kingbaz
New Member
Zac Pennington of Parenthetical Girls mentions Morrissey and lyrical context in an interview with Chris Estey at Three Imaginary Girls. It's a quite nice interview all round, but it's always doubly nice to read or hear someone do more than just namedrop Moz.
The link --- http://www.threeimaginarygirls.com/.../interview-zac-pennington-parenthetical-girls
The Moz mention:
TIG: When I call something "record collector rock," I usually mean it as a bit of a backhanded compliment -- there are songwriters who are making pop music for people who get thrilled from cultural "recognition." With Parenthetical Girls, it seems more like a literary device that you lyrically reference so much new wave, post-punk, and other genres and artists. Sort of like a musical approximation of how good writers catch flakes of Nabokov, Chekhov, and others in their work. Why do you do this so much ("the kick inside," et al), and are there inside jokes tying song topics to musical references?
Zac: I’m a sucker for context. For re-context. It’s no secret that I’m an obsessive Morrissey fan, and from very early on I’ve been fascinated by the rampant creative plagiarism exhibited throughout his entire career. I think for Moz, it’s been a way of further aligning himself with the cannon of what he sees as his literary significance—the same kind of self-mythology he used when he turned all of his teen idols into cover stars… endorsement by proxy. He has always been fond of that old “genius steals” adage of Wilde’s. The idea of forming self-mythology by donning the mythology of others has always been a really interesting one to me.
For me—and believe me, I’ll be apologizing for this one—I think of it as more akin to pop dramaturgy. An effective pop song is fairly limited in the information it can convey: it’s brief, it has a generally constrained structure, and its most important objective is to express an emotion. Using words or musical motifs that other people have used in other contexts allows a song to be more multifaceted—to suggest more avenues and extra-textual narratives and ideas—without necessarily detracting from the concise power of the pop song.
I don’t think that there is really anything wrong appropriating other people’s ideas as long as it’s done unabashedly, and with intellectual intent. I’ve never plagiarized a work without being fully convinced that I was contextualizing it in a way that gave it new meaning. There are a lot of jokes. “Ellie Greenwich” perhaps has the most recognizable sonic punchlines. I gather that most people think that we take ourselves very seriously, or just don’t think we’re very funny.
The link --- http://www.threeimaginarygirls.com/.../interview-zac-pennington-parenthetical-girls
The Moz mention:
TIG: When I call something "record collector rock," I usually mean it as a bit of a backhanded compliment -- there are songwriters who are making pop music for people who get thrilled from cultural "recognition." With Parenthetical Girls, it seems more like a literary device that you lyrically reference so much new wave, post-punk, and other genres and artists. Sort of like a musical approximation of how good writers catch flakes of Nabokov, Chekhov, and others in their work. Why do you do this so much ("the kick inside," et al), and are there inside jokes tying song topics to musical references?
Zac: I’m a sucker for context. For re-context. It’s no secret that I’m an obsessive Morrissey fan, and from very early on I’ve been fascinated by the rampant creative plagiarism exhibited throughout his entire career. I think for Moz, it’s been a way of further aligning himself with the cannon of what he sees as his literary significance—the same kind of self-mythology he used when he turned all of his teen idols into cover stars… endorsement by proxy. He has always been fond of that old “genius steals” adage of Wilde’s. The idea of forming self-mythology by donning the mythology of others has always been a really interesting one to me.
For me—and believe me, I’ll be apologizing for this one—I think of it as more akin to pop dramaturgy. An effective pop song is fairly limited in the information it can convey: it’s brief, it has a generally constrained structure, and its most important objective is to express an emotion. Using words or musical motifs that other people have used in other contexts allows a song to be more multifaceted—to suggest more avenues and extra-textual narratives and ideas—without necessarily detracting from the concise power of the pop song.
I don’t think that there is really anything wrong appropriating other people’s ideas as long as it’s done unabashedly, and with intellectual intent. I’ve never plagiarized a work without being fully convinced that I was contextualizing it in a way that gave it new meaning. There are a lot of jokes. “Ellie Greenwich” perhaps has the most recognizable sonic punchlines. I gather that most people think that we take ourselves very seriously, or just don’t think we’re very funny.
