It’s not very often that I do research in order to write a song lyric, but on Friday I find myself digging around in Nietzsche expressly for that purpose. I had written this song with my friend Adam for our Project MA album, and the words I wrote, inspired by a title Adam had given me, which I think was at first inspired by a piece of fiction he had heard me read publicly, were about the concept of free will. The music that Adam provided as the first kernel of the song, a click track, a bass part, two or three tracks of keyboard, which he sent to me digitally from where he lives in Vermont, inspired me, for one part of the arrangement, to do a kind of spoken word thing. So I improvised this rap about the Barbie film, of all things. In my brain, the lyrics I was writing, about the extent to which we feel “in control” of our lives, brought me back to that film and some of its philosophical leanings. I tracked drums and vocals for this song a couple of months ago, maybe, when the film was fresh in my mind–and maybe in some weird way the film inspired the lyric, but I don’t think I made that connection until I tackled that spoken word part. At any rate, as it is a tune I am trying to finish for the album, I realized upon re-listening that it was not yet ready for mixing. Some arrangement puzzles had to be solved, more lyrics needed to be written. It needed a stronger lead vocal than my initial effort, and I was unhappy with the Barbie rap, felt it was too informal, and perhaps not explicitly connected to the big idea of the lyric. And suddenly Nietzsche came to the forefront of my thinking, especially, his critique of the concept of free will, and something that I understood from reading ABOUT him, that he believed that every cause had an antecedent, and that every cause is necessitating, meaning, that as much as we like to think we have made choices, when we look back we realize that we could not have acted in any other way. My new Barbie rap claims that the film is Nietzschean in its philosophy–which I’m not sure that I’m 100% behind–I just enjoy saying it. And I take a lot of pleasure in trying to incorporate the literary or the philosophical in a pop song lyric. That might be off-putting to some people. They might accuse me of showing off or some dumb thing. I don’t care. It interests me, as Barbie did, deeply, and as Nietzsche does, and as songwriting does. Let’s bring all that stuff together.
I took my wife and son to the airport Friday morning. He’s off to audition snare drum for the Blue Devils. I’m home alone with dogs, the weather’s bad, and I’ve got time on my hands. Spent hours Friday in the studio refining this philosophical pop culture music thing.
And then I watched Saltburn, for which I don’t have a ton to say. I am interested in the fact that it was a film written and directed by a woman. The two main characters are young Oxford dudes in the early aughts. One of these characters belongs to a family that is obscenely rich and eccentric, and the other is decidedly not that. The premise is that these two befriend each other at university, and the rich kid invites the other kid to come home with him for summer break. The film has stirred up some controversy for some pretty disturbing sex stuff–not pornographic, but illustrative of behavior that, I’m guessing, is not the stuff of your typical mainstream Amazon Prime film, stuff that most people would find icky. The film appears to be just a vehicle for that kind of thing at first, even though the whole time you are aware of something darker brewing under the surface besides this kind of fish-out-of-water storytelling. The last half an hour of the film takes some really wild turns–which I am not completely sure are earned. Am I glad I watched it? Sure. Did I love it? No. Did I hate it? No. But I’m bugged a little by the fact that I think I was motivated to watch it, more than anything else, by the controversy that surrounded it. That part of the hype worked on me, I guess, for better or worse. Did I have a choice?
michael jarmer 