(~5 minutes to read)
What are your earliest musical memories?
For some, it might be The Spice Girls spicing up their lives; for others, it might be Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra performing together during the Second World War. For me, it’s Perry Como singing “Catch a Falling Star” and “Magic Moments”. He released those songs in 1958, but I was only three at the time, so my memories are probably from 1959 or ‘60. My mum’s extended family would gather every Christmas night and sing and dance and eat and drink (and smoke!) until four or five in the morning. One of the family owned a tape recorder and it’s via the songs that came from that machine that I remember my “magic moments”. I can’t think of Christmas as a kid without hearing those two songs (and then I remember the tobacco fog – ugh!).
My next really strong musical memory is from the summer of 1964 – The Beach Boys’ “I Get Around” being played in an amusement arcade in Caister, on the east coast of England. My brother and I visited there in the summer of 2015, hoping to locate our old haunts, but alas – things had changed in the 51 years that had elapsed – go figure! I did play the song on my iPod Touch as we searched though!
Next in line is a memory from 1965. My parents had purchased a small, older caravan (trailer) in a holiday resort on the south coast of England, and there was a jukebox in the games area where my brother and I played a lot of table tennis. That jukebox seemed to have been set to play The Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” whenever there was nothing else playing.
Now – music buffs among you will know that the Stones’ 1965 hit was actually titled “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”.
And finally we’re ready to address today’s topic!
Olduns down the ages seem to throw around comments about declining standards with gay abandon (and some would also lament their inability to use the word “gay” in the sense that they grew up knowing). I decided to see if standards really had dropped on the song title front, so I dug around the interweb for grammatically incorrect titles that predate me. While most examples I found are much younger than me (perhaps adding weight to the olduns’ concerns), here are a few doozies from pre-1955.
- Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby (1944)
- Your Feet’s Too Big (1936)
- It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing) (1931)
If you’re an “ain’t hater”, you could add “Ain’t That a Shame” to the list (1955). Personally, I’m happy with “ain’t” in pop song titles and lyrics – it’s an informal contraction, and to be honest, a very useful word when writing lyrics.
Double negatives, such as the aforementioned Stones’ hit on the other hand, do annoy me. “Hound Dog” is a 1952 song made famous by Elvis Presley in 1956. The opening line – “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog”, contains a double negative as well as two style choices that I wouldn’t have made. But it was and is a very popular song, so we live with its lyrics.
The source of many of the examples I found seems to be cultures where a distinct dialect prevails. Whether it’s jazz, reggae, rap, soul, surf, merseybeat, country, or folk, the lyrics reflect the language of that culture or sub-culture. Although all are English, the English spoken in many cultures and regions doesn’t necessarily conform to “the Queen’s English”.
I spent my later childhood years in east London dropping my aitches, using “ain’t”, and probably using double negatives too. My parents had taught me the proper way to speak, but they (my mum especially) were oases in a desert of cockney English. When I started school, I learned to speak like my school friends, so “I can’t get no…” really didn’t sound odd to me. And any songs that I might have written back then (I’m admitting nothing here!) would possibly have reflected the way I’d learned to speak, just as my written English has been influenced by more than twenty years living in Canada.
Let’s face it – if all popular music lyrics had been written with the same attention to spelling, grammar and punctuation as, say, Noel Coward’s songs, the rich variety of musical styles we have today would be less authentic. Would Bob Marley’s song have been as popular if the refrain had started, “Please, my darling, don’t cry”? Would rap and its derivatives have even made it off the ground?
Yet the music, with its imperfect lyrics, infuses into the consciousness of the youthful mind, and without a “Government English Quality Health Warning” on the packaging, becomes normal, acceptable and natural. I am in no way suggesting that such warnings should be considered; I’m merely trying to highlight a dilemma that occurs when so many varieties of English exist, and then each of those varieties makes incursions into the territories of other varieties.
When I write dialogue, I have to think carefully about which words the character would use. I try to make my plays sound authentically Canadian, and to help me do that, I have a sign on my desk that says, “Think in a Canadian accent”. My internal voice still has an English accent – my external voice is kinda mid-Atlantic-ish – neither works for me when I’m writing a play.
Having grown up in an area that many Jamaicans immigrated to in England, I still remember the way they spoke. So next time I write a reggae anthem, I’ll have a Jamaican Creole dictionary on my desk, and I’ll be riddin de woaurrds in de dictionary out loud in m’bes Ja-meekaan aaccent ya.
I suggest you do too.
Your Turn
What are your thoughts about the effects of World English on your native variety? Does it matter if pop culture dilutes the correctness of formal English? If so, why? If not, why not?
The song that really gets me going is “If I was” by Midge Ure.