A classic example is Every Breath I Take by The Police. Each vocal line separately is evocative of a distant lover proclaiming they will reunite one day, but look at the lyrics as a whole, particularly the repeated phrase “I’ll be watching you”, it clearly becomes not about heartbreak but more being a nutter and peeking through the windows. The issue there is that sometimes people don’t get past a killer melody and ignore the lyrics, and you get situations where Every Breath I Take, U2’s One or R.E.M.’s The One I Love are often mistranslated as songs of devotion, becoming songs that couples lovingly sway to or get married to, the gods of irony just out of shot keeling over with laughter.
“I remember my kid brother thinking The One I Love was actually called ‘The One-Eyed Loaf’,” says my interviewee, providing an unbeatable anecdote while proving a point about attention to lyrical detail. The mysterious voice on the other end of the line is TV On The Radio bassist Kyp Malone – so I guess I kept that secret for, what, two seconds? – responding to a question about the band’s lyrics from his apartment in Brooklyn.
Putting words under the microscope isn’t everyone’s favourite hobby, and it doesn’t work for every band. It’s just that, putting aside the arsenal of polyrhythms and mad scientist sounds that typify TV On The Radio’s music for a second, what remains are lyrics that throughout their career have focused on politics, poverty, war, class relations…all the big heavies. TVOTR are a band that deserve your brain’s attention as much as your legs – I wouldn’t waste the same treatment to the lyrics of Andrew W.K. or Bobby Gillespie.
Even their most recent album, Nine Types Of Light, promoted as their love and heartbreak album sometimes takes things in a profoundly different direction to your standard ‘boy meets girl, girl doesn’t pay attention, boy wins affection by winning battle of the bands competition’ song narrative. It’s not that they don’t believe in it and are emotionless cyborgs from the future, but they do understand that some things can get lost in translation somewhere along the artistic process from writing to performing.
“If you ever write a song to someone about a feeling, and then get to go around the world performing it…you wrote it in a moment, but that moment doesn’t freeze in time” he explains. “You’ll start to hear different meanings, sarcastic meanings and things you didn’t notice at the time.
“Like the song You, there’s a line ‘you’re the only one I’ve ever loved’, and the first time I heard that, I couldn’t stop laughing. It’s such a bold-faced lie, but if I played it for friends, some people swoon over a sentiment like that. Sometimes when it’s performed, it sounds like a very sincere love song, and then at other times it sounds like some sociopath who’s trying to manipulate someone.”
Long before the announcement that TVOTR would be returning to Australia for the Harvest Festival, Kyp was just a guy still remarking on the latest success of the band, with Nine Types Of Light equalling the chart ascension of previous album Dear Science from 2008, making it to number 12 on the Billboard Charts. Not bad for a band that began as the bedroom experiments of vocalist Tunde Adebimpe and instrumentalist-turned-producer Dave Sitek. Just returned from a series of European festivals, Malone sounded like he had his bags already packed and ready to go for Australia. “I wanna put a bug in the ear of all the people that put on festivals in Australia, because I know a band that would really love to play there again,” he laughs.
“For me, it’s always been about having more people come see us play – the whole enterprise of this experience has so far surpassed our expectations of what we thought would happen and that’s played out in a bunch of different ways” he continues. “I’m not trying to play humble, because I also believe that what we’re doing is interesting and it’s good music…but it’s definitely sometimes surprising”.
“We got to play the Radio City Music Hall in New York at the top of this tour, and that was an invigorating show in a way that shows haven’t been for me yet. It had a lot to do with the grandeur of the place, being from New York, and from the people that have played there. It’s like I know we can fill a park in Brooklyn every time we play, but to actually have this place full…there was a moment where it was shocking.”
Twenty years ago Jane’s Addiction proclaimed that ‘Nothing’s Shocking’, and now Dave Sitek plays bass with that band (if you’re into the whole six degrees thing). Perhaps they only said that because they had yet to play at Radio City Music Hall?
BY MITCH ALEXANDER
