Read The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature for Free Online Page A

Porter:
    Oh by Jove and by Jehovah, you have set my heart aflame,
(And to you, you Casanova, my reactions are the same.)
I would sing thee tender verses but the flair, alas, I lack.
(Oh go on, try to versify and I’ll versify back.)
     
    Notice in the first two lines the long o sound that is repeated in Jove, JeHOvah and CasaNOva, and the near rhyme of heart and are near the end of those two lines. Another thing Porter is famous for is invoking common, everyday expressions in playful ways. We are familiar with the phrase “alas and alack,” which the composer plays with when he writes, in the third line, “alas, I lack.” All this while maintaining the end-of-the-line rhymes we’ve come to expect in contemporary song: aflame/same and lack/back.
    Or consider these lines, from “Begin the Beguine,” where the song title itself is a visual and auditory wordplay:
    To live it again is past all endeavor,
Except when that tune clutches my heart,
And there we are, swearing to love forever,
And promising never, never to part.
     
    Notice in the third line the internal rhyme in there and swear. The first and third lines rhyme, as they ought to, ending with endeavor and forever. But Porter adds an additional rhyme to these in the middle of the fourth line with the repetition of never. I sure wish I could write like that! (I’d lure bright fish, I’d swish as I sat, my heart would go pitter pat, if only I could dish out fine lines such as that!)
    Of course some people don’t care about this sort of wordplay as much as they do about the content; they may study lyrics intently, looking for wisdom, sage advice, just as many of us did in the sixties. Rock stars were our poets; we felt that they had hard-won life lessons to pass on to the rest of us.
    Others learn the lyrics syllable-by-syllable as a means of recalling the music, but don’t pay much attention to the lyrical content itself. I had a girlfriend who was born and raised in Belgium, and we spent many wonderful vacations visiting her family and friends in her hometown Mons ( Bergen in Flemish), where she went to university at the Faculté de Polytechnique there. Every one of her friends knew the Eagles’ song “Hotel California” syllable-for-syllable, but most of them didn’t speak a word of English. They had no idea what they were saying when they sang “warm smell of co-li-tas/rising up through the air/up ahead in the distance/I saw a shim-mer-ing light.” Not knowing English, they didn’t know where the beginnings and endings of words were. Just as my little sister used to think that “The Star-Spangled Banner” spoke of a particular kind of lamp called a donzerlee light (for “dawn’s early light”), my Belgian friends thought there must be a type of lamp called a “murring light” (from shim-mer-ing light). And what was this thing called a “prizzonerzeer” that all of us are (“we are all just prisoners here . . .”)? They were even more curious to know what the song meant, and I had to confess that as much as I loved the song—I had even learned the guitar solo note-for-note to impress fellow musicians—I didn’t have the slightest idea what it was about. The emotional impact of the line “you can check out anytime you like/but you can never leave” was not diminished at all by the fact I didn’t know what Don Henley was trying to say.
    This is the power of the song lyric—the mutually supporting forces that bind rhythm, melody, harmony, timbre, lyrics, and meaning in a song allow some of the elements to fill in for others when there is ambiguity, contradiction, or outright opacity, as is the case with “Hotel California.” That the literal meaning is not apparent in that song—or for that matter, in almost any song by Steely Dan, the kings of cryptic lyrics—doesn’t reduce the power of the song. Each song’s elements add up to an artistic result. The whole invokes meaning but does not constrain it. In fact, this is one of the