The Big Questions The story of my life: Is there such a thing as an honest song?

The other day, I received a press release concerning Foals, a young British band signed to Sub Pop here in the States. Foals rode in on the extreme tail end of last decade’s post-punk revival, which is too bad; it’s actually a pretty good band, in an inessential, inconsequential kind of way. Apparently Foals has a new album coming out, and while that prospect doesn’t exactly excite me, I don’t dread it, either. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, Foals is mostly harmless. But one small part of the press release did excite me, in entirely the wrong way:

“I feel like I’m wearing less masks with my lyrics now,” offers 23-year-old frontman and guitarist Yannis Philippakis. “Before I felt secure behind cryptic images—I liked stuff that didn’t show me to myself, but on this record I tried to express things with more truth.”

As a joke, I posted this savory morsel of pretension on my Facebook page. A wise friend of mine left this comment, ostensibly addressed to Philippakis: “Oh, honey, THERE’S NOTHING CRYPTIC ABOUT 23.” Snark aside, my friend has a point, but Philippakis’ youth isn’t really the issue. Philippakis’ soul-searching, self-important sentiment is one I’ve heard echoed in a gazillion press releases and interviews with musicians of all ages over the years. Basically, the sentiment is this: There’s something inherently phony or evasive about poetic, abstract, and/or fictional lyrics; it’s far more honest to write songs about your own life. But lately I’ve been wondering, is there truly such a thing as an honest song?

I’ll admit that the question is fundamentally unanswerable. You might as well ask “How do you quantify honesty?” or “Is anything really honest?” Pondering such a conundrum forces you to assume way too much about the inner reality and deepest intentions of a songwriter. But that doesn’t make it any less fun to bat the question around, especially since music fans, critics, and songwriters themselves take the issue of honesty so seriously.

The whole honesty issue—particularly how it supposedly correlates to drawing inspiration from personal experience—came up recently in an interview I did with John Lydon in advance of his Public Image Ltd. reunion tour. When I asked him about PiL’s well-earned reputation for artiness, Lydon, who’s made a career out of not giving a fuck what people thought of him, got defensive. In the same way the Foals guy conflates art with dishonesty and autobiography with honesty, Lydon wanted to make it clear he had nothing to do with “craftily manufactured” art, and that even an abstruse, aurally challenging song like “Death Disco” is really a grief-stricken “scream of pain.” He then goes on to say—much as your average, baldly confessional singer-songwriter like Chris Carrabba would—that his body of work is “quite an accurate way, really, of describing [my] life. That’s what music is for me.” In a sense, this perceived schism between art and honesty skirts the boundaries of the whole rockism debate, at least as it was renewed by Robert Christgau in early 1990, as he stood in the rubble of the ’80s: That is, the pros and cons of the notion that pop music should come from the gut, bypass innovation and intellectualism, and thus maintain some kind of emotional purity.

Going back to the ’80s and early ’90s, one songwriter always struck me as being achingly—at times shamelessly—honest: Mike Ness of Social Distortion. He’s made a career from songs that immortalize his bad-boy image. And there’s no doubt Ness has walked the walk: His battles with drugs and the law are well-documented. The problem is, they’ve mostly been documented by him; Social D’s 1988 album, Prison Bound, serves up plenty of tales of junkie life and loss. But in an interview with Flipside around the same time, Ness admits—only after being asked point-blank—that he never served hard time: “Well, I haven’t been to prison,” he admits in the article, “but I’ve been in and out of county jail, which was basically due to drug addiction. But we got kind of a blues image, an outlaw blues image.” And in the band’s breakout song from 1990, tellingly titled “Story Of My Life,” Ness concludes a laundry-list of biographical images with the line, “So I sit at the edge of my bed / I strum my guitar and I sing an outlaw love song.”

I’m not trying to say Ness is the punk-rock James Frey. There’s no denying the man has smacked himself up (in more ways than one), and county jail is hardly a walk in the park. But when Ness self-consciously acknowledges his “outlaw image”—to the point of actually singing about it—it suggests manipulation, even exploitation. In the same Flipside interview, he talks in warm-fuzzy terms about his Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Why doesn’t he sing about those? Because in the act of writing an “honest” song, even the most well-intentioned songwriters have to sift through their experiences to find the most lurid, colorful, dramatic details. The mundane gets discarded, unless you’re Jonathan Richman. What’s left is a cartoonish honesty, a self-caricature of the songwriter that can feel less honest than a total fabrication, due to the very fact that it’s presented as straight-up truth. 

Funny enough, one of Ness’ most cryptic contemporaries is Morrissey. (I love both Ness and Morrissey, which means I have far more in common with your average rockabilly chick than I’d care to admit, but that’s the subject of another column.) It’s funny because Morrissey uses the same baggage-laden lyric Ness does: In The Smiths’ “Half A Person,” which predates “The Story Of My Life” by three years, Morrissey sings, “And If you have five seconds to spare / Then I’ll tell you the story of my life.” Morrissey being Morrissey, he quickly veers into the kind of sissified territory that the macho Ness wouldn’t visit in a thousand years: “Sixteen, clumsy, and shy / I went to London and I / booked myself in at the YWCA / I said I like it here, can I stay? / I like it here, can I stay? / And do you have a vacancy for a back-scrubber?”

Although the interplay between the song’s female protagonist and Morrissey’s own persona is a bit ambiguous, he clearly isn’t trying to lead anyone to believe that the events in “Half A Person” actually happened. His strength as a songwriter has always been the way he semi-fictionalizes or just plain daydreams the subjects of his songs, including a vivid cast of characters—most unnamed, many sung in the first person—that clearly aren’t meant to be Morrissey. And yet they are: By being fantastical, absurd, and at times surreal, his songs take on a higher emotional truth, one that feels more real precisely for its lack of strict realism.

It’s a tangled web he weaves. In interviews, Morrissey has said things like, “I do feel that life is excessively overrated” and, “Perhaps I’m unique because people are so dull,” statements that could have fallen from the lips of one of his characters, which goes to show how fully and openly he blurs the lines between his psyche, his public persona, and his songs. Ironically, he sounds most cartoonish when he’s being blatantly autobiographical, as he is in songs like “Why Don’t You Find Out For Yourself” (“Some men here / they have a special interest in your career”) and “Sorrow Will Come In The End” (“Legalized theft / leaves me bereft”). But Morrissey himself seems to know that these bitchy, injured-rock-star diatribes ring hollow; you could count those songs of his on one hand.

Of course, the debate over honesty in songwriting didn’t die with Christgau’s rumination at the end of the ’80s. Case in point: the aforementioned press release from Foals, in which this Philippakis kid has decided he’s somehow being “more true” by “wearing less masks” and vowing to “show me to myself.” At the other end of the spectrum is The Hold Steady, a band that’s often portrayed as the second coming (or fourth, or 10th) of straightforward, authentic rock ’n’ roll. But for all of his gritty, photorealistic detail, lyricist Craig Finn is more of a yarn-spinner than a memoirist. It’s a deliberate, delicious friction, and one of the reasons why The Hold Steady’s music feels so universal. At the same time, Finn’s many portraits of the artist as a young Twin Cities punk—for instance, the teeming Sid And Nancy-like apocrypha of “Your Little Hoodrat Friend”—shift so dramatically between journalism and myth, the veracity of his lyrics becomes moot.

Either way, it’s a hell of a lot more believable, not to mention entertaining, than hearing some confessional singer-songwriter recite his diary. Not to pick on the aforementioned Carrabba—okay, what the hell, why not?—Dashboard Confessional is a perfect example of autobiography served so straight, it sounds like it’s being preached from some moral high ground. “The days will pass you by,” Carrabba sings on Dashboard’s 2006 hit “Don’t Wait”: “Don’t wait to lay your armor down.” Personally, I’d rather hear a songwriter with at least a little armor left.