My Rights vs. Yours
Poetry, song lyrics, and a secret third thing
The song “My Rights vs. Yours”, from the New Pornographers’ fourth album, Challengers, came into my head recently. I couldn’t remember what the song sounded like, but I knew it was one I’d liked at one point. The phrase in the title just seemed applicable in so many aspects of life, large and small. Even without any other context at all, those words convey meaning: a single song title imbued with so much, mostly accidentally. Not long after that, there “My Rights vs. Yours” was, playing in a friend’s car, and I remembered why I liked the song all over again.
Rock music is the closest many people ever get to enjoying poetry, where poetry = phrases in stanzas that can conjure up a feeling, a mood, or an image. (My grade nine English class studied the lyrics to “The Sounds of Silence”, so I may just be reiterating my own indoctrination.) There are songs that tell stories (think “Hurricane”), there are songs that make a point (“You’re With Stupid Now”), and then there are songs whose lyrics in isolation may look nonsensical, but which, combined with music, are something more. A vibe.
That’s where I think “My Rights vs. Yours” fits in. Some lines sound related to relationship angst, but others just sound: setting off “the truth in one free afternoon” with “A new empire in rags” makes sense, within the song, but as is often true of lyrics, they mean more the less you think about them. The elliptical nature of lyrics is a feature, not a bug. An impression you take away from one song can connect with another in your head, whether not there was any intention that they do so, or whether the meaning behind the lyrics is in any way linked. For me, “A new empire in rags” leads to “Fake Empire” by The National, even if beyond the word “empire”, the only similarity may be that it’s another song full of impressionistic non-rhyming couplets (*that might not actually be couplets). (Oh, and it looks like they came out the same year. So maybe more linkages than I’d realized.)
Years ago, talking to an acquaintance about record an album, I asked if his band planned to include the song lyrics in the CD insert. Absolutely not, he said. This surprised me, because I’d pored over the lyrics of songs I liked since I first started listening to my own music; for the albums I listened to obsessively as a pre-teen, especially, I knew every place where the printed lyrics differed even slightly from the recording. I’d quoted song lyrics, among other things, in my graduating high school yearbook. But I’ve come around to his thinking: lyrics aren’t meant to be read on a page, by themselves. Looking at the first violin line isn’t going to tell you much about an orchestral piece. They need all the other parts to work. And, as comes up every so often (which with Taylor Swift is really quite often), too much scrutiny of lyrics highlights everything that’s ridiculous about them.
The most memorable time I saw the New Pornographers live was a couple months before their third album, “Twin Cinema”, was released. I was on my way back from a short trip to Ireland with family that began and ended in New York City, and spent a couple of nights in the Brooklyn apartment of friends on the trip back home. The band played most of their new album at a free concert in Prospect Park. It was a perfect night: ideal t-shirt weather temperatures, ribs and corn and beer for sale, good music, an easy walk home. That I was slightly jetlagged only made it all the more enchanted. Later, when I listened to the album at home, there were a few lines I repeated to myself from time to time. At the concert, though, I don’t think I could make out a single word. That didn’t matter: the songs mattered.
Good title, though.