Tuesday's Two great songs of the day:

Or Perfection: Narrative Flow in Songwriting

After a long day out in the sun looking at strange plants, getting lost in the Home Depot, (hey, it happens), rummaging through thrift stores and going into rolling hills of Texan nature at sunset, I give you:

Tuesday's Two great songs of the day:

Silver Jews, "Random Rules"


Standout Lyrics
there's no guidance when random rules
and
I know that a lot of what I say has been lifted off of men's room walls.
Maybe I've crossed the wrong rivers and walked down all the wrong halls.


The Mountain Goats, "The Recognition Scene"







Regardless if you personally agree with the sound of these songs, they both represent strong, narrative songwriting. They contain beautiful symbolism with simple sentence structure. I've learned it is easy to make a complex sentence or idea sound beautiful, but constructing a simple, short sentence is much more difficult (1), but also, to me personally, much more beautiful. Ideas do not have to be expressed with complication.  Most things we experience, feel and know as humans can be said with rather simplistic tonality.

These two songs are two such examples. They both are simple in their construction, but very beautiful.


Ironic Footnote:
(1) Even in regards to artistic value of beauty, writing about what qualifies and quantifies 'beauty' or 'taste' becomes increasingly difficult in written expression. Just google Kant's Judgment of taste (universality vs. subjectivity) Interested?
 See:
Kant's aesthetic-judgment
To symbolically convolute this idea even farther, you have artistic production becoming something allows art to be mass produced, and thus seen, to many artists/consumers at the turn of the industrial revolution, and the rise of the capitalistic market,  a means of  creation for "less" beauty.  There are many of the same; the product lacks originality, and thus, craftsman ship, and thus, beauty.

See: 

Walter Benjamin The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Think print making- or in Benjamin's case, mass production of furniture.

However, while the criticism of art/music remains difficult to define, the expression of the human condition, the camera obscura of life- is not. We all live, we all die, and the moments spent between those two extremes, we all have universal experiences as humans. This in itself is quite simple.