Lecture by Nick Mount on John K. Samson's Lyrics & Poems 1997-2012

John K Sampson a peg I don't think you away with a song in which the course was I hate Winnipeg if you weren't from Winnipeg or maybe that's not really true maybe that's not actually true you know maybe you could get away with writing a song like that and singing a song like that if you weren't from Winnipeg maybe even somebody from Ontario could do that but as a novelty song a satire joke stompin Tom Connors probably could have done it and we would have loved it at the SkyDome the guess who sucks the jets were lousy anyway the magical thing about I hate Winnipeg and the song that it's from is that it's not a joke not at all it's sincere it means it and that you can't do unless you're from there and of course it also means and says the exact opposite I love this town and that you cannot do unless you're from there the love-hate relationships that we all have with the places that we're from is a relationship that you can only have with the place you're from the volume okay is it too loud it's good okay half of John K Sampson songs are about wanting to leave Winnipeg all of them are about why he does not leave Winnipeg many of them are set in recognizably specifically Winnipeg locations so a late-night restaurant in North code Onan a basement bar on Albert Street um Grace Hospital on Portage Avenue or under the Disraeli bridge they feature local landmarks like the Golden Boy the statue of the golden boy that sits atop the Manitoba Legislative Bill they're by local heroes like Reggie leach the m80 hockey player the one song want selected to the Hockey Hall of Fame they use metaphors drawn from farming valo curling the local climate the local geography they get a lot more metaphoric mileage out of home heating systems than most songs from the east or the west coast radiators hum out of tune on one song I want to call requests through heating vents it starts another we take our metaphors from our surroundings right they come to us from where we are it's a good moment a sad moment unfortunately today to remember the first page of Xinhua Chubby's African story Things Fall Apart a cockles Fame spread like a bush fire in the Harma time right like a bush fire in the harmontown the cold wind that blows down from the north we take our metaphors from our surroundings Samson's lyrics are not all recognizably set and Winnipeg but enough of them are that you start to think that they all are you know even when they're not apparently said I'm going to pick Paul tuff says that every weaker than song is about Winnipeg and I know what he means it's always there under the words even when it's not in the words the lyrics on their first album fallow were actually printed over top of a very faint map of Winnipeg it's the same one that's reproduced on the cover the weather you can see it up there is doubtful it's a very faint map in behind the wheat in behind the word fallow with the Red River twisting through the top of it why would anybody care about these songs if they weren't from Winnipeg right if you didn't know David rhymer from Reggie leach why would you care why were the folks in Corner Brook Newfoundland happy to hear from John Kay Sampson two weeks ago and why are you people here in Toronto happy to hear from him and about 45 minutes assuming of course that you are happy to hear from him 45 minutes and why are you happy to hear from him 40 fact that was though that was a question are you happy to hear from him in 45 minutes yes to put the question another way how does the local become universal so I'm really not sure about this but I think that the best answer the a writer an artist could give to that question is don't know don't care because I think for the writer for the artist doesn't matter where you are getting the local write is enough that it's enough to be true to the feelings that you have for the place that you know because places are not Universal but feelings are and if you get the feelings right then the audience will follow whether they are in Corner Brook or Nanaimo because they will have the same feelings that you do about the places that they love and the places that they hate in the live recording that I showed you last week recorded here in Toronto of the week advance John K Sampson performing one great city at the end of the song the end of the performance John hesitates to finish the last line on the last word I hate he just Waits and some guy out in the audience yells out Hamilton it's a joke but it's not a joke he means it that guy feels the same way about Hamilton as the song does about Winnipeg Universal in art is when a drunk guy finishes your sentences he is in very good company this is the British singer-songwriter Frank Turner who's another Punk gone folk I'm from a small town in the rural south of England and as such a record above the geography of four roads in the great expanses of Manitoba shouldn't perhaps resonate John's gift is that it does within his personal journeys into the heartlands of his landscape he draws enough truth about the human condition out into the open to connect with anyone who has ever felt alone awkward lost or cold and indeed warm loved or nostalgic this is another one this is John Darnielle of the mountain goats and John grew up in a town called san luis obispo which is in coast of california between Los Angeles and San Francisco and it's not at all like when a packet no matter who you are and no matter where you're from you know what it's like to hate your town that's the skeleton of a feeling that by the end of one great city becomes a walking breathing human being with all the complexity about how you feel about where you're from that's what's universal right not where you're from how you feel about where you're from if you get that right people will sing the chorus for you artists do not make their art universal audiences do that because we want the song to be about us we want all the songs to be about us when you're breaking up every love song is about you or to take a highbrow example Ulysses James Joyce's Ulysses weirdly the book that we have talked about the most in this class that the fewest of us have read or will ever read including myself it's a fiercely local novel or at least what I've read of it it's one man's him one man's take to his hometown it's its James Joyce's my Dublin to John Samson's my Winnipeg but generations of readers critics we call them have universalized Ulysses they have made it into the modernist novel this novel about a city we've turned it into a novel about us and I think in significant part we did this to validate the time spent reading it imagine right reading that thing and thinking well that's not about me at all that would suck lyrics and poems is not a book it's a collection of five books written over 15 years this thing took over twice as long to write as it took James Joyce to write Ulysses that is not a criticism that is a suggestion to think about how much of a life went into it 15 years to think about how much of a life goes into writing songs it also means because it's five separate books it also means that it's a lot harder to do with that what we did with a novel like Lolita or a collection of short stories like better living through plastic explosives but it's difficult for us to pin down the style to characterize the techniques and affections that define a describe a writer style whether they know it or not some aspects of a writer style will no doubt stay with them throughout their writing career especially those of which they're unconscious but style also changes from book to book because it's not the same book and you're not the same person in the first book or album fallow in 1997 the stylistic trait that jumps out of me and is these songs is what grammarians call the imperative mood the imperative mood and that is the construction of sentence of verbal constructions that we use to make commands or issue requests like pay attention or please stop here those are imperatives it's a lovely turn right the imperative mood these are songs that are in the imperative mood they're in the mood to make requests sometimes the speaker will direct those commands those requests at himself the performer like in the very first song page 15 go over your lines iron your carefully-crafted disguise publicly smile and privately frown please hear my cries sometimes they're directed at others maybe an other tell me why I have to miss you so ask me the questions you never want answers to knock so I'll know you're still there so grammatically those are all imperatives but the content of them makes them into something different that not really commands they're more please the imperative is also the mood of a prayer please explain tell me why it hurts that's the mood of follow the second album left and leaving from 2000 is still sometimes in the imperative mood but this time it seems to me that the hallmark of the style in here is something that we've seen before in this class and that is the list and again the first song sets the stylistic mood the first songs about a garage sale and everything must go and gets on page 33 everything must go I don't know if they say this in Manitoba or not but my wife's family's from Saskatchewan and that's what they call leftovers must go what's in afraid we're gonna have must go so this is everything must go second stanza cracked up compass and a pocket watch some plastic daffodils the cutlery and coffee cups I stole from all-night restaurants a sense of wonder only slightly used a year or two to haunt you in the dark a wage slave 40-hour workweek weighs a thousand kilograms sub n journeys comes with a free Frakes big smile for all your dumb demands the cordless razor that my father bought when I turned seventeen a puke green sofa the outline to a complicated dream of dignity and a laugh too loud and too long it's a collection of apparently random things right like the collection of apparently random things that the boy in number 18 keeps in the coffee jar under the floorboards in John McGregor's if nobody speaks of remarkable things somatically it's not insignificant that the boy in number 18 wants to keep that stuff right that he's trying to hoard it to collect it whereas John K Sampson speaker is trying to get rid of it all he's doing some housecleaning on a life but we're talking about style now not theme and stylistically they're the same they're there they're their things their lists bits and pieces that suggest the whole synecdoche page 40 those second to last stanza memory will rust and erode into lists of all that you gave me a blanket some matches this pain in my chest the best parts of lonely duct-tape and soldered wires new words for old desires and every birthday card I threw away I don't think those things actually are random I think there's an art to the selection and I don't think the technique is an accident either and that it's not an accident that that is a favorite technique of these songs and a John McGregor two writers are the same generation though in very different places because I think the list that might be randomly ordered but it is not at all randomly selected is a symptom in art of a condition in our time and that is a response to all the white noise we've talked about the too much of everything the literary list is life on shuffle in left and leaving you get already a bit of what would become the dominant stylistic trait of reconstruction site and after and that is something that's become a sort of hallmark of Samson's writing style and that is the the mixed and often extended sometimes at the same time metaphor some mixed and extended metaphors if you look at the title song page 55 I'm lost I'm afraid a frayed rope tying down a leaky boat to the roof of a car in the road in the dark and it's snowing if I'm more than it means less last call for happiness I'm your dress near the back of your knees and your slip is showing I'm afloat afloat in a summer parade up the street in the town that you were born in with a girl the top wearing tulle and a Miss somewhere sash waving like the Queen that's mixed metaphor that's metaphor in a blender but they're all associated notice that the different things are all associated they're connected or linked from a boat to a float as a verb to a float as a noun and Samson told us that back in a song on left and leaving he said your metaphors as mixed as you can make them are linked like days together so on page 38 and so they are most of them the metaphors tend to be linked associated if you want as good an example as I've ever seen in a song or a poem of an extended metaphor that is unmixed that it stays constant over the course of the song check out a tournament of Hearts in reunion tour it's a love song a love story made entirely from curling metaphors why can't I draw right up to what I want to say the biggest change in the lyrics over Samson's last few albums is less than their style I think than in their genre for myself and there's room for argument about this but for myself song lyrics are not poems but they are descended from the same ancestor from a time when we did not separate words and music into separate boxes separate classes separate stores the word lyric actually comes from that time right from a stringed Greek instrument that the Greeks used to accompany songs or recitations just reading song lyrics aren't poems but they are poetic and they're more poetic in one way today the most poetry is that is they rhyme which is not true of most poetry they use poetic techniques routinely like illusion like iron like metaphor and simile they use poetic genres like the elegy the Abad the dramatic monologue and especially the confessional the dominant genre in Western popular music since at least the 1960s around about the same time it became the dominant genre and poetry the songs on fallow and in left and leaving are mostly written in that vein in the vein of the the first-person confessional lyric spoken by or about the self the speaker or performer but starting with reconstruction site something interesting has happened and that is Samson's lyrics have increasingly become artful in another sense they've become fictional about bless you about fictional characters or sometimes their stories fictional stories about real people so unreconstructed cite for example we get poems that are spoken by a bunch of old guys at the Elks Club Lodge the last call we get a song spoken by and about a retired Antarctic Explorer who's having dinner with Michel Foucault we get a song spoken by a cat a cat who is tremendously fed up with his depressed owner that just wants to drink and watch TV all the time some of the songs on the album I don't maybe all of them I don't know but at least some of them for sure are linked and what we would call a song cycle and I think the song cycle is about visiting somebody in the hospital I don't know can't tell if it's somebody who's terminally ill or so perhaps somebody who's been hospitalized for for mental reasons some form of depression or a breakdown at least half the songs on the next album reunion tour our dramatic monologues spoken by fictional or real people but not by the singer dramatic monologues including the very first one which is spoken by a bus driver there's another one that is spoken by a man who kills himself in a parking lot that's David Ryan Moran the one that's spoken by the curler the lonely curler sitting at the rink wondering why he's not better at this and the relationships there's one spoken by a guy who saw Bigfoot and what happens I think as you're listening to the record or reading the words is that enough of them are spoken by fictional characters that you start to think or realize that they're all spoken by fictional characters even the ones that seem like they might be spoken by their creator like the one about a tired musician on tour in the title track that maybe that guy too is also a fiction provincial is John K Samson's latest album his first solo album released just last year in January it's what I suppose you'd call a concept album the concept being to explore for Manitoba highways and the stories are some of the stories that you can encounter along those highways they're coded on the back of the album so each one of those symbols represents a particular road or highway one of the four roads the songs with diamonds beside them like heart of the continent are set on route 85 Portage Avenue the main artery and Winnipeg and the heart of the continent as joanne showed us last week the songs with the green square beside them are on highway 23 which leads to the village of Nanette Manitoba which leads and led John to the Nanette sanatorium just outside of the net that was the provinces tuberculosis sanatorium so for 60 years and the problems of Manitoba if you got TB that's where you went often to die the speaker of when I write my master's thesis is writing his thesis about that place that's the the fiction the conceit at work here the next song the speaker of letter in Icelandic from the nine net sand is a patient there writing to his brother saying forget about me I'll be dead in the ear move on I think maybe just because this is fun to imagine maybe I read it somewhere I can't remember but I think the letter is in the archives that the master's student is working on or maybe it's one that he hasn't found yet that when he finds it it's the one that's going to let him write my master's thesis I'll find the evidence over 15 years Interest change in artists not just their style but interests here's Paul tuff again writing in 2002 about the week events first two albums images of revision and construction of tearing up streets and pulling down buildings and planting a bomb at City Hall and spray-painting construction sites are all over John Samson's lyrics as as if he's saying that the only way to stay sane and stay put in a frozen isolated broken-down city like Winnipeg is to reimagine it to rip it up and put it back together in your head it's a great essay Fanta to guess a still the best essay I've ever read on the week events one of the best days has they've ever had a music period and he's certainly right about the ubiquity of those images on the first two albums but I'm not sure he's right about why about the meaning or significance of all those buildings being torn down or rebuilt I think that the buildings the buildings pardon me disappear and reappear in these songs so repeatedly partly because that's what buildings do in the cities of what is still the new world cities that constantly tear themselves down and reinvent themselves cities like New York cities like Toronto the cities like Winnipeg the golden boy is a symbol of all that he's actually modeled on Mercury the Roman god of Commerce and the torch that he holds is a symbol meant to lead the youth of Manitoba forever forward into a more prosperous future his weapon is the wrecking ball in our time buildings also disappear or have disappeared in our cities for other reasons Paul tuff is a Canadian writer who lives in New York City has for some time in the fall of 2001 these are the lyrics by John K Sampson that he wrote down and stuck on his fridge from the song I play to the start my cities still breathing but barely it's true through buildings gone missing like teeth see he says that even though he knew that the song was about Winnipeg for Paul tuff in New York after 9/11 it became about his city write about his feelings for his city artists don't make their art universal audiences do that because sometimes we need the song to be about us I'd be willing to bet that one of the other reasons that buildings keep getting pulled down in Samson's lyrics and the first two albums especially is because you can take the punk out of the punk band but you can't really take Punk out of the punk the weaker the ends are not as aggressive a band musically as propaganda was but the songs are still pissed off some of the time you know they're still quietly angry even though they're now capable as propaganda is now of laughing gently at their own anger in songs like pamphleteer or confessions of a futon revolutionist when samson sings let's plant a bomb at City Hall I really believe that some part of him means that but some part of him still wants that I swear I'm more than half believe it when I say that somewhere love and justice shine but for all that samson songs are quite clearly products of their society and in some cases protests against that society I don't think they're either really protest songs or social realism but that's not really what the rap to I think they are primarily vehicles for emotion for the representation and communication of feelings the job of the lyric not ideas not facts in 1994 the Prince Edward Island born poet mark strand now an American poet published a very good book of art criticism on the American painter Edward Hopper the book is called hopper and strand in this book argues against what has become the dominant reading of Edward Hopper the painter that is that Edward Hopper is a realistic painter that his paintings are social documents of mid-century America strand says well okay maybe a bit but that's not really what makes them so great that's not what we love about them this is what he says in part he says it is my contention that hoppers paintings transcend the appearance of actuality and locate the viewer in a virtual space where the influence and availability of feelings predominate and Sampson has obviously read this book he quotes comet in Sun on an empty room one of two songs on reunion tour that is both named after and after in my Calista sense paintings by Edward Hopper and I would be willing to bet that this is one of the books on hopper that gets brought to the person in hospital on reconstruction site but more importantly I think that's exactly what John Samson's lyrics do they transcend the appearance of actuality the real Winnipeg streets and landmarks that they name and they locate the listener in a virtual space where feelings predominate on facts not places and that's why people who aren't from Winnipeg can identify with them why you do not have to have lived in New York of the 1930s to be moved by hoppers paintings like that one most famously Nighthawks 1942 because it's not a real diner it's a virtual diner created and made possible by art only in art which makes it a diner that anybody can visit just like the one in North Carolina mostly I think that the many images of tearing down buildings and rebuilding buildings on the first to weaker than albums I think they're just that I think they're virtual spaces for exploring emotions metaphors for the tearing down and rebuilding of the self in the later albums there's less of us there's less destruction less desire to tear things down there's more reconstruction more reunions more renovations or just living with it in an old house with blowing fuses and the taps reversed with our taps reversed the last song he's not alone anymore that helps to over all of Samson's albums one interest has stayed constant least one one question has stayed the same that is what is home remember Nomi Nichols condition and Marion caves novel a complicated kindness Nomi says that she is home sick at home home sick at home it's a perfect phrase she doesn't mean she's homesick for home she's at home and homesick there so are Samson speakers and characters over and again the epigraph for the first album fallow from Katherine hunter being born is the easy part it's the staying here that's difficult and just like caves characters in all of his novels hurt her novels Samson's characters including his own are constantly leaving and returning spending time in bus stations playing on the luggage carousels at airports counting the highway lines to home in one song one song title their anchor less anchor less in another their exile the room in Sun and an empty room is empty because they're packed up moving vote to become homeless like the students in John McGregor's novel page 38 sorry I'll try to stop breathing last three lines I love this place the enormous sky and the faces hands that I'm haunted by so why can't I forgive these buildings these frameworks labeled home that's homesick at home that's know miss condition exactly but I wouldn't read too much into the coincidence of them both being from Manitoba it's not a condition that's confined to the prairies we are all as I've been arguing since January a little bit homesick at home these days we're all trying to figure out how to feel at home even when we are at home this is the the key for the songs on provincial the one that tells you which song is wrong which roads except for the last one home x marks the spot the treasure that we're all looking for home for 15 years now John Samson's songs have been helping us articulate how we feel about the towns in the cities where we're from the places that we love and hate in the last song on the last week of that album the speaker says that he wishes that he was something useful like a toothbrush or a soldering iron the last line of the last song in the last week of Dan's album is about the song and I think about all the songs before it it says make this something somebody can use make this something somebody can use I think we have we have John and that's why we put your words on our fridges and that's why we yell them back at you in bars let's take a break there when we come back John Sampson will join us you

Channel: Department of English University of Toronto

Views: 6,141

Rating: 4.9459457 out of 5

Keywords: Nick Mount, John K. Samson, University Of Toronto (College/University), Lyrics & Poems 1997-2012

Id: Coq0rf8brZs

Length: 37min 58sec (2278 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 06 2013