The recent thread on Whiter Shade of Pale got me to thinking about my position that it’s the second most pretentious rock song ever, after Stairway to Heaven. Both full of what seem like interesting lines or couplets, but which don’t add up to a hill of beans.
That said, even though they’re both overplayed to hell, I still enjoy listening to them, and if I was in a band that wanted to play them I’d jump at the chance.
I’ll grant that AWSoP is richer dirt, though. Possibly just because it’s less sensible than StH, it’s easier to draw references, be they intended or not. I’ll have to read the Miller’s Tale to see what folks are talking about regarding that reference. In any case, I credit writers for rich dirt whether the references were intended or not. (It’s interesting how one can make arguments from Shakespeare about issues that he couldn’t possibly have conceived, simply because of its complexity and verisimilitude, for example.)
I’m using the term “pretentious” a bit obliquely, applying it to the works themselves, disjoint from the authors’ intentions. That is, whether it seems pretentious on it’s own merits, regardless of whether the authors thought they were being deep or trying to sound deep.
Am I wrong? What are your candidates? Does Inna-gadda-da-vida belong ahead of AWSoP? Black Sabbath / Black Sabbath? All of Uriah Heep’s Demons and Wizards? Yes’s Tales of Topographic Oceans? Miles Davis’s All Blues?
PS: I’m an amateur songwriter, and ALL of my lyrics are pretentious, since I’m pretending (or at least, trying) to be a tolerable lyricist, and failing. So I use the word with affection and empathy.
This will probably sound really bizarre to you, but I rarely, if ever, pay attention to the lyrics of a song. That’s not to say I don’t hear the words, I could recite to you the full lyrics of thousands of songs on the spot, but I don’t give even a passing thought to what they mean.
That said, I nominate every song ever written by Don Henley, Billy Corgan, and U2.
“The Trees” and “Closer to the Heart” by Rush are both pretty cringe-inducing.
Any song that tries to “capture the zeitgeist” of culture and/or politics is usually horribly pretentious, e.g.:
Billy Joel, “We Didn’t Start The Fire”
R.E.M., “It’s The End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”
Jesus Jones, “Right Here Right Now”
Starship, “We Built This City”
That Starship song is one of the most self-congratulatory, self-aggrandizing, embarrassingly pretentious pop songs ever written. It is the very essence of what happened when people from the 60s found themselves still alive in the 80s.
Same here for most of the music I enjoy. There’s music I like that is lyric-driven, but, for the most part, I pay lyrics little to no heed. I love Smashing Pumpkins, but I do agree the lyrics are, if not pretentious, a bit teen-angsty heavy-handed for my tastes. They read like something the average “nobody understands me” introspective high school student would write in the margins of their notebook. But it is right for their music, I’d say.
Not to mention it sounds about 99.44% like a mediocre Pink Floyd song. If you want to run in the Pretentious Olympics, aping Pink Floyd is a pretty good way to get there.
Any and all of them that talk about how hard it is to be a rock star, followed by any and all of them that talk about how great it is to be a rock star. Several are already mentioned.
The parallel are movies about how great Hollywood and being a movie star or in the industry is. Self-fellating trash, to a frame.
It’s not a rock song, but Jay-Z & Justin Timberlake’s “Holy Grail” is pretentious even by hip-hop standards (i.e. a genre where it seems like almost every other track is the performer bragging about how awesome they are), and falls into all of the same “OH MY GOD DOESN’T IT SUCK TO BE RICH AND FAMOUS” traps that the songs mentioned above do.
It does get a little self-aware towards the end, though, when Jay-Z imagines his younger self telling him “If this is all you got to deal with, then deal with it, this shit ain’t work.”
“Stairway to Heaven”
Most of Led Zeppelin’s discography
Anything by Rush
Anything by the Dreadful Grate
At least half of anything recorded in the '70s
Hell, most of “classic rock.”
