arKumenTs

[IED0DXM%UCLAMVS.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU]

L-Hs Mailbag:
^^^^^^^^^^^^^

     Don't get the "French CD of _Never For Ever_"! Actually, a true
French-made CD of _NFE_ doesn't even exist, but even if it did, the
French-language version of "The Infant Kiss" would _not_ appear on
it, so you'd be wasting your money. "Un Baiser d'enfant", which is the
title of the French version, was _only_ released as a single
(in France and Canada), and was _never_ incorporated into the French
LP.

     Jon, IED has of course listened
to the string section in "Houdini", and totally
agrees with you that it's wonderful, and beautifully integrated
with Eberhard Weber's bass playing. He doesn't see it as in any
way "superior" to the string section in "X4", however. Why must there
be a comparison here? Simply because a violin can be heard in
both pieces of music? To IED, the English modal touches in the "X4"
violin part are very different from "Houdini"'s harmonic orientation,
which is completely tonal. The passage in "Experiment IV" also
differs in that it is virtually a solo violin part, with only a
very simple obligato: sparer and more austerely played -- and therefore,
in a way, arguably much less "melodramatic", to use your word --
than the chamber ensemble passage in "Houdini". And the passage's modal
touches are not overly emotional at all, to this listener, but actually
quite cold: they tend to add a distancing quality to the emotional tone.
Listen to Vaughan Williams's "The Lark Ascending" some time -- you'll
hear the similarity immediately. IED can see that the issue of whether
one is more "sentimental" than the other is a matter of taste, but at
least IED has some specific musical reasons for his opinion.
     The Parsons "team"'s involvement with _The Kick Inside_ is well
known.

     Now, about the following lengthy rebuttal to Doug's
latest gauntlet: IED wants to preface it by assuring everyone
that he is just as sympathetic to Doug's sorry romantic state these
days as anyone else in the group. In fact, Doug's condition is so
sad and poignant that IED feels churlish for lashing away at his recent
posting as he is about to do, but after all, this is L-Hs, right?
We're _supposed_ to be argumentative and obnoxious, aren't we? No? Oh.

     Doug, IED hasn't yet found a specific identification of Delius's
affliction, but it was apparently inherited from his father,
according to the _Oxford Companion to Music_ (the only source
in IED's house with any info on Delius's life). IED
must get to a library soon to settle this. It did seem that
the _OCM_ was being a little coy about the disease...

 >Well, I still think I am right.  I guess I'm just over-zealous and
 >overly-confident...

You said it this time, Doug, not IED.

 >...but Kate says that "There Goes a Tenner" is a song
 >about fear.  She also says that recording *The Dreaming* was the the
 >most frightening thing she ever did.  It still seems to be that it'd
 >an awfully big coincidence that she'd write a song about fear while
 >engaging upon the most frightening endeavor of her life, and have the
 >two things be unrelated.

     Well of _course_ it's about _fear_, Doug! Neither IED nor Kate has ever
said otherwise, either in your interview with her or anywhere else! In
fact, the lyrics almost specifically talk about the characters' fear. The
point Kate was making in her interview with you was that the fear
had nothing to do with a fear of making _records_, but revolved
around the fear of the characters in the song, who were _burgling
a bank_! To say that any reference to an emotion as general and
nonspecific as "fear" in _The Dreaming_ _must_, for that very
reason, be a metaphor for _Kate's_ fear about making recordings
in a studio is absolutely ridiculous! It's like saying that
all the songs on side one of _HoL_ are about Kate's love of, say,
chocolate, on the grounds that Kate has once or twice indicated that she
"loves" chocolate! You're making a fundamental error in logic,
Doug, by starting off with a totally personal association on
_your_ part -- in this case, of "fear" in a song on _The Dreaming_, with
Kate's  nervousness in a highly specific situation (recording
in the studio) -- and then immediately looking for ways of
"interpreting" the lyrics so that they can all be reduced to supporting
your totally arbitrary premise. Sure, Kate was nervous
while recording, but she's also been nervous about a hell of
a lot of other things _besides_ recording. And anyway, this
song was _clearly_ inspired by a story of a bank heist!
     You make exactly the same crucial error when you read
"Hounds of Love" as a metaphor for Kate's anxiety about her _fans_.
(And let's even leave aside for the moment the fact that Kate says
she _has no such feelings_ about her fans!)
You personally may associate the term "hounds of love" with
"fans", but such an association is by _no means_ generally understood!
IED hasn't talked with a single other fan who had made such a connection
before reading about it in your interview. More than a couple have thought
your idea was highly bizarre, however! It's easy to see what you're talking
about when you say that "fans" could be thought of as "hounds". But the
point is that there's no reason at all for assuming that
fans is somehow the _exclusive_, or even a _likely_
association in the song. Besides, all of the songs on side one -- "HoL" among
them -- are explicitly about very private, interpersonal relationships. To
show the seriousness of the flaws in your method of interpreting songs:
It's just as possible to argue that the "hounds" in "Hounds of Love"
represent Kate's fear of _airplane flights_! If you begin
with the personal association of "fear" in a Kate song with
"Kate's fear of airplane flights", you could quite easily
find "support" for that in the lyrics to the song -- at any
rate, support of the kind that you seemed to think legitimate
enough in your interpretation of fear in "There Goes a Tenner"
("'Tenner' sounds like 'tenor'", etc.). For example:

  "And I'm ashamed of running away
  From nothing real,
  I just can't deal with this,
  But I'm still afraid to be there..."

Well, it's _obvious_ that this is all a reference to Kate's
fear of flying! After all, why _else_ would she then use
this image a couple of lines later:

  "Here I go -- Don't let me go -- HOLD ME DOWN"!!!

And suddenly the most enigmatic line in the whole song is
also explained in the light of this brilliant new interpretation:

  "And I'll be TWO steps on the WATER"

Well it's _obviously_ a reference to the QUEEN ELIZABETH _2_!!
It's as clear as day!!!

     Admittedly IED has chosen an interpretation
that sounds absolutely ludicrous, but if you're _disposed_ to think
of the song in that way to _begin with_, the QE2 metaphor is
no more implausible than your connection of "Tenner" with "tenor" --
in fact, it seems if anything a little less arbitrary.
Nonetheless, the interpretation is utterly silly, because there's
nothing in the song that points _exclusively_ toward the airplane
symbolism, any more than there's _anything at all_ in "There Goes
a Tenner" that _exclusively_ indicates a reference to the musical
recording process, or any more than there's anything in "Hounds of Love"
that refers _exclusively_ to "fans". Without some _real_
evidence, this kind of interpretation simply has no business in
objective analyses of Kate's songs. Great stuff for the WSI,
Doug, but total balderdash in the real world.

 >P.S.  If I'm so overconfident, how come when I told Kate about "My
 >Lagan Love", she poo-pooed my ideas away?  Later, when talking to her
 >brother John, I found out from him that he had actually done most of
 >the work on those lyrics.  I then told him my ideas, and he said that
 >I was absolutely right.  Explain this, Mr. Marvick.

O.K., that's not too hard. First, it's not quite true that she
"poo-poohed" your idea. What she really did is to say that
she had worked on it very quickly, and to her there was no
great importance in the lyrics. She didn't actually say that
the song was _not_ about a dead lover, however. Here's what she
said, for the record:

 >I think the lyrics are really just a vehicle for the song.
 >I wanted to do the song and it had no traditional lyrics.
 >We had to find some to go with it, so we pulled together
 >some lyrics with my brothers and just put them to the music.
 >It wasn't something that I put a great deal of thought into
 >at all!

     Furthermore, it's very evident, in reading the transcript of your
interview with Kate, that she got the impression, right from the word
go, that you had some extremely unusual interpretations of her songs,
to say the least. To IED, anyway, it seems that you had developed (and
apparently still believe in) a highly elaborate personal construct
around her songs. If (as seems very clear from the bemusement she
expressed at your interpretations) Kate had this impression, it's
not at all surprising that her answers would tend to form a pattern:
one of trying to deflate and bring back down to earth your ideas
about songs that, after all, are for the most part founded on and inspired by
very specific narrative ideas and images. So why is it hard to
understand her response to your idea about "My Lagan Love", which,
like most of her b-sides, seems to have been done much more quickly
than her LP tracks?
     As for John's agreement with you that the song was about
a woman mourning her dead lover, that's not at all surprising, nor
does it conflict with Kate's comment that the lyrics were not
especially significant, as far as _she_ was concerned. After all,
if she had wanted the words to have a highly personal and specific
importance, she'd have taken the time to write them herself, instead
of working them up with her "brothers", as she put it. (By the way,
there's still no reason to doubt Kate's description of authorship.)
How many other songs of Kate's can you name in which she worked on
the lyrics with one -- or two -- other people? IED counts zero. Isn't
that pretty strong support for Kate's assertion that the song's lyrics
have no great personal significance for her? IED doesn't see how this
subject constitutes a challenge to his comments about your interpretive
method in general, Doug.

-- Andrew Marvick