Sorry, guys. The famous epigram - variously attributed to musicians Frank Zappa, Miles Davis and Elvis Costello among others - just doesn’t hold water.
Probably first coined as a way to fight back against bad reviews, it’s a smart way for creatives to put down critics. Fair enough - everyone needs armour to protect them against the spectre of self-doubt. But it doesn’t take on board that writers are creatives too, and not all of them aim to assess or judge more abstract art forms like music. Quite the reverse, in fact. Art was made to inspire, and it does it across the borders of genre, style and method.
Having said that - along with sex, music can be one of the most difficult things to write about successfully, whether it’s promotional copy, journalism or fiction. Just as they do with their lovers, people form different kinds of relationships with the music they listen to. Although it’s part of almost everyone’s emotional life, it’s all too easy to describe it badly. Either we do it too literally, deconstructing it note-by-note so all the nuts and bolts are visible, or we employ prose so purple that our readers roll their eyes at our excesses. Either way, we can easily fail to communicate anything about the music we seek to evoke.
Bryan Ferry’s friend, the writer and academic Simon Puxley, went the subjective route when he added sleeve notes to Roxy Music’s debut album. His style owed something to the freewheeling rush of imagery beloved of Kerouac or Ginsberg:
“…musicians lie rigid-&-fluid in a mannerist canvas of hard-edged black-leather glintings, red-satin slashes…listening to the music re-sounding, cutting the air like it was glass, rock n roll juggernauted into demonic electronic supersonic mo-mo-momentum – by a panoptic machine-pile, hi-fi or sci-fi who can tell?”
- Simon Puxley, sleeve notes for Roxy Music (1972)
Although writers like Truman Capote have found this kind of wild spontaneity lazy (“that's not writing, that's typing”) its highly-coloured imagery does paint a vivid verbal picture of the music within the sleeve. Arguably, it tells us a lot more than traditional album copy which simply refers to content, genre or personnel in baldly factual terms. Although there have been journalists who made a point of elevating the subjective impression over the objective critique - rock scribe turned academic Paul Morley, for example - these writers have (even by their colleagues) been accused of veering into hagiography.
Maybe it takes another musician to fanboy with dignity. In 2018, bassist Mat Osman from Suede told Bowie biographer Jerome Soligny that he often plays his favourite Bowie track, Golden Years like an incantation to clear the air in a new living space. His description is a mini masterclass into the art of affectionately translating sound to vision.
“It starts with a riff that rolls like surf and the laziest of finger clicks. A spectre of a mouth organ. It leans back, tips its hat and stretches. The drums tumble down into the beat, there’s a trill of maracas and the vocal - that voice - comes in, close and low…but it’s the song as a whole, the sheer gorgeous flow of it, the way it’s simultaneously laidback and relentless, that fills each new room in my life with a warmth and a joy and a beauty that colours the rest of my time there.”
- Matt Osman in Jerome Soligny’s Rainbowman: David Bowie 1967 - 1980
When you inject music nobody knows into your writing, you have considerably more leeway. Unless, like Osman, you’re trying to describe a classic, you have a pretty free hand because your words are all your readers have to evoke the imaginary sound in their minds. Here’s my attempt at translating a guitar solo into words in my short story, The Real Thing.
He waits stage left, the lights throwing his sharp profile into greater relief, poised as an eagle waiting for its moment to dive. As the chord sequence grinds back slowly to its root he moves, the first chaotic burst of notes shuddering from the Marshall as he shakes his wings unfolded and launches into the void to wheel and bank on the thermal uprush. The guitar is alive under his control, sweetly distorted, loud and pure, a sinuous stream of singing energy, rhythm, melody. Caught in the cascade, he makes it look easy; watching, I am drawn into his world, this smooth, effortless illusion where technique is invisible. Not until I'm inside can I see the fractal interlacings of the structures he builds. Only then do I notice how calm he is, even and silent at the heart of the display. With a controlled eroticism that stops the breath, he catches the audience in his hooked beak and whirls them through his palace of sound, through ice and fire, dropping them gently on their feet before disappearing into silence, shadow and shocked applause.
- Clare O’Brien, The Real Thing (1992)
To translate the intention of my character, who’s a bit of a predator himself, I chose a consistent metaphor, that of a bird of prey on the hunt - although instead of a death I was describing a moment of spontaneous creation.
In this way, writing about music can become a vehicle for characterisation, carrying the story forward in a similar way to a song embedded within a piece of musical theatre. In his novel Saturday, Ian McEwan uses it to communicate a state of grace which expresses both the love his character Henry feels for his musician son, and his dream of an idealised world without conflict.
“No longer tired, Henry comes away from the wall where he’s been leaning, and walks into the middle of the dark engine of sound. He lets it engulf him. There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they’ve ever found before…when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible word in which you give everything you have to others, but lose nothing of yourself.”
- Ian McEwan, Saturday (2005)
We can, of course, use more familiar music to say something specific about a character. Do they have a favourite song, or a snatch of melody which haunts them? Maybe they get nostalgic for their teenage innocence every time someone puts on Abba’s Dancing Queen, or like Jodie Foster’s character in True Detective: Night Country, a Beatles song may trigger painful memories.
One relatively subtle example of this is title character Patrick Bateman’s amateur analysis of the band Genesis in Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho. By dismissing their work with Peter Gabriel and his detailed but simple-minded analysis of the later albums he so much prefers, he shows us both what he values - measurable, commercial success over “artsiness” - as well as hinting at his obsessive nature and his confusion when faced with the complexities of other people’s minds.
“I’ve been a big Genesis fan ever since the release of their 1980 album, ‘Duke’. Before that I didn’t really understand any of their work, though on their last album of the 1970s, the concept-laden ‘And Then There Were Three’ (a reference to band member Peter Gabriel, who left the group to start a lame solo career), I did enjoy the lovely ‘Follow You, Follow Me.’ Otherwise all the albums before ‘Duke’ seemed too artsy, too intellectual. It was ‘Duke’ (Atlantic; 1980), where Phil Collins’ presence became more apparent, and the music got more modern, the drum machine became more prevalent and the lyrics started getting less mystical and more specific (maybe because of Peter Gabriel’s departure), and complex, ambiguous studies of loss became, instead, smashing first-rate pop songs that I gratefully embraced.” - Bret Easton Ellis, ‘American Psycho’’ (1991)
There are, of course, many other ways in which words and music can combine, each amplifying the power of the other. Songwriting is the most obvious one, and although a proper discussion of that is outside the scope of this wee Substack, some hybrid forms do act as a kind of instant translation matrix.
We’ve already mentioned musical theatre, the peculiar rules of which were memorably lampooned in Subspace Rhapsody (2023), a recent episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Within the genre, songs act as insights into a character’s state of mind that can’t be expressed any other way; they’re a kind of replacement for the older soliloquy format we’re familiar with from Shakespeare. In Subspace Rhapsody, the joke is that the characters (under the influence of the “improbability field”, in itself a quantum mechanics joke…) can’t actually stop themselves from tunefully revealing their innermost secrets in front of their friends, colleagues and disastrously, lovers. Suddenly, instead of writing about music, we’re really musicking about writing.
Music with narration, like Prokoviev’s Peter And The Wolf, has been around for a very long time. In it, leitmotiv is amplified into full-blown storytelling by the addition of spoken word between discrete musical episodes. Music remains the dominant medium here, but the recent explosion of performance poetry from hiphop and spoken word artists like Loyle Carner and Kaye Tempest arguably reverses the polarity. In these artists’ work, rap and older, bardic traditions have mingled to combine with music into a new form of spectacle in which words are in the driver’s seat, but driven forward by the engine of music.
All kinds of translation - even between verbal languages - have their difficulties and perils. This is never more so when we’re attempting to evoke an essentially non-verbal experience, and it’s easy to fall short. But isn’t it the business of writers to try to invoke the abstract and ineffable?
Call it dancing to architecture if you must - but you know, that can be a thing, too….