Exploring The Nuances of Gladwell’s Assertions That Country is Better at Being Sad than Rock ‘n Roll
In Season 2 of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History, “The King of Tears” episode explores the difference between Rock ‘n Roll and Country music (the insights on birthplace worthy of a listen alone) particularly, why Country music is more effective at sad songs than Rock ‘n Roll
Gladwell uses Rolling Stone’s Top 50 Best Songs of All-Time as a stand-in for all Rock, concluding that,
In all those 50 songs, nobody dies after a long illness, no marriage disintegrates, nobody’s killed on a battlefield, no mother grieves for a son. The closest that any song in Rolling Stone’s list comes to being truly sad is Smokey Robinson’s, “Tracks of My Tears”, which is, first of all, number fifty, so they put the sad song at the bottom of the list. And secondly, it’s about a guy at a party. In their moments of greatest travail the protagonists of Rock ‘n Roll’s sad songs still get to go parties.
As someone who built their identity on many things – one of them being his dislike of Country music – I have to admit that my fiancee was successful in opening my mind to Country music, largely on the strength of the genre’s ballads.
Using George Strait’s “He Stopped Loving Her Today” as the standard bearer for Country sadness (and a particularly heartbreaking funeral performance) by the end of “The King of Tears” Malcolm concludes that country music is so sad, because it’s so specific.
Beauty and authenticity can create a mood, they set the stage, but I think the thing that pushes us over the top into tears is details. We cry when melancholy collides with specificity. And specificity is not something every genre does well.
Absolutely, details are important to us. We are a story-telling animal and what is a story but details put in useful order.
After talking about how sad “He Stopped Loving Her Today” is, Gladwell goes on to pick apart the Rolling Stones’ (this time, the band) song “Wild Horses”, explicitly, for how not-sad it is.
That was, for my teenage self, a step too far.
Somewhere, from deep inside, a sudden cry, “I’m talking about drawing a line in the sand, across this line YOU DO NOT-” …cross.
As a socially anxious high schooler, I fell in love with music like it had all of life’s answers. “Wild Horses” was the kind of heartaching ballad I could build a world within, around. The south side of Milwaukee, its yeast and lake breezes, its yellow lights and red cigarette tips: mixtapes and long cruises. It was enough to lose yourself in.
And while the vagueness of the lyrics in “Wild Horses” is part of what allows such vivid world-building, I want to take a step back for a moment, to address a larger concern about music criticism.
Not The Lyrics
Too much music criticism is too literary.
Really smart people write really smart things about really important music which I often enjoy reading. Good criticism (of good music) expands the experience of listening.
But too often, writing about music focuses on the words of the music, biasing itself to the medium of the critic: the type of “what does it all mean” analysis that sent Dylan running to electricity and all-black fits with matching sunnies.
Where academic circles can overly focus on lyrics, the Album Review From A Major Publication can veer even further off course.
I’ll never forget Pitchfork’s scathing review of Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros first album (“home, take me home, home is when I’m alone with you”) which was subtitled, “dude from Ima Robot reemerges as a folk-pop singer, winning over satellite radio and late-night TV producers for some reason.” and goes on to tell us more about some band called Ima Robot and why Edward Sharpe’s lead singer is, basically, a phony.
Yes, I am aware that the focus on the backstory is the intention: to criticize the art most severely by not engaging with it.
But it’s cynical and cynicism is not only destructive, it’s, possibly worse, boring.
Now, to be fair, Malcolm Gladwell said “what pushes us over the edge” are the details. What he does not say, what too often goes unsaid in music criticism, is that he talking about the details of the lyrics.
The theory that the lyrics of Country music make it more sad than Rock ‘n Roll overlooks the fact that one must be on the Country music covered wagon to be thrown over the edge by the lyrics of Country music.
“He Stopped Loving Her Today” never convinces me to come aboard. To me, it’s the musical equivalent of a made-for-TV movie. (Like, from the 80s, not now when TV is amazing).
“Wild Horses”, on the other hand, gets me in the gut everytime.
How Wild Horses Gets Me On Board, or, Well Talk About The Fucking Music Then.
The Chords
“Wild Horses” sways between the major and minor: we’re lifted as the chords step up and we’re felled when they drop down, we’re released when the progression resolves. The chords of “Wild Horses”, and particularly their order, are a sound foundation on which to build melancholy. But it takes something more than chords to break your heart.
The Instruments and How They’re Played
There are 3 guitar parts on “Wild Horses”. They work together with staggering efficacy.
The acoustic and the 12 string guitar drive the song forward, while the electric guitar is used to pierce and accentuate: the simple chord strums on the electric build at the beginning of each verse, before it breaks off to create its own heartaching licks beneath the vocal melodies. Keith Richards is soloing almost the entire time: a time-honored Blues tradition (remember: everything is the blues) later embodied by Santana.
Melted into the Pollock-like flicks of electrified guitar strings is a tack piano plinking out its own melodies before backing up the main chord changes where they so effectively pull, or play, on your heart strings.
So you have three melodies: vocal, electric guitar, tack piano, all moving in and out of each other, all weaving around the foundational chord progressions.
There’s so much happening in “Wild Horses”, it tends to wash over the listener. Every melody is “never on schedule but always on time”: leaning back on the beat but never out of sync with it, the multiple instruments shoving themselves forward before fading away again, lulling us into hypnosis, allowing Jagger’s cracking vibrato to punch us in our suddenly defenseless heart.
Mick’s Voice
Mick Jagger’s restrained, quivering vocal. Not just what he’s saying, how he’s saying it.
While the music of “Wild Horses” produces a suggestive state in its listeners, Mick’s voice pierces us, ripping into the ears. Where the electric guitar does its best impression of a slide guitar, staying on the soft side of Richard’s palette, Mick’s vocals are a sharp, whiskey tenor knife.
I’m a fan of the shoe-gaze band The Sundays, but listening to their version of “Wild Horses” is probably a better argument than anything written on the page about a song can make.
Notice how:
- The Sundays version lacks the layered instrumentation.
- The guitar strumming seems to be right on the metronome, so you don’t get that push forward/pull away effect as heard on the original.
- No pianissimo. Most of the guitar strumming is at the same volume, creating a stagnant foreground. Overall, this version is much less dynamic.
- And its vocals, while still pretty, aren’t offset by anything. Chef’s talk about balance: salt balancing sweet, crunch balancing soft. In the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses” you have the sharpness of Jagger’s voice offset by the softness of music behind it, a musical softness that itself is a balance of soft strumming acoustics, smooth-but-stabby electric guitar, and a stab-and-more-stabby tack piano. In The Sundays version you have soft, washed out vocals on top of soft, washed out guitars. The result is two songs with the exact same lyrics that vary greatly in how much they make you want to curl into a ball, dive into the cookie dough, and watch the final episode of The Office for the 12th time.
This is all to say, the lyrics of “Wild Horses” don’t need to spell out a story in easy-to-read, sequential order because the sadness of the music being played, the context it creates, makes a world where we can float in and out of the story being told, and our own.
Lyrics: How The Vague Sets Up The Specific
When I first heard Dawes “Western Skyline” I thought I had found a band to hang my sad hat on for years to come. It would turn out that “Western Skyline” would be the peak of my experience with the band.
Dawes’ “Western Skyline” borders California Rock and Alt-Country, making it emblematic of the conversation between the genres.
It is a one-two punch, a set up and knock out, of broad truths and specific narratives.
Sung to a 3rd party named “Lou”, a character who may or may not be a local bartender, “Western Skyline” outlines with details, paints painful color with broader truths.
What we know about the specifics in “Western Skyline”
- Man meets woman in California
- Man follows woman to Alabama
- Woman’s father preaches on Sunday
- Man and woman fall apart
And yet, the song breaks your heart perfectly in two.
Keeping in mind that “Western Skyline” would not be sad without its chords, tempo, and melody, let’s look at how its ambiguous lyrics strengthen its specifics, each making the other more potent.
Here is the second verse, broken down line by line.
So I followed her here to Birmingham, where the soil is so much richer
“Birmingham” is powerful both because names are powerful (“a midsize city in the American south” doesn’t feel like the word “Birmingham”, even if you could remove the history from the word Birmingham, which is impossible), and because of Birmingham’s specific, tragic history.
“The soil is so much richer” is the perfect poetic aside: could be that the soil of Alabama is richer than the soil of California, literally, or that the history of the south is tied more intimately to its land.
Line 1: Specific
And though my aching pride might guide my hand, she did not ask for me to come
None of this is specific.
Yes, it sounds like it’s very specific to this story but you could apply this sentence to any love-lorn tale of a boy following his feelings.
You don’t even need the previous “I followed her here” to give “she did not ask for me” its power.
Line 2: Vague
So I wait for her all through the day, as if I wait for her surrender
The waiting could be literal, it could be figurative, it’s probably both. It’s certainly not the very specific “He Stopped Loving Her Today” line,
Kept some letters by his bed dated nineteen sixty-two He had underlined in red every single “I love you”
Line 3: Vague
And every time I get her to look my way, she says I’m not where I belong
This is the first thing we’ve heard anyone say in this stanza and its devastation is its broadness.
She didn’t say “you don’t fit in in Birmingham” she said, “no matter where you are, who you are, what color your hair is, your last name, your first name, no matter who your parents are or what they wanted you to become…none of that matters because at your core, you are not where you belong”.
This says nothing about the devastating preface “everytime I get her to look my way” which says so much while saying so little. It tells us he wants her to look at him, she doesn’t often look at him, and he has to do things to “get her” to look at him. It’s desperate and heartbreaking.
Line 4: Vague
But I watch her father preach on Sundays, I know the hymnals all by heart
So far in the second verse we’ve been building layers of meaning with vague, but effective sentiments.
Those vague and effective sentiments were given added strength by the specific that preceded them, “I followed her here to Birmingham”.
On the final line of the second verse, we have come full circle, landing back on a very specific scene, made more powerful by the broad statements leading up to it.
Is knowing “all the hymnals by heart” a metaphor? At this point it is and it isn’t. Does our protagonist know them because he’s been there so long? Or because he shares a Christian background? Both can be, and therefore are, true. A third reading could be that “hymnals all by heart” just means he is in tune with this land, these people, at a spiritually foundational level.
The multiple possibilities layer over each other, weighing on the listening heart. The ambiguity makes the specific more powerful, and vice versa.
A Father, also a father, preaches on a Sunday in Alabama: we weep.
Line 5: Specific
One More Argument For Ambiguity: The Terror of “A Little Bit of Everything”
Dawes’ “A Little Bit of Everything” is specificity gone awry.
Every sentence is context and detail. It is overwrought, too much starch.
The song is part list poem: every detail becoming more meaningless, becoming “We Didn’t Start The Fire”.
It’s the mountains,
It’s the fog,
It’s the news at six o’clock,
It’s the death of my first dog,
It’s the angels up above me,
It’s the song that they don’t sing,
It’s a little bit of everything
The death of your first dog? Songs that angels don’t sing? None of these details compliment each other.
The few scenes that the song builds are so detailed they crossover into silliness.
Like this scene where a guy thinks about his entire life as he overeats in a buffet line.
An older man stands in a buffet line,
He is smiling and holding out his plate,
And the further he looks back into his timeline,
That hard road always had led him to today,
And making up for when his bright future had left him,
Making up for the fact that his only son is gone,
And letting everything out once, His server asks him,
Have you figured out yet, what it is you want?
I want a little bit of everything,
The biscuits and the beans,
Whatever helps me to forget about
The things that brought me to my knees,
So pile on those mashed potatoes,
And an extra chicken wing,
I’m having a little bit of everything.
Did you notice how the waiter asked him what he wanted as though he was asking about the food but also, like, life!?
Once he started describing each piece of food I lost it.
This is a sad scene, whose telling is hilarious.
I want this scene in a novel that has hours to get specific. Not a song who has mere seconds. It’s a scene that should be subtle, but is instead, heavy handed.
One of fiction’s many powers is its ability to transcend the details of its situation with a larger than life proclamation. It’s that feeling you get when a specific scene builds up to a climactic quote that work perfectly in context, but is all the more powerful for how well it works devoid of context, as a broader statement on the human condition.
The Conclusion and a Call Me By Your Name Spoiler
Take the climactic monologue in Call Me By Your Name.
It is a devastating series of words because it applies to the story its concluding, but also because it doesn’t: it applies to love, to the pain of being alive, to growing old, to compromise, to passion, to regret, to suffering and healing.
It is one of the most profound speeches I have ever seen on film.
As Youtube user Rainbow Di so eloquently sums it up, “I love how this isn’t even about being gay but being heartbroken”.
Specificity isn’t why something is sad, and it doesn’t make Country music better at being sad than Rock n’ Roll.
Songs are powerful and exciting and emotional for all the same reasons they are sad: because they transcend their specificities.
The goal of an emotional writer should be to build up only enough detail as necessary, and then let the dialogue or lyrics play themselves out on multiple levels: where every sentence is both a sentence between our specific characters and an argument between good and evil, love and shame, longing and acceptance.
The people, places, and proper nouns build the worlds of our stories, ambiguity allows us to enter them.