There are always links between the content of a song’s lyrics, and their revealed meaning to the music talk initiate, and the inside, hard-to-express significance that the poor fucker who wrote the song has almost no say over. I felt stupid, even though I turned out to be right.
His mocking was tinted with anger: I was overstepping the agreed borders of music chat, the borders of About. About a year later we had a late-night conversation about music and I said that listening to the Smiths had changed my life. What we weren’t discussing was what Bowie meant to us, I couldn’t have articulated that and neither could he. I remember at 13 going swimming with a friend and spending an hour treading water and trying to get straight what Ziggy Stardust was ‘about’ – we figured there was a secret track order that unlocked Ziggy’s real story, like a rock Da Vinci Code. About opens doors, for a bright or nerdy kid it’s part of the basic coin of meeting people, whether you’re talking music or books or anything. “If you want to argue that rock lyrics are poetry,” enthuses John Kutner in his 1000 UK Number One Hits, “What better place to start?” Almost anywhere, I would have said, but of course you could see why people might have received it like poetry – by the time it reached me, it had long settled into a role as a comfortable enigma, the sort of song whose key question is “What’s it about?” Later on I could identify why – history, as presented to me at twenty years remove, had it fingered as a moment when rock grew up, began to carry itself with maturity and weight, peeled away from pop. Its classical allusions, its stately pace, its piss-elegant lyricism all disgusted me.
I was never a punk but I could listen to this and knew what punk (approved version) was getting at (approved version). If you’re a reader who skips to the mark first you’ll have realised that I still don’t like it much, and you might want to check the bit in bold for the rationale.
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