Song lyrics, being primarily a device to counterpoint instrumentals, are often nonsensical, frequently sexual, and very rarely profound. Sometimes to avoid having to say something, the songwriter will say nothing at all - a tautology. I was just listening to “All You Need Is Love” by (of course) The Beatles, when the following lines came up:
There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done
There’s nothing you can sing that can’t be sung
(snip)
There’s nothing you can make that can’t be made
No one you can save that can’t be saved
All of which are trivially true, regardless of whether or not love is all one needs.
Some tautologies are essentially meaningless 5=5 affairs, but others serve as reminders or emphases of what should be obvious but what often isn’t. For example:
“Your life is your own” is meaningless in that obviously the ‘your’ already gives the life an owner, making the predicate redundant. However, it’s an emphasis of the ownership, perhaps used in situations where someone is trying to control your life or live through you. Thus it’s not a useless statement, as it could sometimes be used to convey real meaning.
I agree, an obvious statement can be emphasized without being a tautology. If you’re saying that my examples fall into that category, I disagree. John Lennon wasn’t saying anything about what I can do except that it can be done.
The literal tautologies in “All You Need Is Love” and “For What It’s Worth” are actually intended to communicate a meaningful message, not just fill in the meter.
He was offering you a particular viewpoint about life.
Really? :smack: I thought it was ‘‘all alone is all we are.’’
As someone who has come to expect well-articulated, meaningful song lyrics from Nirvana, I am outraged! If you need me I’ll be out back planting a house… building a tree… finding my nest of salt…
Personally, I would say specifying some things someone can do is a viewpoint about life, not “you can do what you can do”. But in the interests of returning to the original purpose of the thread, let’s agree to disagree on that one. I will expand the original idea: share your favorite tautological song lyrics, even if you have to disregard any implied or contextual meaning to consider them a tautology.
I don’t think this is quite a tautology, but from The Turtles’ “So Happy Together” presents the same statement twice in a row with slightly different word order: “The only one for me is you, and you for me”. So “you” are for “me”, and also “you” are for “me”. Nothing about “me” being for “you”!
The singer also says “Me and you, and you and me” several times, but I’d consider that just for emphasis.
I have heard that this song was actually meant as kind of a joke, and that’s why the lyrics are so inane. Not sure if that’s true, though.
Re: “All You Need is Love.” In college, I took Intro to Symbolic Logic, and we would have these assignments where we would be given symbolic statements and would have to “translate” them into normal language. Most of them were like “If all my skis are blue, then some of the salmon are certified public accountants.” The professor had a bit of a sense of humor. Most assignments were about ten statements.
Then one day, he handed out an assignment that was 50 statements long. Everyone grumbled but dutifully completed it that night. It turned out to be the entire Beatles song, “All You Need is Love.” A lot of students were unfamiliar with the song, so had to slog through the whole thing, never realizing what they were writing. But it was interesting to see that the whole thing could be written out with symbolic logic.
