It is well known in almost any circle of people, I would say, in this 21st century, that there is definitely a greater love that exists for songs, rather than for literature. For many people, the explanation for just why this is, and especially why this is for poor people in particular, tends to automatically go hand in hand with the idea that poor people are simply "too stupid", perhaps, to connect with high and mighty literature, since it requires 'effort', and so they naturally 'revert' to songs, where it is almost as though they are being read a story, like an audiobook. For some time, I myself figured the problem was something along these biased lines. My friends, most of whom probably cannot read beyond an 8th or 9th grade level, and some of whom probably cannot read much at all beyond stop signs and the like, were simply too "simple" to want to read the great works of literature of years of yore. The only way they could enjoy stories was through a rap song or a rock tune. Oh well. Whatever.
Then, however, at some point, especially as I myself often dabbled endlessly jumping between both forms as an artist, it began to occur to me that there is, I believe, a whole other reason that has been quite overlooked for this particular love of songs is so pronounced for the poor, but the love of literature still rather lacking. This is the idea that I have had: Poor people do not dismiss the halls of literature because those halls are challenging. If anything, poor people are, I can assure you, more than ready to take up the arms of a challenge, and they are also more than accustomed to being bored as hell and having to "slog through" things than you can imagine. No, this is not the reason why poor people have very much abandoned literature in the modern age. It has nothing to do with them being challenged, or having lower reading levels by some silly test you give them, or anything like this. The reason, instead, is this: Literature, to put it simply, the vast bulk of it, is just rather offensive, in some sense, to the eyes of a poor man or woman, and the reason it is offensive is because so many of the characters within the pages of the "classics" just seem a bit, well... ungrateful. They are people whom poor people do not want to imagine, I think, because many of the people who populate the great books of yore, and even today, are often very wealthy people who ,for some odd reason, still are not happy or satisfied. For a poor fellow, this is absolutely confounding, the idea basically being something like "...but this person is rich, they have a three story house, they have 3 cars in the book, they have a boat...and yet they still want me to believe they have a trauma. No, it is not possible. It is not possible!"
Essentially, you see, poor people tend to find most characters in most books to just be something like a lottery winner who still isn't happy, even after winning the lottery, and they thus find the person utterly incomprehensible. And ... before you start to mention books like, say, the famous Russian title The Brothers Karamazov, which is all about poverty, and very terrible poverty at that, well, the poor do not want to read that either, because it's the exact opposite, just as extreme, and therefore, though it is not annoying like the books of the wealthy are, it ends up being threatening and scary, because as a poor man reads it, he sees his own shadow within the text, and he thus quickly slams it shut and runs from it, and then of course probably does not tell any of his friends about it. Which, of course, is exactly why a book like the Brothers Karamazov is endlessly obsessed over in those obnoxious "literary halls" where Harvard professors write dissertations, but is not much loved here in the ghetto itself. I myself actually very much loathe that book, whilst at once feeling such pity for the main characters. I don't want to actually get to know them any better, of course.
Now of course you want to know about songs, however. Aren't songs so similar, you say? And don't songs talk about great wealth and poverty and all of these things just like books do? Well, yes, of course they do, as there are only so many topics to go around,but songs, in my opinion, and in specific the singers of songs, are a very, very different breed, especially when it comes to perception. In my opinion, you see, I think much of the big secret behind why the poor are able to endure rich men singing songs about suffering is because, to put it simply, the singer and his/her voice is often like a flash of light that comes to you and then disappears just as quickly.
In fact, I will even go so far as to say that there is almost something decidedly not human about the voice of a singer. It is a voice, but it is not talking, and therefore it almost does not belong to a person, in some strange sense, and what I think happens as a result of this is that songs get the chance to occupy a sort of "dream sphere" that literature simply cannot achieve, because it is often too much like a conversation. A character like Holden Caufield in the Catcher in the Rye, who whines and moans, simply seems too real to many readers. Too familiar. You hear your friends in him; and he annoys you. Put that same exact theme in a song, however, and it doesn't seem like anyone. It is just a dream thing that fades in and out. He says the same bratty things in the context of a song, and it doesn't annoy you. You love it. Songs have a strange license that is not given to the writers. A license to bitch, really.A license to not make sense. A license to often just say anything at all that you can dream up ....
A singer is almost not human, and you really start to understand what I mean by that when you start to look at how singers are thought of, and written about, versus how the great authors of yesteryear have been. Most people, in my experience, especially these days with the surplus of music, simply do not care at all about just who it is who sings (or screams or raps) to them on the radio anymore. Yes, singers have faces that are far more well known, but the person behind that face isn't really "considered" deeply. People don't care about biographical details of the person. They don't care even if that person ever releases another song, perhaps. Many readers of Hemingway could probably tell you he was born in Michigan, and he once lived in Paris; but how many people who have listened to the Doors really know that Jim Morrison was born in Florida, and had a father who was a US Admiral? Morrison has been a major part of rock and roll lore, so we are told, since the 60s now. He exists like a ghost: Everyone knows he danced and shouted, and he was good looking, he wrote poems, and sang strange songs. Beyond that, next to nothing is known about him by the literal millions and millions of people who have heard him. He is just a voice, a strange voice on the radio at night. Nothing more is necessary to know.
Another thing I find very interesting is that it also very often the case that one song to the other by the same artist is not recognized. This is a great liberating thing that does not exist for a writer. I, for instance, had a song I loved to hear on the radio for years and years, which I had no idea was a David Bowie song whatsoever. I would come home and listen occasionally to David Bowie on my computer, or sometimes even declare to people that I despised David Bowie, not even aware that, when I was in my car, this other song that often came on the radio was also the same guy. With an author, this sort of thing is impossible: He is forced, more or less, to always be revealed. Readers often know everything by a certain author, even if he has released an entire bookshelf worth of works, like Stephen King. The second you buy a book, for instance, you will often have to pass that one little page where all the other works by the author are listed. In the world of songs, this often never happens, because its all just happening in the air, away from any book or page, floating on a radio or a speaker somewhere. The chance to even glimpse what else the artist may have done often does not exist for the average poor person -- even still in the age of the Internet. In the world of songs, everything is frightfully disorganized; in fact, this has ironically become even more the case because of the Internet. Many songs online are mislabeled, the wrong artist listed.
It is thus the case that, for the most part, music listeners, in my experience, are not what one would call a "completionist". People do not really keep track of singers past a certain point. With writers, even while they are living, this is very different. Track is kept. They are obsessed over. We sit and wonder who they are. The interviews tend to be longer. And oftentimes we want as many biograpical details as possible. This same thing is never done with a singer, almost never done. The singer is really never fully humanized -- much to their benefit --- 9 out of 10 times. Do biographies exist? Yes. But does anyone read them? In my experience, not really. Some people care-- but not the majority who have heard the work. He or she gets to remain as nothing more than just an anonymous voice, often a voice with no name , no accent, and no place of origin. With so many songs that the People love, there is always that same story behind them: Who, exactly, were the people that made this song? No one knows, and this especially happens with songs once a few years have passed. They slip off into the ocean and you do not even care to find traces of them, or anything else that the artist of them might have done. They become these anonymous little things that the radio DJ randomly throws back into your life when he decides to. You can probably think of dozens of such songs from your own life that have this if you try. I know I can. Say the song "Bitch" by Meredith Brooks, or "Run Around" by Blues Traveler, "Two Princes" by the Spin Doctors, even that enormous hit "I'll Be" by Edwin McCain. I literally have not the slightest idea about what any of these artists do or have done with their lives since. Yet they constantly re-enter into my own life with these enormous songs of theirs that keep traveling and popping up in the most random of times and places. It's incredible when you really think about it.
I sometimes swing back to certain songs I used to sing with my grandfather when I was a boy in the car, say a song like "Brandy" by the band Looking Glass, and I look into who the people were, and it's just the most random set of people in the world, people who were never again, so much as a single time, heard from.They just disappear down the road, they get lost. A writer is always able to be tracked down, you'll find. There is this intimacy; but the intimacy is damning, in many respects. It has ruined reading for many people. I am convinced of it. ...
And all of this,I believe, as I said in the beginning, it all serves to help the poor connect with songs far more than literature, tragically, because songs have no real trace of social class, or economy, or even really place. This is even the case in songs that clearly are coming from certain social classes. Take a song like "Meet Virginia" for instance, years ago sung by Train. It is about a poor working class waitress seemingly in some Southern town. This song was a hit: it is easy to imagine big truckers searing down the enormous US interstate listening to it, it is easy to imagine little girls in Kentucky or New York City listening to it, its easy to imagine waitresses and mechanics, doctors en route to work , all sorts of people connecting with this Virginia the waitress character in the song. Now try to imagine these same people taking the character Virginia in through a book, or even a film. No one would, for the most part literally no one would. Try to insert Virginia into a novel and suddenly no one cares about her; if anything, they, as I said before with the Brothers Karamazov, we can't wait to escape her. I am hard pressed to imagine the trucker who whistles along to this song being the same dude who would sit down with the novel about a struggling waitress woman.
It really is very strange....
#Food for Thought...
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