‘Baby you don’t have to rush’ and  the rhyme of lyric intelligence

One of the songs that will top the charts over the next three months says, “Baby you don’t have to rush, you can leave a toothbrush at my place; we don’t need to keep it hush, you can leave a toothbrush at my place.”

When we start humming DNCE’s Toothbrush at the office, should we worry that its words reflect a gradual drop in the lyrical sophistication of popular music? But what do we mean by lyrical sophistication and how important is it in determining the value of a song?

A recent lyric intelligence study by Andrew Powell-Morse, concludes that the lyrics of top hits are getting dumber by the day. Powell-Morse, a data analyst, examines word choice in 225 number one Billboard hits of the last ten years from four genres — Pop, Country, Rock, and R&B/Hip-Hop. His conclusion is that popular song lyrics in English are at American third grade reading level.

Lyric intelligence in a popular song comes from its ability to crystallize a life experience into a short, memorable and melodious verse. In other words, songs are poetry and the power of a great song is not based on one’s ability to fit a fifteen-letter word into a musical note or two (Nameless, please stop employing empty rhymes with words like ku-perspirate and vasodilate!). Poetry is about precision in the intense expression of emotion and thought; the ability to say a whole lot in the fewest number of words.

This has never been more apparent than it was last week at a tribute concert to honour the Grammy Living Legend artiste, Smokey Robinson. Smokey carries many distinctions in the music industry.

His dexterity on the piano makes him a fine musician. His reputation as a writer of more than 4,000 songs — some of them recorded by all-time greats such as Michael Jackson and The Supremes — makes him an accomplished poet. His position as vice-president of Motown Records throughout the 1960s and early 1970s marked him out as an astute businessman.

ADDICTION BATTLE

His singing long legitimised the male falsetto voice and on stage, Smokey has always been a real entertainer although he never could dance with that agile, boneless choreography of The Temptations, Chris Brown or Bruno Mars. Even now, at 76 years of age, Smokey holds an audience in the grip of his vocal prowess and the joy of that classic wooden sway that passes for Smokey’s hottest dance moves.

On Thursday, in Los Angeles, Smokey was awarded by MusiCares MAP Fund for his dedication and commitment to helping others with drug and alcohol addiction recovery. Several artists including Backstreet Boys, Cee Loo, Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, Tamar Braxton, El DeBarge and Kem gathered to perform a number of Smokey standards such as, Shop Around (1961),  I Second that Emotion (1967), Cruisin’ (1979) and Just to See Her (1987).

The show was not without hiccups. “Babyface” stopped half-way through the first verse of The way you do the things you do (1965). With a touch of nervous laughter, he said, “I am auditioning, Smokey; I am auditioning Berry [Gordy, founder of Motown Records], I am in 1965 …. I wore my Temptations glasses so I could be on Motown”. And then he started again, from the top, flooding the hall with his convincing act in the lines, “You got a smile so bright, you know you could have been a candle. I’m holding you so tight, you know you could have been a handle. The way you swept me off my feet, you know you could’ve been a broom.”

At the end of his performance Babyface confessed that the teleprompter had gone off earlier and without it, he wasn’t sure he would remember all the lyrics to a song that has been covered by numerous artists including Diana Ross, Rita Coolidge, Bruce Springsteen and UB40.

Smokey has served these and other artists in many ways. His honesty about his drug addiction, his inspiring decades of sobriety, his care and fund-raising support those who are on the path to recovery.

Nowadays, many activists — including President Barrack Obama — speak of drug addiction as a disease. On Thursday, Smokey skipped that poetry-cum-new science about pleasurable activities that co-opt the brain. He owned the demons of his prior addiction, head on, with the words, “…those two and a half years were the darkest point of my life … When I started doing drugs I could not have written my life any better than it was going. Drugs don’t care what you are doing. They don’t care who you are, what your job is, what your status is, if you are young or old or whatever you are. If you open that door, they’re gonna come in. And I opened that door and I let them in and they destroyed me for two and a half years.”

Smokey’s lyrics have been the voice of counsel and comfort for many over the decades, resonating with their experiences and giving them the grammar to navigate life’s highs and lows. Now that he speaks with honesty about his years as an addict he is, once again, providing lessons on how to live. As actress and film director, Angela Bassett said when she presented the award, “the life-saving work of MusiCares” echoes the “life-affirming art of Smokey Robinson”.

CRUISIN TOGETHER

But copying his art is not easy. Andra Day’s performance showed that. The guitars were on point, the baseline was as of old, the lyrics were correct but the vocals were off. In her hands, Tracks of my Tears became a strangely difficult song because she did not muster the smallness of body and voice that sadness should bring. You don’t shout sadness. You wear it on your face as your voice moves slowly through the contours of defeat and despair.

Not surprisingly, when Smokey got on stage with the crowd anxiously waiting for his performance of My Girl, the all-time favourite, he chose first, to give the audience another shot at hearing Tracks of my Tears. And what a difference! In Smokey’s hands it was a story of abandonment and loneliness.

His super-slow tempo, his patience in savouring every word, his near-stillness on stage collectively seemed to isolate him into a corner of unrequited love, burning jealousy and sheer pain from an agonized heart.

But more than this performance of feeling, it was Smokey’s rendition of Cruisin’ that dramatised the hopelessness of a word-length analysis of popular music. Metaphor really matters. You can have the simplest words and the shortest verses and still load them with a ton of (multiple) meaning.

“I’m gonna fly away, glad you’re going my way, I love it when we’re cruisin’ together.” Cruisin’ is not about birds of the sky or airplanes. It is a euphemism, a metaphor for making love. But when you know the story of Smokey’s life you read these nursery-school rhymes differently — as code words for getting high on drugs.

So songs are not intelligent because they weave in and out of the dictionary in search of big words. Songs are clever and life-affirming when they bottle emotion, when they turn colourful associations into unforgettable melody. And with a very basic but cunning grammar, the music of Smokey Robinson has done just that for close to 60 years.