Here's a nice Saturday night diary for you: let's talk lyrics. Lyrics from ... high school!!!
Real poets ooze contempt
like a bead of oily dressing
from a partly punctured packet
found wedged into the baseboard
behind the flowered couch
since 1992, on moving day
for song and rap lyrics as a form of self-expression, but for many people they're as close as they ever get to poetry while they're growing up.
And some of them are pretty good. Then again, who am I to judge? I am not a poet, as the italicized section above, coughed out just for this diary, should make clear.
Since we've reached "fun time" for the week's cycle of diaries, I pose a silly, frivolous challenge to you. What are some of the lyrics you most enjoyed while you were in high school (or no later than college freshman year) that you can still bear to admit? Try to come up with something unusual and less well-known. We get Beatles and Dylan and Nirvana and R.E.M. and all that all the time. Introduce to us something we don't know.
Now, you may ask: even though this is clearly a diary about high school musical tastes, can't I give you some lyrics that I've learned since then? Yes you can -- as if I could stop you. But then you're not playing the game by the rules, you rebel, you. That should belong to a different diary, maybe on a different Saturday night.
I thought that this song, "From Me to You" (decidedly not the Beatles' song), from Janis Ian's 1975 Between the Lines (an album mostly known for its unfortunately maligned tale of smart teenage girl high school woe "At Seventeen" -- which was the first song ever performed on Saturday Night Live, so suck on that!), was culturally way ahead of its time. I think that the years have borne that out. (Or maybe it's just that every song you hear until you're 15 gets so deeply embedded into your memory that you either make peace with it or claw out your hippocampus.) So return with me to my middle-adolescence. Here, the Janis That Lived wants to whack you over the head with some advice that Petula Clark never imagined, whether you're an office worker or ... the President-elect.
If you prefer to listen as you read, through the magic of what looks like probable "we'll just look the other way because maybe this video will help us sell our back list" copyright infringement, you can listen to someone's "I'm-going-to-put-it-up-as-the-soundtrack-to-an-out-of-focus-picture-of-the-album-cover" YouTube video here.
I'm leaving by night
I'm leaving alone
I'm leaving it lie
When you waken I'll be gone
I would not beg for me
As I would not beg for you
Though I'd like to be the one
To see you through
Every step you have taken
Disappears with the tide
You're torn up and shaken
With changing your mind
You haven't got the grace
To say you'll finally decide
And you haven't got the strength
To stay and fight
Those people who surround you
Only want to see you weak enough to crawl
They'll lie for you decide for you
And buy up all your rights and all your wrongs
And they'll try to stop your singing
In the middle of your song
For they do not want you free
And they do not make you strong
But only drag you down
In the hole they're coming from
They say you are foolish in wanting the sun
Say you are selfish in learning to run
They'll tell you that the darkness
Is a blessing in disguise
For you'll never have to notice
If you're sighted or you're blind
And they'll do their best
To keep you from the light
You're more than beginning
You're learning to fly
You feel like you're falling
But it passes in time
I hate to see a friend
Go down in flames without a song
So I'm waiting by the doorway
But I will not linger long
OK, what have you got to offer? Anything interesting?