Bas bleu

Pop songs are deeply monological. That feature only asserts itself, however, when one is confronted with songs that take up a dialogue, for example Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know.” The song begins with a moody,sparse, yet playful instrumental section seemingly taken from the Tom Waits songbook. It moves from there to a terse recounting of nostalgia, resentment,and bitterness regarding a past relationship. Good stuff! It reminds me that look forward to someday being in another relationship I’m unhappy in. The song continues in a minimalist vein, creating a kind of empty sonic space in which the tortured words of the singer resonate. Then some weird shit happens.Someone else starts singing and what she’s singing offers a counterpoint to the earlier claims. It’s jarring because a dialogue is so unusual in pop music. I’m sure there are more examples but I can only think of two off the top of my head: The Postal Service’s “Nothing’s Better” and The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me Baby.” These songs are very different from traditional duets, which despite the presence of two voices only offer one narrative. Compare Gotye’s song to Matt Nathenson and Sugarland’s “Run,” another song currently on rotation on commercial radio. The two voices in the second song are working together to explain one emotion. This isn’t a dialogue; it’s a soliloquy in two voices. So why are pop songs primarily monological? Probably for the same reason that they succeed in ways that novels can’t: music can convey emotion in a much more immediate way than novels and what it loses in its social vision it gains in the instant and deeply personal contact it can make with listeners. We like monological music because we want to be alone with songs and we want them to be alone with us.