That’s it, I’ve hit my generation gap with new music. Jonas Brothers I could abide, and Hannah, Britney, Hanson and the boy bands, because pop is fun. But holy mother of god Owl City’s lyrics are AWFUL.
Generations older than mine have taken issue with hair length, drugs, promiscuity, and noise. We’ve even hit insipid before, usually disguised by unintelligible enunciation and drowned in amplitude. But webroots Owl City takes stupid to a nails-on-chalkboard low, dubbing over loops of mechanical saccharine, with a prominent emo-sensitive vocal track.
OC’s Adam Young wines like James Blunt impersonated by a digital clone. The singer’s voice is not helped by being equalized to imitate the shrill tin of skype. But maybe he is. The vocal effects improve pitch, and perhaps producers know their tween audience these days hear their Romeos through the disembodied voices of computer chat. This is new territory. Imagine Leif Garrett trying to croon through a tracheostomy mike.
But the insanely awful lyrics are where Owl City really breaks ground. Neither David nor Shawn Cassidy’s songs were ever this embarrassing, and much of their sentimentalism was tongue in cheek. Adam Young’s Cave In, for example, could benefit with a laugh track.
Yeah, I’ll ride the range / and hide all my loose change
In my bedroom,
Cause riding a dirt bike / down a turn pike
Always takes its toll on me.
Fireflies suggests to me that someone’s developed a plugin for Garage Band which sorts random cliches according to rhyme. But the grammar’s still a rudimentary, this ’cause that.
It’s hard to say / that I’d rather stay
Awake when I’m asleep,
‘Cause everything / is never as it seems
Because my dreams / are bursting at the seams.
Vanilla Twilight throws metaphors into a mixer:
I’ll find repose in new ways / though I haven’t slept in two days,
‘Cause cold nostalgia chills me to the bone.
But drenched in Vanilla twilight, / I’ll sit on the front porch all night,
Waist deep in thought because
when I think of you I don’t feel so alone.
He had to have pulled “repose” out of the thesaurus. But “waist deep in thought” is too honest to be contrived. Obviously no thoughts here rise above the neck, except the stench of what we usually measure by increments of leg bones as we wade: ankle, knee…
My visceral gag reflex to these lyrics has everything to do with Owl City’s populist ascent through our idiot’s meritocracy. Our cultural figures, counting even our professional class of opinion shapers, are no dullards, but they will exploit any dim light for which there are moths. If pop music is candy, this treacle is pharmaceutical quality lithium. Young minds eager to stretch their realities on poetry, will have their spark of vitality mucked in industrial effluent.
To me, this dreck is worse horror than Kafka could devise. New world order, failed education, twilight of Democracy, now idiocracy for eternity. Vanilla’s Twilight streams past and future tenses in real time.
As many times as I blink / I’ll think / of you tonight.
When violet eyes get brighter, / and heavy wings grow lighter,
I’ll taste the sky / and feel alive, / again.
And I’ll forget the world that I knew, / but I swear I won’t forget you.
Oh if my voice could reach back through the past,
I’d whisper in your ear: / Oh darling I wish you were here.