in the first place? And why are we hearing them as songs? Epic makes readily explicit the motivation and means for song, which seems an unnatural communicative device in our modern times: opera’s relative unpopularity is not simply due to the whiff of elitism but, in no small part, to its alleged lack of realism. Milton’s motivation is no less than to rewrite the scriptures in order ‘to justifie the wayes of God to men’. A muse is usually incited as influence or literal inspiration, breathing in the words: ‘Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story’ opens Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey. Lyric poetry, on the other hand, more often than not dispenses with these formulaic justifications of the chosen medium. People can write poems simply to write poems. Nor does the subject of the poem have to account for the form by some forced tip of the hat to mimesis. So too with songs, themselves Lyrics. What influences the singer of Norwegian Wood to pick up his guitar and clear his throat? Perhaps music sublimates his emotions enough to allow him to communicate them that way. But why would we care any way; is the implication that the audience has asked him to recount his bedroom trauma?
Fourth Time Around has more complex mimetic foundations. The protagonist is a musician of sorts who hums and drums, which together with plenty of evident chutzpah support the choice of balladry as his preferred mode of expression. It becomes apparent only gradually that the intended audience is not external to the fictional world of song and singer, but ‘you’ - another character, Another Girl. And yet, unlike in the two Beatles’ songs, there can be no doubt as to the power relationship in play. The story of the termination of a prior romance is being related as an analogy to the present situation and it serves as a circumlocutory means to the same end - the dissolution of the current coupling. Both break-ups are temporally coextensive: as the narration of the former separation unfolds, so too the process of effecting the current one, a fact only realised by the audience (us and her) when the last three lines have been voiced. Here, finally, we understand the original impetus, the motivation for the song. Its raison d’être is therefore internal, part of the fictional fabric but also part of the source of its dramatic power. The act of breaking up is completed in the act of singing the ending. Then there is only silence: both narratives are over with no come-back, no possible retort.
It has been an unabashedly one-sided affair.
[1] This is not to say that they had not previously composed some cracking tunes.
[2] Thus abstracting songs and literature from History, Ricks indulges an unbridled impulse for intertextuality, drawing Donne, Marvell, Swift and Hardy into a discussion of Lay Lady Lay, for example.
[3] I have altered the format of both from that of their respective publications, which makes for a clearer comparison and better reflects the sung phrasing. The form of a song has already been denatured when the lyrics are freed from the stave and given the aspect of poetry on the page.
