Journal sielwolf's Journal: Interesting Lyrics are Written by Portishead 1
Reading back to Ian McShane, before this season of Deadwood on HBO, who was interviewed by the New York Times Arts & Leisure section, on how the dialogue in the show is so strange because where it was common in the period to speak with a single inversion in a sentence, David Milich is inclined to layer two or three inversions in a sentence.
Not that it was easy to read. But there's a reason why we sometimes invert normal sentence structure. A normal sentence:
[Subject] [Verb] [Object]
And an inverted sentence:
[Object] [Verb] [Subject]
or
[Verb] [Subject] [Object]
or
[Verb] [Object] [Subject]
The whole hallmark is that the Subject comes after the Verb it is operating on the Object with. The idea is that it gives emphasis to the Subject instead of to the Object. We could call this Yoda-ism... if sucking the last three Star Wars movies did not do.
In the last few months we've gotten a slight uptick in possible Portishead news with such things as getting hat-tipped by Dangermouse in the New York Times, then Portishead (or whoever is masquerading as them on Myspace) shitting on said DM for being a hack (laffs all 'round), and faked ads. Just short of a decade we might actually have a third Portishead disc in our hands at some point here. And that they've held up for so long, with so little visibility while other peer acts have risen up and burnt out... it's pretty damn impressive.
And something notable about Portishead lyrics is that they often use sentence inversion for extensively and to good effect (and, yes, this is just a good excuse to link to some video).
Let us consider "All Mine", probably the most simple use of inversion. The chorus goes:
"All Mine, You Have to Be"
Which we could return to the simplified sentence form as
"You have to be all mine"
Reading either out you can feel the air get sucked out of it when returned to just the basic sentiment. But what is interesting is how both versions are about possession and the necessity of said possession but the inverted form is exponentially more powerful. This comes from the comma seperating the two clauses and Beth singing each with equal emphasis so that our expectation is that the "All Mine" would stand alone as a bit of pop chorus sloganeering. However, by actually having it dependent on the "You have to be" it sort of corrupts the purity of the notion. It's the kind of thing you'd expect from a psycho ex: they'd speak, and it would sound passably human... yet you got the idea that something was lurking within it... that it was a show... and then they'd drop this little qualifier on there and all the warning flags would go off.
And that's the genius of the lyric. Another example is "Wandering Star" (my personal favorite):
"Wandering stars, for whom it is reserved, the blackness of darkness forever"
Which can be unwound to:
"The blackness of darkness is reserved for wandering stars forever"
Here the structure is more complex with an additional prepositional phrase (the "for...") and, when inverted, the subject kind of plops down within it (bookended by the adverb "forever"). It's a bit labyrinthine but this too works as it sort of feels like the idea is uncoiling as it is sung. It isn't just declared. It's brought up piecemeal and then fused at the end (btw, I dig the variation Portishead throws into "Wandering Star" in the video above... it ain't acoustic as the poster says but it is still damn boss).
"Sour Times" has a likewise different feel. It's chorus goes:
"'Cause nobody loves me, it's true, not like you do"
This (at first) doesn't seem to be an inversion and that's the brilliance of the chorus. It (like that of "All Mine") feels, on the first bar, like a normal declaration. But the "nobody loves me" is actually a dependent subclause of the "not like you do". But the song goes so far as to bury the subject by throwing in an additional subclause with the "it's true". So where the original notion is something like:
"You love me like nobody else loves me, it's true"
But the listener feels that Beth is emoting her loneliness and affirming it ("it's true")... before it turns out that she actually is loved (or feels that way). This idea is sort of juryrigged casually on the end and creates the clash of two polarized ideas (to be loved versus unloved) in a single statement. The complexity is now all that is unsaid. What could provoke such a phrasing? Is it a love that only she seems to see? Is she some crazy broad chasing some dude around? Or is it some doomed relationship going to the grave while everybody is just going through the motions and she is having a Freudian Slip moment? It makes you wonder and that is the delight: a song that lets you meditate on it, lets you return to it and see something new in it you might not have seen before.
Luckily Portishead doesn't go too overboard with their stylings. They use regular syntax more often than not. But they are more lyrically adventurous than most. They aren't afraid to give you something complex. And that is a rare treat.
Ironically... (Score:2)
...such inversion was, once upon a time, normal in English, just as it is in other Germanic languages. It is still used in modern German quite a lot as a way of shifting emphasis, and is the main reason why inflections and genders remain useful -- without inflection and gender, such inversion is more difficult and clumsy in English. (It's still possible, just a bit clumsy and unusual.) Gender and inflection died out in English (or actually is still dying out -- there are still vestiges of it, such as "who/w