It does help show why you think the lyrics are pretentious.
I have a different take on it, but that may be my own ignorance showing. I’m a little out of touch with new and/or resurgent professions, but was sorcery a common trade to which someone would apprentice themselves in the last part of the 20th century? Or is the Sorcerer’s Apprentice a familiar master-pupil trope usually portrayed in a medeival scholarly setting heavily laden with Latin and Greek alchemical references? Is Sting just trying to evoke a sense of the subject by using language and phrasing from classical literature?
I think the song is a bit too precious, and I’d certainly never call it high art, but the lyrics are at least consistent with the theme.
A lot of bands come off as pretentious because of their fans. “You’re not deep enough to get Radiohead.” O rly? I just don’t like the way the music sounds, lyrics or no.
Yep - and Next to You, Roxanne and others are brilliantly-crafted pop songs that don’t sound pretentious. He’s capable of taking the stick out of his butt; it’s just that sometimes he forgets.
Of course not - I looked up “prerogative” when Bobby Brown came out with hishit song. (actually, I didn’t - I knew the word; but you get the idea). Again: I absolutely think big words can exist in pop music - but not when used in a forced way. That’s when they sound pretentious.
I hear you, but I don’t care if he gets bored. Writing a good, accessible pop song that balances an easy familiarity on the first listen while also sounding fresh is really, really hard - tossing in fancy words because you own a better thesaurus than I do is no excuse.
Whether or not a rock/pop star has earned the cred to talk about bigger issues has NOTHING to do with how they talk. Bono doesn’t use eruditer-than-thou jargon when discussing debt-retirement - that’s probably why he’s reasonably effective at championing the cause.
The Cure, pretentious? Good god, no. Moody, sometimes, sure, but pretentious? Naah, Fat Bob never took himself seriously enough. Of course, all the Camus and Baudelaire in the lyrics may make it seem otherwise…
Word, old bean, I’m going to take issue with your comments on Sting, whom I suspect you don’t like very much.
I’ve always appreciated Sting’s use of erudite information in his songs. It’s not as if the songs don’t provide context into the swotty stuff he mentions. I didn’t know who Nabokov was at 12, but I figured he wrote about being an older guy being interested in a younger girl. I figured being caught between a Scylla and Charybdis was a bad place to be. Or that carbon-14 was a horribly long-lasting byproduct of nuclear power. And so on.
I think we disagree on what “forced” is. In the examples above, all of the big/obscure words can be figured out. And they do fit in meter and rhyme. (Okay, “cough” and “Nabokov” is stretching it a bit. )
But then I would say doing that same task and not going with you/blue/true type rhymes is even harder. I have known the lyrics to “Wrapped Around Your Finger” pretty much from the day I brought home Synchronicity back in '83. It wasn’t a hard song to learn the lyrics to, even with a few unfamiliar words in there. It was a popular song and a single from that album, so I imagine a few others learned the words, too. xenophon41, I think, has it right. The master-apprentice analogy is woven throughout the song, and it does has a historical imprimatur to it - “it fits.”
Well, I’d say, nor does Sting. I really only know his activism from his rainforest preservation work, and I thought he was very effective in getting attention to the fact that amazing amounts of forest were being destroyed on a daily basis, and that it was causing irreparable damage to the ecosystem. Don’t recall him whipping out the specs and using Al Gore-like powerpoints to make this point. The Police ended after the Amnesty International Conspiracy of Hope Tour… with U2. I don’t think they bashed you over the head with their support for human rights.
I think a key aspect of pretense is “can you take the piss out of yourself?” The crack about rhyming “cough” with “Nabokov” came from Sting himself. He did a nuclear war themed version of “Every Breath You Take” for the TV show “Spitting Image.” In the liner notes for Bring On The Night, he discusses “Children’s Crusade” and states that analogizing the loss of a generation in WWI with the loss of a generation to drug abuse didn’t quite work. He’s pretty self aware, I think.
Let’s assume that to get out in front of a crowd and say, “Hey, look at and listen to me!” requires a good amount of front. So most successful musicians are on the pretentious side. I think Sting is a really smart guy who expresses that in his writing. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn’t. But again, this is the same guy whose most famous song has the take/make/fake/stake rhyme.
HH, great job of defining YMMV. Every point you make is reasonable and I can’t blame you for having them. Sting is one of those guys I love to hate - to be clear: he is supremely talented; his music with the Police is worthy of being in the pantheon; his solo stuff, while not to my taste (too adultsoftjazzcontemporary) is worthy of the sales and his continued fame. I just find him way too self-serious, full of himself and, yes, pretentious. I’ve stated my case and cited examples (without even referencing King of Pain! a song I actually really like FOR its pretentiousness - it is an Oxford professor’s response to Jumping Jack Flash) so no need to go further.
Like someone says above, the only thing remotely “pretentious” about Stevie is her quasi-gothic self-presentation. Her music is pretty ordinary and down-to-earth. If anyone in Fleetwood Mac was ever “pretentious” to any degree, it was Lindsay Buckingham with his crazy cocaine-fueled experiments on Tusk (and he still accomplished great things there!).
Oh I quite like Dream Theatre, although the clashing of discordant keyboards vs guitar can be a bit samey I admit.
Now Stung (Sting in past tense) I really can’t stand, but I love the police.
I also enjoy Rush, Queensryche, Marillion (with Fish) and a whole lot of other prog rock,some of it is good, some not so, but you can’t say the whole genre is bad.
There is a reason they’re called “Critics” rather than something else. Unfortunately, some of the professional ones and their Editors take that entirely too far.
I remember reading a thing about 5-7 years ago about a U2 concert. About two-thirds of the so-called “review” was nothing more than the asshole writer going on and on about how he has NEVER liked U2, but had to go to the concert as part of his job. You know what, dude? FUCK YOU. The article isn’t supposed to be about YOU and your dislike of the band, no matter who they are. Don’t want to go? Tell your boss that you can’t be unbiased and have him/her send someone else. And you, the Editor? What part of “edit” did you miss? Had to fill the page, did we?
Coldplay They have mastered the “holier than their audience” lofty gaze into the distance with raised chin while pounding out fixed tempo single notes schtick.
Cream. “Tales of Brave Ulysses.” Taken from a poem (contemporary and unpublished), rather than written by the group, but still. Compare and contrast, class.
Nobody ever thought of Cream’s lyrics as pretentious. Solos as self-indulgent, yes. But lyrically?
It boils down to this style of music being considered “middlebrow”. Critics are often people who were raised middle-class, but went to college and got art, literature, and/or music degrees, gaining an appreciation for “highbrow” art. They appreciate the highbrow because, well, it’s highbrow, and they consider themselves part of that class of people. They also appreciate the “lowbrow” (in this case, the more primitive, blues-based rock) for its “authenticity”. It’s the age-old upper-class patronizing of the Noble Savage. They despise the “middlebrow”, though, because those artists are attempting to take the highbrow (in this case, “classical” music) and make it more accessible to the middle class.
That’s not forced at all. It fits the meter and describes something in an interesting way which fits the theme of the topic of the song itself. Forced is:
)
a song I actually really like FOR its pretentiousness - it is an Oxford professor’s response to Jumping Jack Flash) so no need to go further.