Tag: songs

Brandon Flowers Is “The Man”—Whatever That Entails

In a 2017 interview with NME, Brandon Flowers, the lead singer of The Killers, was asked about the origins of “The Man,” the lead single from their then-upcoming album Wonderful Wonderful. According to Flowers, he wrote the song to “hearken back” to his public persona during the band’s heyday in the early-to-mid-2000s, when songs like “Mr. Brightside” and “Somebody Told Me” made them one of the biggest musical acts in the country. Flowers admits to enjoying slipping back into that past version of himself, but he says he looks back on that period of his life with more than a little embarrassment:

I’ve been cleaning it up for a long time. I don’t think that was really a great representation, an honest representation of who I am. It came from a place of insecurity and I would just puff my chest out and say things and put a lot of negativity out there. I basically came to regret that and I’m sure a lot of people can identify with that.

Based on Flowers’s comments, it is tempting to read “The Man” as a partial critique or parody of masculinity. Critics generally seemed to have reached that conclusion when discussing the song. Writing for Pitchfork, Ryan Dombal argues that “The Man” is the product of the conflicting urges to celebrate and mock traditional masculinity; the song is “poking fun at dick-swinging supremacy while serving up something that could reasonably soundtrack a rough-and-dusted pickup truck commercial.” More directly, Chris DeVille wrote in a (very short) piece for Stereogum that he likes “The Man” because the song “knows it’s ridiculous and it relishes that ridiculousness.” And in Spin, Anna Gaca suggests that the song “gets a lot better when you start believing that it’s narrated by the villain, and that the Killers are subtly shimmying some kind of truth to power.”

I understand the impulse behind these readings, but I’m not sure the text of “The Man” supports them. For one thing, to read “The Man” as a critique of masculinity feels like an excuse for enjoying a song with frankly uninspiring lyrics (“I’ve got gas in the tank, I’ve got money in the bank,” “Don’t try to teach me, I’ve got nothing to learn,” etc.). Gaca, to her credit, considers that very point in her review, conceding that “the lyrics are pretty cliché” and “not exactly something you’ll find yourself searching for deep-seated meaning in.”

But even if the lyrics were technically stronger, I still don’t think they’d support such a reading, because the content of every element of the song celebrates the subject matter. Every line is a boast of the speaker’s manliness; even a bizarre line like “USDA-certified lean” only sticks out because it’s novel, not because it’s skeptical of the song’s core conceit. The groove is infectious, an immediate call to the dance floor, and the roboticized backing vocals during the chorus are pure cheesy fun. Whenever I hear this song, the first thought that comes to mind is, “Hell yeah, I’m the man! This is awesome!” The fact that I’m not wholly comfortable with that response is the only reason I have for looking for critique within the song itself; it’s the natural way to reconcile my conflicted feelings about it.

At this point, I’d have to conclude that if Brandon Flowers wanted “The Man” to be an expression of regret or skepticism about his past as a performative stud, then it simply didn’t make it through the process. But I can’t say that Flowers is being disingenuous in that interview, either, because while the song does not effectively critique that persona, the music video most certainly does.

The video for “The Man” (dir. Tim Mattia, 2017) sees Flowers take on the roles of various caricatures of American masculinity: a Vegas lounge singer, a playboy, a daredevil motorcyclist, a greaser at a karaoke bar, and a high-roller in a cowboy get-up. Like the song itself, the video depicts these paragons of manliness at their most pumped-up, as they strut down the Strip, entertain the ladies, and lay down the big wagers. Unlike the song, though, the video does not leave those depictions unchallenged, but instead shows the consequences that such approaches to masculinity have.

Admittedly, the video’s skeptical outlook is gradual and at first rather fleeting. It’s not until the first chorus that we see some push-back against the characters that Flowers portrays: some eye-rolls behind the playboy’s back, a yawn from someone watching the lounge singer. In a video that’s driven by montage and built around five different plotlines, it’s easy to miss those first little jabs; I’ve had to watch it several times over while writing this review to catch as many of them as possible. They’re important, though, because they lay the groundwork for the later (and grander) declines these men experience. Without the eye-rolls and yawns, their downfalls might seem like sudden calamities; with them, and those falls become more and more inevitable.

Take this shot of an audience member for the lounge singer’s act. There’s nothing especially dramatic happening in the frame, but his facial expression conveys quite a bit. He’s not sold on the performance; if anything, he looks confused, as though he’s wondering why Vegas is still staging shows ripped from the days of Busby Berkeley or Flo Ziegfeld. This fellow resembles nothing if not the critic listening to “The Man” and asking himself, “Are these guys for real? This has to be a joke, right?” A shot like this is not essential to the video when considered in isolation, but as such moments accumulate the effect gets stronger and stronger. The viewer is left with the gut feeling that something eventually must give.

And, boy, do some of these guys fall hard. The high-roller goes on tilt at the roulette table and loses everything he has, before the casino tosses him out into the parking garage. The motorcyclist, haunted by footage of debilitating crashes (possibly his own highlights?), rips up his tapes in a self-pitying fit. After his karaoke set, the greaser starts flirting with a woman in the crowd right in front of her boyfriend, who proceeds to beat the snot of him. Even when the fall is comparably mild, there’s still a noticeable sense of dejection: the playboy on his knees when the ladies leave him, the lounge singer packing his glittery costume in a storage locker. To me, at least, the message of the video is clear and distinct: the version of masculinity presented in “The Man” is at best unfulfilling and at worst self-destructive. Turns out, you can in fact “break me down.”

This leads us to the question: if the video for “The Man” is a clear critique of traditional masculinity, does that make the song itself a critique as well? I’m still not convinced the answer is yes, but I can’t definitively say no, either. The music video is paratext for the song; it brings the reader to the text and offers some information for interpreting it, but it does not constitute the text. And given how most songs are heard without the context of the video, it’s not even a piece of paratext that people are necessarily likely to encounter (unlike, say, the cover a book or the title of a film). But I do think the video demonstrates that “The Man” can be employed in the context of critique, especially in the way that it asserts the speaker’s manliness to the point of insecurity—the singer doth protest too much, methinks.

Granted, that “The Man” is amenable to critical usage is not necessarily a point in its favor. It’s not like Negativland’s album Dispepsi proved that soda commercials were secretly subversive, just that they’re banality was amusing. But then again, it’s not like PepsiCo and The Coca-Cola Company were involved in the making of Dispepsi, either. The video for “The Man” was made with the band’s participation, and that does lend some extra weight to its reading of the song. Ultimately, I’m unable to find a clean resolution to this tension.

I think Dombal is on the money when he calls the song “a particularly phallic ink blot”: it provides a lot of potential answers, but no definitive ones. Alternatively, we could give Gaca the last word: “”The Man” is a bop. It would sound fan-fucking-tastic in a roller rink.” Somewhere between those two, you’ll find me.

But that’s enough from me. What do you think of “The Man” (either the song or the video, or perhaps the union of the two)? Can you think of any works of art you feel similarly conflicted about? Sound off in the comments below!

Normally this is where I would plug some previous piece of mine which is tangentially related to the one you just read, but this time I’ll instead link to a video essay by YouTuber Sarah Z entitled “The Politics of Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog”. Her video also dives into the question of how to approach a work which appears to both endorse and critique the same idea. If you at all found this post interesting, I’d give her video a watch.

Take care, and thanks for reading!

Rhyme in Bob Dylan’s “Queen Jane Approximately”

This week, I’d like to talk about one of my all-time favorite songs, Bob Dylan’s “Queen Jane Approximately,” and about how it uses different kinds of rhyme to reinforce its meaning.

First released on Dylan’s 1965 masterpiece album Highway 61 Revisited, “Queen Jane Approximately” seems to have a very straightforward rhyme scheme. It’s composed of five stanzas, each following an abaBB pattern, where the capital letters represent the refrain line (“Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?”). It’s a pattern only slightly removed from the classic ABXB pattern of the ballad, one of the fundamental forms in poetry and music.

However, the abaBB pattern only tells part of the story. The a rhymes all have stress placed on the second-to-last syllable, while the b rhymes have stress placed on the last syllable. For an example, let’s consider the first stanza:

When your mother sends back all your invitations
And your father to your sister he explains
That you’re tired of yourself and all of your creations
Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?
Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane? (lines 1-5)

As you can see, Dylan alternates between these two kinds of rhymes, poly- and mono-syllabic. But what good does knowing that do us when it comes to analyzing the song?

To see how the rhyme in “Queen Jane Approximately” reinforces the meaning, I’m going to consider two ways of conceptualizing these sorts of rhymes. The first way is to think about them is in terms of the masculine/feminine distinction.

Masculine rhyme, in traditional English-language poetics, refers to a rhyme in which the stress falls on the last syllable. All monosyllabic rhyme pairs (e.g., “dog” / “blog”) are examples of masculine rhyme, but so are polysyllabic rhyme pairs like “deny” / “reply“—effectively, the actual rhyme there is “-ny” / “-ply.”

Feminine rhyme, on the other hand, refers to a rhyme in which the last syllable is unstressed, but the second-to-last syllable is stressed. The classic example is “sharing” / “caring.” (Note that something like “sharing” / “sing” would not be a true rhyme, because the stress patterns don’t match up: the former ends unstressed, the latter stressed.)

Now, the masculine/feminine distinction plays into a restrictive view of gender norms, in which masculinity is coded as strong and femininity as weak, which is why the terms are (slowly) falling out of favor. Yet that wouldn’t necessarily prevent the distinction from providing a useful framework for approaching the song. Indeed, I can imagine a song that alternates between feminine and masculine rhymes, as Dylan’s does, in order to encode the text of the poem as a dialogue: the “female” voice speaks, then the “male,” and so forth.

Alas, such dialogue encoding doesn’t really apply to “Queen Jane Approximately.” To start with the obvious: the song is wholly in the voice of the speaker, with Queen Jane as the addressee. In fact, Queen Jane doesn’t even have much of a voice in the speaker’s description of her. She is spoken to (“…all the bandits that you turn your other cheek to / All lay down their bandanas and complain” [16-17]) and she is spoken of (“…your father to your sister he explains / That you’re tired of yourself and all of your creations” [2-3]). But she doesn’t speak much herself, and when she does try to communicate with others, she is ignored (“…your mother sends back all your invitations” [1]).

You might argue that, by systematically inserting feminine rhymes into the song, Dylan can still imply a conversation between Queen Jane and the speaker. But it’s hardly clear that either Queen Jane or the speaker even wants to be part of a conversation. After all, in the final stanza the speaker pitches himself as “somebody you don’t have to speak to” (23). If Queen Jane and speaker ever get together, it will take the form of a one-way lecture—in other words, the exact thing they’re doing now.

Granted, this line of inquiry has helped to shed some light on the song, but only in how proposed framework doesn’t fit the situation. So rather than using the masculine/ feminine distinction, I would suggest we approach the rhyme in “Queen Jane Approximately” with a rising/falling framework instead.

At first, this proposal seems like a mere relabeling of terms: all masculine rhymes are rising rhymes (the meter of a line “rises” when it ends with a stressed syllable), and all feminine rhymes are falling rhymes (the meter “falls” with an unstressed syllable). However, these different terms have different implications. No longer are we think of the rhymes in terms of gender, and therefore people. Rather, we can think of the rhymes in terms of “direction,” where rising is positive and falling is negative.

Note that each stanza of “Queen Jane Approximately” follows the same, two-part syntactic structure: “1) When [X], 2) won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?” The first part describes a series of conditions, and the second suggests a course of action in response to them. Let’s consider the both parts of that structure in turn.

When the speaker lists off the background conditions of Queen Jane’s life, it sounds thoroughly unpleasant. Given that she is always referred to as “Queen Jane,” we can safely say that she holds (or at least, believes that she holds) a high station in the world, yet she is being subjected to constant torment. This has all the makings of a declension story. When even “the flower ladies want back what they have lent you,” you have fallen from the heights (6).

As it happens, every stanza’s “when” clause contains both of its falling rhyme words. Queen Jane’s world is dominated by these weak, unstressed endings, which match her apparent fall. It is true that each “when” clause also contains a rising rhyme word, which could somewhat dampen that effect. But Dylan tends to pick words with negative connotations for that position (“vain,” “pain,” “complain”), so the semantics tend to drown out the sound.

But while Queen Jane, literally and aurally, spends most of each stanza in descent, the refrain offers the prospect of restoration. The line “Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?” not only proposes a solution, it also ends emphatically: “Queen Jane” easily scans as a spondee (two stressed syllables). The refrain not only ends with a rising meter, it seemingly compensates for her previous declines.

Viewed in this light, “Queen Jane Approximately” is not merely another classic Dylan sneer-song, à la “Like a Rolling Stone” or “Positively 4th Street.” It becomes comforting, albeit a bit patronizing. No matter how far one falls, it’s still possible to rise for a strong finish.