This week I have been bedeviled by the tricks of the hooks and the hearts of popular music. I keep telling myself that most popular songs are not written to be true, but glib; that they run on what's call 'the hook.'
Distracted by numerous lyrics that all seemed to sending me a secret message, I decided to investigate the functioning of "the hook" and came in my Googling to a song by Blues Traveler from their album "Four."
"Four" is an album I've had for many years (A memoir of a brief, but doomed, May -- September romance some eight years back.) which has a song on it called "The Hook." Looking up the lyrics, I saw -- for the first time -- what the refrain actually says:
"Because the hook brings you back
I ain't tellin' you no lie
The hook brings you back
On that you can rely."
It's a common problem with the lyrics to pop songs that they are often misheard by the listeners. These ear blips are called "mondegreens." Neo has written about this in an illuminating manner @ neo-neocon: Mondegreens
I have a old friend who has bought apartments in New York City by exploiting the phenomenon in books. Mondegreens are commonly explained by the facts of loose recordings, production choices, and the volume at which all the instruments play and the singers sing. It is more simply explained by the fact, as noted by my old friend Ethan Russell about Mick Jagger many years ago, "Well, you know, he does slur a lot."
And he does, and they all do. Singing words requires, as we learn in the sacred book of Bob Dylan, that you bend and shape the words to the measure of the music. Success in pop music is found, after all, in the singer not the song.
The other thing that drives the hearing of a song is the mood of the listener. You hear things in songs that aren't ever there just as you see things about your house that are long gone. In each, what we hear and see in down times is essentially the ghosts of ... love, etcetera. And coming or going, love has a lot of etcetera attached to it that it pulls along behind it like the chains on Marley's ghost.
All of this is a periphrastic way of coming to what I had heard sung in the refrain to "The Hook" for many years. I never heard the word 'hook.' Instead I heard the word 'heart,' as in:
"Because the heart brings you back
I ain't tellin' you no lie
The heart brings you back
On that you can rely."
I've listened to that song, with attention or just as background, probably around a hundred times over the years. I've even been to a Blues Traveler concert in New York City that had it on the set list. In all those iterations I've never heard 'hook,' but always heard 'heart.' Now I know the truth of the lyric, but frankly, I'd rather not have known.
Seen whole the lyrics to 'The Hook' are all about the plight and pain of being a pop star. One of thousands of such screeds in which our celebrities bemoan the curse of wealth and fame their rise has brought to them -- the endless angst of those who fear they had to 'sell-out' in order to 'buy-in.' I try, but somehow I just can't feel this pampered pain.
In the end, I really don't want the hook to bring me back. I want the heart to bring me back:
"Because the heart brings you back
I ain't tellin' you no lie
The heart brings you back
On that you can rely."
It might be a mere mondegreen, but it makes a much better song.
Posted by Vanderleun at June 25, 2006 10:38 PM | TrackBackI too also thought it was 'heart'. The song seems to make much more sense with it. 'Hook' just sounds like a plaintive serial killer's lament.
Posted by: Jeremiah at June 25, 2006 11:56 PMThere are two ways to listen to music, emotionally or technically. Most people listen on the emotional level, because they don't know all the finer technical points. Reviewers and other musicians listen on a technical level, which is why what they hear frequently doesn't jibe with what everyone else hears. The point is, when you listen on an emotional level, you hear what you want to hear. It's a reflection of the listener.
Sort of Heisenberg's Uncertainty for music.
What are you all talking about? Have you never listened to Cole Porter? Go find a copy of “I Get A Kick Out Of You" – I am listening to Rosemary Clooney’s version and there is no mistaking the words or the meaning. It has heart and no hooks – just the meaning of the words conveying a sincere human emotion. Cole Porter did not need a hook – or any of the music composers of my era! Go find out for yourselves.
Posted by: ChiefTestPilot at June 26, 2006 12:32 PMYou never said it overtly, but the "hook" part of a song is the part - often the refrain or chorus - that people tend to remember. It "hooks" them. Example:
In the Beatles' "When I'm 64," the hook is:
Will you still need me
Will you still feed me
When I'm sixty four.
If you memorize no other part of the tune, you'll be hard-pressed not to commit that hook to memory. It is an intentional design effort by the songwriter - good songwriters always talk about creating "hooks."
Posted by: Michael at June 26, 2006 6:35 PMI think part of it is that very very few pop singers have anything ni the way of classical voice training. Anyone who has had any at all will get "diction, diction, DICTION" hammered into their brains.
Admittedly, some who get such training will abandon overt clarity in favor of more emotional impact (one can do both but it takes a lot of practice.) James LaBrie of the prog metal band Dream Theater springs to mind— he's got operatic training, but on some of the choruses the consonants get a bit lost.
Posted by: B. Durbin at June 26, 2006 7:17 PMI think you could argue that the "hook" of a song IS the heart of the song...repeated, constant beating of the central wisdom of the song.
So, you were not mistaken these many years - it is the heart that brings you back.
Posted by: Heroic Dreamer at June 28, 2006 9:12 AMRe: Cole Porter --
I think you'll find that the term "hook" indeed goes back to the Tin Pan Alley songwriters. "I Get a Kick Out of You" has a really nice hook, in fact. The first four words in that title are it.
Re: the song "The Hook"
It's clever, it's pretty much a slam at REM, and it's also to the tune of Pachelbel's Canon played at speed. The first time I realized that last, I was in an Ethiopian restaurant. Laughed hysterically. Nearly dropped my Wat.
But it really does sound like "heart", and that's what offsets the cleverness from becoming too much.
Posted by: Maureen at June 28, 2006 9:18 PM"It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood." -- Karl Popper N.B.: Comments are moderated to combat spam and may not appear immediately. Comments that exceed the obscenity or stupidity limits will be either edited or expunged.