Thursday, January 10, 2008

The Meaning of Songs

Since internet, websites, Wikipedia and so on that a very new thing to me, who has never bought magazines about music, is possible: to read the autentic meanings, reasons and origins of songs and, more specifically, song lyrics.

I can discover what their authors really meant when writing those songs; I can research the story behind their lyrics; I can even dig in what the authors didn't want to say and which possible hypotetical meanings they object to.

However, all of these, eventhough satisfying my curiosity and, many times, my difficulty in textually and contextually understanding lyrics, is always painful.

Painful because very often the meaning is so trivial, so banal. Other times, it's just infamous, like writing a beautiful sad song that, after all, is just a complaint and or an attack directed to some ex-band member.

But even when the reason behind a song is pure and lovely, knowing its true meaning and reason is still painful: because it just destroys all our possible imagination. It prevents our appropriation of the song. It tells us that OUR meaning, its connection to our life, is in reality false. Knowing the true meaning, I have to face that the song was not created for me, because of my life, and inpired on my feelings and the feelings of those related to me through love links.

I cannot anymore tell the song is mine our ours!

Walt Disney's movies of Pinocchio, Snow White and so many others have pinned down the image of those characters. It is no longer possible to me to take part in the authorship of those stories, drawing with my imagination the aspect of those characters.

Websites with authentic meanings of songs do the same: they destroy our possible co-authorship of songs. We can no longer paint them.

I rather prefer books with no images.