Another piece of writing I really liked, the Possessed. In the introduction you endear to the great Russian novels, in part, because they are sturdy enough to hold up to critical analyses while also seeming familiar and true.

We are wrong to listen to pop as we might read Russian Lit. Pop should be discombobulating, vertiginous, and irrational. Pop should be Dionysian. If Apollo ever decides to actually listen to music, we’ll send him Grizzly Bear and keep VW to ourselves.

Given the cacophonous pop that usually charts, it’s easy to forget that lyrics–not just laser synth, backbeat, etc– can themselves contain the Dionysian music. That lyrics ought to be musical, this idea dates back a long time, but it was the former Ezra–that poet turned fascist– who made it a dictum. Preoccupied as he was with the force of the musical phrase, Mr. Pound never considered how forceful musical lyrics could be when set to…music! He needs Mr. Koenig bring his ideas–of the musical, of the lingual-visual, of image collision–into their rightful. Music in lyrics, lyrics in Music!

Recalling an article written about Mr. Pound, it’s quite amusing to think that the author, one T.S.Elliot, were he alive, could be equally defending the lyrics and metric of either Ezra.

“At first the whole thing may seem to be mere madness and
rhetoric, a vain exhibition of force and passion without
beauty. But, as we read on, these curious metres of his seem
to have a law and order of their own…”
[...]
“but no word is ever chosen merely for the tinkle; each has always its part in producing an impression which is produced always through language.”
[...]

“Art is a departure from fixed positions; felicitous departure from a norm.”

For my part, I’m glad we have Ezra K. So cute, and not soon a fascist.

For me, the primal honest-pretension vs. faux-simplicity battle in pop lyric is Lorenz Hart vs. Oscar Hammerstein III — Richard Rodgers’s defection seems as poignant as the death of that pretentious Cockney Keats, way more poignant than John leaving Paul for Yoko. But like most pop culture battles, it was straightforwardly inherited from folk culture battles.