Bang Goes The Scansion

This is a post about song-writing, and the Divine Comedy (Hannon, not Dante). It's been simmering since the latest album was released in May, and has come to the boil as I work my way through the book Finishing The Hat - specifically the sections commenting on the work of other (dead) lyricists, which I'm shamelessly going to imitate, and so highlight a series of distinct songwriters' sins. I should emphasise that I'm not setting myself up as being a 'better' lyricist (whatever that means) than he; from the point of view of a writing blog it makes sense to learn from those one admires, both from their strengths and from their shortcomings.

Hannon's work has got me through many a dull work day and will continue to do so. I love the lush orchestral sound lent by Jobi Talbot, sitting beautifully with Hannon's consitently inventive and often touching lyrics. However much I enjoy his work, I contend that he is sloppy and technically-limited (or -disinterested) as a lyricist.

By technique I mean the craft of choosing words to fit into the rhyming and rhythmical structure of the song, done in such a way as to match natural speech patterns (without putting the emPHAsis on THE wrong sylLAble), and not intruding on what the song is saying. To take extreme examples, contrast Cole Porter's You're The Top - an ostentatious display of technical brilliance - with Alicia Keys's Empire State of Mind - a study in broken scansion (and an 'of' that has no right to exist).

Bang Goes The Knighthood is, to my ears, a very irritating album. The scansion is consistently very poor; by the time we reach the title song it is already grating on my nerves, and I'm afraid I cannot truly enjoy the album because of it. However, I don't intend to pick it apart - though one easily can - save to mention that the carelessness of its author can be summarised in two words "Frank LamPARD".

No, it's much more interesting to take several of my favourite songs, and pick them apart instead. All of his work has scansion problems, but Bang was the point where it went from a tolerable imperfection to a real annoyance. You may think me pedantic for this, but my whole point is that otherwise excellent songs don't hold up to close scrutiny.

We'll kick off with my favourite: Our Mutual Friend. It tells a rich and interesting story, at times touching, and has a tension running through it, paying off at the last line. This is a very strong and effective structure. Look a little closer, though, and cracks appear. Read the first couple of lines as though you were speaking them:

No matter how I try

I just can't get her out of my mind.

You probably put the emphasis on ma-, how, try, can't, out, mind. Hannon's setting emphasises ma-, try, just, get, out, my. The effect is to make the lyric sound forced and unnatural. Furthermore, if I were reading it aloud, the 'peak' of the phrase would be "can't", but the setting lands it on "my". Contrast with:

Then privately we danced

But couldn't seem to keep our balance.

Here the lyric sounds natural, because the ebb and flow of the lyric and melody match that of how it would be spoken. The song, sadly, is littered with other examples of the same problem. The song tells a story, but there are holes in that, too. "We all went back to his place" is followed by the (lovely) sequence of the couple being alone, but it's never explained where everyone else went. Credibility is stretched by the girlfriend having presumably been so drunk as to fall unconscious, but not so hung-over to resist shagging someone else first thing in the morning; it's told through his eyes, so I suppose he could have misinterpreted her. He also doesn't seem to blame her for the incident.

On to Lady Of A Certain Age. This is a poignant vignette of a whole life, again with a last-line pay-off, this time from a refrain. I'll leave the scansion problems as 'an exercise for the reader' as I don't want to repeat myself, but there are a couple of other comments to make:

You chased the sun around the Cote D'Azure

Until the light of youth became obscure.

And left you all alone and in the shade

An English lady of a certain age.

The second of these lines is a weak lyric; it sounds like it's quoting a cliche, but it isn't. Anyway, light doesn't become obscure, it is obscured - the line exists only because it rhymes with D'Azure. Did the light of youth leave her all alone? Sloppy use of language. Shade/age is a pretty weak rhyme, at that, especially for the main idea of the song.

The biggest sin, at least in the recording on Spotify, comes in the payoff. The whole song is in the second person, as though sung to the subject. The "nice young man" who buys drinks is referred to as "he" in verses one and two, but in the otherwise fine climactic payoff, the subject abruptly switches to:

And you'd say "No, you couldn't be"

This is probably a slip of the tongue, but whatever the reason it's unforgivable.

Now Jiggery Pokery, from the cricket-themed album Duckworth-Lewis Method. Very much in the tradition of English light comic songs, it tells the story of the so-called ball of the century bowled by Shane Warne to Mike Gatting. I once attempted an inebriated rendition of this after a dinner-party, in full cricket gear (plus pillow up the shirt), to a non-cricket-literate audience, with predictable consequences. It's a fun, and funny, song about a subject dear to me. Dubious scansion and rhyme (Trafford/Athers - really?) aside, there are still problems. First, the language doesn't ring true:

But such was its rotation that it swerved out to the right.

Nobody ever describes cricket deliveries in terms of right and left, it is invariably in terms of the batsman's off or leg/on side. At any rate, from Gatting's point of view (as is the entire song), it swerved left...

Second is a structural problem. As with the previous examples, we have a last-line payoff. Anyone familiar with the incident knows it was Shane Warne's big moment, and mention of him is (rightly) saved for the climax:

I might as well have been holding a cob of corn.

Jiggery Pokery, who was this nobody making me look so forlorn?

I hate Shane Warne!

Yet the equivalent parts of the preceding verses are all -oon rhymes:

I might as well have been holding a contrabassoon.

Jiggery Pokery, who was this nobody making me look a buffoon?

Like a blithering old buffoon.

I might as well have been holding a child's balloon.

Jiggery Pokery, who was this nobody making me look a bufoon?

Like an accident-prone baboon.

It would have been far more effective to have them all be -orn rhymes, building tension to the Warne payoff. I had a stab at this, within the existing structure, and couldn't get anything which was better than OK and not flawed in some other way. Within this structure there aren't many useful rhymes, and I suspect Hannon tried this before settling as he did. Personally, I'd have restructured once I realised I couldn't do -orn effectively - maybe to make room for something like "wish I had never been born"; songwriting is like a sudoku puzzle with a blank page, where you have to figure out the grid shape yourself, and you have between 0 and 100,000 possible entries for each box. Blind alleys are inevitable, and I argue that this is one.

Worth mentioning is also Don't Look Down, which has the interesting lyric:

The wind that’s blown us dies a quick and painless death

The air gets clammy and we hold each other’s breath

"We hold each other's breath" is a gloriously evocative and economical lyric, and a real favourite of mine. Pity then that "the air gets clammy" is little more than padding, and 'quick and painless death' is a cliche padding out the previous line. A good example of a great payoff with a poor setup. Also "disgraceful or distasteful or distilled" is an admirably inventive bit of alliteration.

I think that's more than enough! To sum up, I'll continue to listen to, admire, and enjoy the Divine Comedy, and I look forward to his/their next offering, warts and all.

Always to thine own self be true

Not to fools like me

Who change their minds

For the sake of rhyming schemes.

Bletchley Park - a disappointment wrapped in Enigma.

We visited Bletchley Park yesterday. At the risk of diluting the purpose of this blog further than its already-homeopathic levels, here are a few thoughts.

My interest in BP, as they style themselves, was first piqued by the film Enigma, and from there to the book on which it was based (Robert Harris is now among my favourite authors). The Enigma code and its solution fascinated me, and its wider strategic context and influence equally so. I spent seven years at university studying maths of various kinds, and am a professional software engineer, so it is perhaps hardly surprising that I had invested time in understanding the rudiments of Enigma and the admirable cracking of it. I felt I was more clued-up than most BP visitors, but was hopeful of having some gaps in my understanding filled in.

Enigma is clearly BP's prime asset as an attraction. How then did they treat it? Pretty badly, to be frank. Little fragments of the story of its significance were dotted around the museum building almost at random, and mostly repeated each other. The main display pedestal for an original machine was empty. Little attempt was made to explain what it was and how the machine worked. About five separate places were the 'menus' for the 'bombes' (basically this is a script produced by a human cryptographer to feed to their proto-computers to crack that day's Enigma settings) explained. None of these explanations was, to my eye, comprehensible or interesting to an intelligent layman. I'm certain I didn't understand everything they were trying to say, and I was making a real effort - without wishing to sound arrogant, if I didn't, who would? We saw a reconstructed bombe, with only vague explanation as to how it actually helped to crack codes. Given the meagre summit of my education on which I now stand, this should have been an exhilarating view, but alas it was no more exciting than a big box with wires dangling out. I would dearly have loved to understand what this magnificent creation did, how, and why. Alas, I must rely on wikipedia.

On a broader level, BP is as much a museum to Enigma as it is to how museums were in the 1970s. Dated, dilapidated, disjointed, disorganised, disinteresting. I realise they are having funding problems, but that doesn't explain why what they already have is so carelessly and inadequately written. I've already mentioned repetition, but in one section we noticed two of their different printed text boards having exactly the same paragraphs of text, with different pictures. They were right next to each other. This is plainly sloppy and amateurish, however small the budget. There was a passage thrown at random about the war with Japan, with a very oblique reference to their having a nuclear weapons program, which was not expanded on or referred to at all. This would have been fascinating! In the middle of a floor about mostly cryptography and amateur radio listening stations (not a subject I understand in depth, or have any desire to), was a large collection of WW2 toys slapped in at random. After a while we gave up worrying whether we'd taken a wrong turn and missed the intended flow, because it was apparent that that was no such thing.

The museum shut promptly at 4pm, which we sadly weren't aware of, so we missed Hut 8. This is where the events in the film/book centre around - the battle of the Atlantic - and I was hoping they would give us some much-needed wider context, and most importantly a good story about Enigma. I doubt we'll bother to go back and fill in this gap. Our tour of the museum of computers was likewise curtailed. We saw the first genuine computer, with a total absence of explanation about how it worked, what it did, and what the lighted displays on it meant. I did enjoy their working BBC Micro - partly watching a 10-year old girl have no idea what to do with a command prompt, and partly by the nostalgia of entering the classic 10 PRINT "Karen smells "; 20 GOTO 10 program. Somehow I remembered that the semi-colon drops the carriage-return from the output - don't ask me why.

Credit where it is due, the BP story is an important one and deserves to be told. There is a lot of voluteerism happening there, and credit to them for giving up their time to this worthy cause. Any major building work would destroy the character of the war-time 'huts', and would be to its detriment. These comments on the museum should in no way detract from the awe and admiration I have for those who worked here during the war, and their unquestionably glorious achievements.

Despite my continued enthusiasm in the subject matter, on the whole my feelings are those of disappointment. To tie this back into my writing blog, my view that in any creation for an audience you must at once see the work from their point of view, and manipulate what you present to them so they go through the experience you want them to. Fail to do that and you are giving them what you want to give them instead of what you want them to have - and BP is proof of how big that gap is.

Red Dwarf - Back to Earth pts II & III

Well, it tied together two of the stronger story ideas which the series/books have ever generated, threw in a scene of genuine emotional clout, and ended on a hopeful note. What could possibly go wrong? Sadly, the whole was far less than the sum of its parts, and the blame lies squarely on some lamentable writing decisions.

I'm trying hard to make these posts a balanced and well-reasoned dissection of new episodes of a much-loved show. That said, the best thing I can honestly say about the return to Earth is that it now occupies pride of place in my Jar Jar Binks Archive of Things I Pretend Never Happened. A plot line in which characters interact with their audience and their creator is a potentially interesting one, but absolutely must never be used with already-established characters, lest the magic of those characters be irretrievably destroyed. The cast and crew speak proudly of their four-walled TV sets, but their writer systematically demolished the fourth wall by having his characters abruptly aware of their own fictional existence. Self-parody is joined by recursive self-reference, fanwank in-jokes, and cheap topical gags, and the result is jarring in the extreme. Even if this were a good idea, and I cannot emphasise enough that it wasn't, the execution is poor - the plot and the pacing grind to a standstill, and the use of characters is again weak. It isn't even funny.

The golden rule of writing is "Always be true to your characters". Have them behave realistically, and within their own personality. Rimmer commits a cold-blooded murder, and nobody even reacts to it. Lister, in the space of two minutes, is in fear of his imminent death, experiences his own death, kills his creator, and yet can laugh hysterically as he repeatedly hurts Rimmer's nadgers. This would only be remotely credible if Lister were a psychopath; he isn't, and it isn't. Sorry, this is crap writing. These aren't human beings, they are the playthings of the author. Ms Hologram, having served her purpose, is unceremoniously dumped into the Darth Maul Dustbin of Undeveloped Utility Characters. She could have done so much more.

The dystopian Blade Runner angle worked really well, once you accepted the abrupt jump there from Coronation Street, and that we were previously in "real life" (no huge monoliths in Westminster last time I checked). It looked brilliant. So much more could have been done with this idea - I wish the entire Earth episode had been set there. At it was, it was an incongruous fantasy rampage shoehorned into, and with no connection to, what had been done previously. An opportunity wasted.

The scene in which the crew are in Carbug (fabulous prop, but better off in a Top Gear stunt) and "land" it as though a spaceship was witty, original, and funny. A moment's thought, however, and we notice Lister's comment about his hometown having lots of stolen cars, and Rimmer being a classic car expert (previous episode) - it's a pedantic point, but surely this undermines their necessary unfamiliarity? A more careful author would have cut out these in favour of keeping the (worthy) landing scene, to no other cost to the script.

Having endured the embarrassing tour of modern-day Britain, we are rewarded with a noticeable recovery in the end section. Lister is faced with the decision to leave his personal utopia (rework of the book version of Better Than Life) knowing that it is a fantasy. This is a really strong idea. Craig Charles shows us how much he has developed as an actor, and delivers a scene of genuine poignancy. Bravo. The Earth plot is then tied up as a fantasy (explicit Back To Reality rework) - OK, so it's a bit holey in that the others weren't experiencing their own utopia (in BTR they were all respectively in plausible hells), but we can forgive that. We have the clunkily-set-up but otherwise strong idea of Lister chasing Kochanski in hope of a reunion, leading us forward into another (?) series. Hope for them, hope for us.

Watching the Making Of episode was a revelation. There are some seriously clever technical things going on behind the scenes, and credit is due for them. The production, on the whole, was very impressive, particularly given the practical constraints they must have. There were several good ideas in the writing which deserved much more than they got; there were a few very bad ideas which got far more than they deserved. There is some genuine merit in the writing - let this not be lost sight of - but it was too clouded by its rank failings for the result to be a success, and the overall sense is one of opportunities missed. Red Dwarf has never been perfect, but in its pomp the shortcomings were papered over by the sheer joy of its inventivess, wit, and panache. Not so here.

I hope there is a further series, and I hope that it is an outstanding success. I cannot, however, look forward to it. Forgive the repetition (this is a writing blog after all!), but I hope it's better-written than Back To Earth. I can only wonder what Rob Grant (those in the know will understand the schism far better than I ever will) thinks of what his co-creation has become in his absence. Were it me, I would be upset.

Update

Just a brief update on the situation of this hugely unpopular blog. I intend to discontinue posting new material on Ages of Man (or whatever it eventually gets called) as I believe the project is viable and do not want to have any more material in the public domain. I will continue using this blog to post about the process of writing itself. I will also use it for writing exercises - I have acquired books on good writing technique, and while I'm delighted that there were a number of chapters which taught me nothing new, there are areas which would benefit from working through given exercises, which I will do in due course. I intend to work on a detailed plot for the novel next.

I've also been pretty busy with Real Life lately and haven't had any time to write, but this will hopefully cease to be the case soon.

Bad writing

Part of being a good author is not being a bad author. Tautologous though this may sound, I think there is a distinction. There are competent but uninspired authors, and there are inspired but flawed authors (some of whom sell extremely well!). Good writing needs both creativity and technical ability, and a lot of that technique is the avoidance of flaws. Some things that I try actively to avoid, and also those that make others' writing at best tiresome and at worse unreadable, as follows:

• Character inconsistency. People acting 'out of character' and doing/saying things which that character would not do/say is the most cardinal of sins. At all times must every character stay within their own bounds (development aside), and at all times must they be believable as people.
• One-dimensional characters. Finding the balance between this and the above is tricky, but shallow characters who have a very limited range of predictable behaviour can be very tedious.
• Continuity errors, anachronisms etc.
• Cliche. Not all university professors wear tweed jackets with leather patches, not all secretaries chew gum incessantly and speak in a nasal Jewish-American accent, not all villains cackle maniacally and rant about power, but lazy writers don't take the trouble to create characters outside these stereotypes. Also, adding miscellaneous physical impairments, bleeding eyes and so forth, does not add depth to a character.
  
• Focus on the world, not the people. This is especially a problem in (bad) sci-fi/fantasy, where one feels that the author has thought a lot about all the cool things in the world they have created, and the people/lifeforms running around inside it are merely there to wield the Sword of Deity Slaying or fly the VPL-0134 Super Starfighter of Doom. Sure, fantastic scenarios can provide very interesting backdrops for good stories, but they should not be the story itself. People are interesting, made-up things aren't.
• Deus Ex Machina. All the tension built up through the plot is diffused in one lazy magic ending.
• Pace. Things that are not interesting but are necessary take far too long to exposit, or things that are interesting are not dwelled on enough.
• Self-parody. Usually the sign of a long-running series running out of steam, this is a sure-fire sign of a shortage of ideas.