The sport of writing a song
* I am re-posting this old post due to change of email account. *
...The
sport of writing a song, a tightly organized genre, is not to smuggle
in specifically subversive subtext when the censors aren’t looking but
to make the subversive emotions universal enough not to need a subtext.
...'All art aspires to the condition of music', Walter Pater wrote.
All music dreams of becoming another kind of music. Art songs dream of becoming pop songs and pop songs dream of becoming folk songs, too familiar to need an author. We hear Cole Porter now without knowing that it’s Porter we’re hearing. He sublimated his suffering into his songs, until the songs are all we have, thereby achieving every artist’s dream, to cease to be a suffering self and become just one of those things we share.
All music dreams of becoming another kind of music. Art songs dream of becoming pop songs and pop songs dream of becoming folk songs, too familiar to need an author. We hear Cole Porter now without knowing that it’s Porter we’re hearing. He sublimated his suffering into his songs, until the songs are all we have, thereby achieving every artist’s dream, to cease to be a suffering self and become just one of those things we share.
- Adam Gopnik, from his New Yorker article on Cole Porter
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