Letters of Wreck

With this, I’d like to introduce the idea of “pop missteps,” moments in songs, books, movies, tv, etc. where the creative party fails to deliver a complete, sound (pardon the pun) experience. But I’m not talking about their ability to take a virgin and defame her in a little under a year. I’m talking about the honest-to-god misstep of the “artist,” be that the singer/songwriter, producer, or entire recording party. Often times, perhaps even always, this has to do with a lack of awareness of either the tone the creative party is shooting for, and/or not realizing how a certain gesture/move (camera angle, voiceover, line, passage, etc) detracts from the intended tone. Of course, because I started with a pop music infused anecdote, I’m also going to suggest pop music as repeatedly falling victim to this.

Enter: a crooning Christina Perri. I’ll admit I hadn’t heard of her before “Jar of Hearts” came on the radio. A quick Google/YouTube search reveals that this 2011 hit was her first, followed by a series of others catalyzed by some decent vocal work and an insatiable hunger to write clichés. But that’s the nature of the beast; we, as a culture, function on our idioms and clichés, as they are the most efficient means of communicating meaning. As my freshman creative writing instructor quipped, “Bless the poor bastard who wrote, ‘It’s raining cats and dogs.’ How ingenious. How I’m sick of it.”

Perri doesn’t stray from this. And that’s fine. Pop music isn’t meant to be groundbreaking or even remarkable. It more functions aurally than lyrically, and even then, the good ones, the ones that stick around, are the ones that literally stick around in your head. So that’s where I’m at, but for a different reason. I’ve forgotten the melody, and Perri’s voice is only still present because of my recent Googling. What’s remained, though, is her misstep. I’ve embedded the video for “Jar of Hearts” here, but the line goes like this: “You're gonna catch a cold / From the ice inside your soul.”

Overall, Perri’s lyrics are by no means egregious. However, this line is so unaware of how out of tone it is, it’s laughable. The actual image of it isn’t romantic or mysterious or sad; it’s funny. What’s especially funny is that the overall intention of the song is to softly berate a former lover, consequently making the listener pity his state of being. Simple, sure, but effective, especially given the audience. This line, though, paints a picture of a sniffling man, perhaps sneezing, perhaps suspending his head over a pot of hot water. There are plenty of tissues and blankets and bowls of chicken soup in there too. Yes, we pity him, but mostly because he’s feeling a bit under the weather. Even looking past the ridiculousness of a frozen-over soul, and the party’s subsequent sickness from it, Perri’s presentation of thought likewise suggests a lack of seriousness. She doesn’t state, “You caught a cold because” or, the more direct “You got sick because…” No, her hypothetical suggestion that “You’re gonna catch a cold…” reminds more of your mother or grandmother badgering you to put on more layers. Even the Christmas Story’s popular “You’ll shoot your eye out” warning comes to mind, as this line functions as less of a cautionary tale, and more of one with a seductive leg lamp in it.

With that being said, I love the line. It could even be considered poetic, filed under something like super-realism or magic realism. It does a lot of work too, by bridging the gap between the spiritual and physical quite efficiently. There is some accidental genius here.

Admitting all that, I feel like I’m an anecdote, rather, a footnote in a David Foster Wallace essay, particularly his “Big Red Son” (no pun intended there either). Yes, the one that starts with scientific evidence about penectomies via seeking the perfect orgasm, and follows DFW through his jaunt at the AVN (Adult Video News) awards. About halfway through his essay, Wallace, of course, interrupts his excursion with a footnote about an LAPD officer admitting that he loves porn because of “‘the faces,’ i.e. the actress’ faces, i.e. those rare moments in orgasm or accidental tenderness when the starlets dropped their stylized ‘fuck-me-I’m-a-nasty-girl’ sneer and became, suddenly, real people.” Wallace rounds out the detective’s story by tying it to an innate humanness, and even going further to assert that those who work in the industry often have false, even dead emotions. But when this emotional wall falls, “[t]he effect on the viewer is electric. And the adult performers who can do this a lot –allow themselves to feel and enjoy what’s taking place, cameras or no – become huge, legendary stars” (8).

What’s interesting, though, is that these moments, these brief intrusions of humanness, from a directorial standpoint, could be considered missteps. They are anomalies within the field. And though, by no means am I calling the porn industry art, I didn’t use that label for pop music either. What I’m more wanting to point to is the accidental genius that occurs in both examples. While neither medium disallows these “flourishes,” neither necessitates them, nor even readily asks them of their performers. They exist as remnants, vestigial blemishes in a world that tries to blot out, smooth over, and shoot in HD. The same could be said of those anecdotes about serious actors dangerously living out a role: Christian Bale’s severe weight loss in The Machinist, Natalie Portman’s in Black Swan, and Heath Ledger’s iconic and devastating undertaking of the Joker in The Dark Knight.

I know I’m positing this as if all these examples, all these inconsistencies or inaccuracies could be smoothed over into a hypothesis about the human condition, that despite all our knowledge and research and safe-measures and camera angles and STD testing, we still crave the humanness of the human. I suppose that’s what good reality tv shoots for. Then again, there is no good reality tv; it’s editing inherently dramatizes. We, as a culture, strive to capture the humanness, our own biologies under glass, but really can’t. The act of capturing undermines the humanness. Sure, if something unnaturally natural leaks out, so be it. But we still try to write, edit, reshoot, and refine. Even the act of me writing about a performer’s misstep begs the performer to reconsider an otherwise human condition: irrationality. The idea of criticism suggests that we should alter our writings, films, and songs into final products. That they should not, and consequently we should not, falter in our thinking or speech or deliveries.

This is where we’re at. This is the state of performance, of art, of their co-mingling. It’s said that masterpieces would be torn apart in workshops. Yet, they, standing as symbols of what art is, maintain, as good art is naturally flawed.

So, we’re left with the porn star actually enjoying her orgasm, overcome with her own biology. And we’re left with a misused line, in a simple song, unaware of its tone, attempting to metaphorize a situation, and failing. Its misstep is human, and perhaps, though my diatribe may suggest otherwise, this is why so many are so drawn to it.