Music: Word Germs

Into Tin Pan Alley’s Broadway capitol, the Brill Building, there passes each day a hustling parade of tunesmiths and music agents, each hopeful that he carries the answer to a song publisher’s prayer. “This number is the greatest,” one says, or “I gotta song here, it’ll fracture ’em.” The publishers buy such songs in the hundreds each year, and record-company presses compound the fractures by turning them out with the regularity of automatic cooky cutters. The multitude of dins is largely devoted, of course, to love, and mostly in songs that court, exhort or contort.

One man deeply saddened by this phenomenon is University of Chicago Semanticist S. I. (for Samuel Ichiyé) Hayakawa. A small, vigorous Japanese-Canadian of 47, Vancouver-born Dr. Hayakawa is editor of the quarterly, ETC.: A Review of General Semantics, writes books and magazine pieces, and is a devoted jazz fan. Word Man Hayakawa finds the lyrics of most popular songs unspeakably bad. Says he: “The words of true jazz songs, especially the Negro blues, tend to be highly realistic and unsentimental in their statements about life. The words of popular songs . . . pretty much the product of white songwriters for white audiences, are full of wishful thinking, dreamy and ineffectual nostalgia, unrealistic fantasy, self-pity and sentimental cliches masquerading as emotion.”

For a summer conference on general semantics at St. Louis, Hayakawa organized his antipathy to pop lyrics into a thesis based on what a fellow semanticist has labeled “the IFD disease.” IFD, explained Hayakawa, is a “triple-threat semantic disorder” of Idealization (the making of impossibly ideal demands on life), which leads to Frustration (when Idealization’s demands are not met), which in turn leads to Demoralization, Tin Pan Alley, says Hayakawa, breeds IFD germs as Jersey swamps breed mosquitoes. “First, there is an enormous amount of idealization, the creation of a wishful dream girl or dream boy, the fleshly counterpart of which never existed on earth:

Some day he’ll come along, the man I love

And he’ll be big and strong, the man I love . . .

“Then, of course, one meets a young person of the other sex, and a tremendous amount of projection begins:

I took one look at you, that’s all I meant to do,

And then my heart stood still . . .

You were meant for me, I was meant for you . . .

“Love is depicted in most white popular songs as … magic. There is never an indication . . . that, having found the dream girl or dream man, one’s problems are just beginning. Rather . . . having found one’s ideal, all problems are forever solved:

We’ll have a blue room, a new room, for two room,

Where every day’s a holiday because you’re married to me . . .”

The housing problem is promptly and magically solved:

A turn to the right, a little white light Will lead you to my blue heaven . . .

“The unrealistic expectations” created by the idealization bugs then bring on “disappointment, disenchantment, frustration, and, most importantly, self-pity.” Hence:

My heart is aching, my heart is breaking . , .

Next, says Hayakawa. comes the demoralization or despair:

I’ll never laugh again, what good would it do?

For tears would fill my eyes, my heart would realize . . .

“And what is the final step?” Says he: “When the world of reality becomes unmanageable, a common practice is to retreat into a symbolic dream world . . . The psychiatric profession classifies this retreat as schizophrenia:

I’m goin’ to buy a paper doll that I can call my own,

A doll that other fellows cannot steal . . .”

There is probably little hope for improvement, the current crop of songs being as germ-laden with IFD as ever. But for the man who wants to listen to nonclassical music without danger of infection, Hayakawa recommends Negro blues. They have shortcomings, says he, but always as a recurrent theme Negro blues assert “the will to live.”