King’s X: Looking for Love: Explication
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?path=AS...=9325
Piece: Looking For Love
Artist: King's X
Players: Doug Pinnick, Vocals, Bass;
Ty Tabor, Guitar, Vocals;
Jerry Gaskill, Drums
Album: Ear Candy (Atlantic, 1996)
Length: 02:58
Genre: Progressive Metal
Medium: Guitar, bass guitar, drum set, vocals.
Farmer* Would Be Proud: The Ability of King’s X to Interweave Music & Lyric
The quick tempo and driving, highly syncopated rhythms of this piece combine with dissonant, almost mournful harmonies over a strong but conjunct melody to make a spectacular setting for the lyrics whose content could also be described as mournful, driving, and dissonant.
As the song starts out at about half-volume in only the right speaker, we catch the hint from the grittily distorted solo guitar that this is a song with a gritty, driving—almost, indeed, desperate—subject matter. The second guitar joins in at the end of the first phrase, filling the left speaker, to complement and harmonize with the guitar in the right speaker. Take careful notice of the way this is done: if the Right-guitar is playing a solo, perhaps we can exercise poetic license to think of this as an individual who is singing his or her song, incomplete because there is no complementary individual, no one to balance out the sound, no one with whom to harmonize. Ah, but then!—the Left-guitar joins in with harmony, and together, they complete the final punctuation of this opening phrase. Joined then by an explosion of percussion (perhaps at the joy of having found one another!), the two guitars drop into unison to support Pinnick as he enters with the lyrics.
Lyrics play as an important part of the music of King’s X as does the (arguably poetic, expressive) music. The first lyrical phrase of this song comes in as the guitars fade into the background to allow the center stage go to Pinnick, and he chants:
I want to,
I need to,
I got to move on down the line.
If not to,
to make me,
I should have stood behind the lines.
What is this?
What have I?
What am I? Not what you see.
So take me,
so use me,
I'm stupid—I don't want to—
Oh! Lookin' for love.
I say “chants” here because it does indeed give that effect; if we only consider the cadence of the lyrics themselves, we hear that they are arranged so that they give us the driving syncopation that stirs at least two distinct emotions in us. For one, syncopation in this light helps us feel the mood of the piece: not everything in the singer’s life is lined up perfectly, not everything is perfectly organized—just as a runner might twist his ankle during a race, he knows that he cannot quit and so he does not—he moves on, limping, and in this case, searching (or, as it were, “Looking”). The second aspect of mood created here by the syncopation is the notion of searching, but in an even more directly kinesthetic way: just as the strong rhythms invite us to tap our feet or bob our heads to the music, so is created in our minds’ eyes the image of desperation, quickness, the struggle within the singer as he belts out the melodious lyrics.
Furthermore, the music and text reflect each other in mood and in spirit in a way reminiscent of the English madrigal: notice how the percussion stumbles on “I don’t want to,” as though both singer and music are backpedaling in protest to whatever it is the singer does not want to do. The fact that “I want to, I need to, I got to” and “If not to,” and so on, are staggered the way that they are, we derive the notion of ambivalence through both the instruments’ rhythms and the singer’s voice. He’s not singing at the top of his lungs, but he is singing loudly and almost disjointedly, like a man unsure of himself or deeply troubled about something. Pinnick has an uncanny knack for harmonizing and developing deeply textured vocals even while on the edge of shouting, such as when, in the single-line chorus, he exclaims, “Oh!,” which sets us up as a colon does a written sentence for the explanation for the outburst: “[I’m] looking for love!”
At this point, with the end of the lyrical line, so ends the guitar line with its own sort of phrasing that returns the listener to ground zero, setting the stage for more lyrics, similarly syncopated, and similarly chanted:
A standard,
a program,
religion burns me at the stake.
I questioned,
I listened,
I worshiped—how can I relate?
I worked so
hard at it
... oh, Lord, the bruises and the burns.
I just don't,
don't get it.
I guess I lost my faith.
Oh! Lookin' for love.
Now we see the reason for this inner turmoil, the reason that the singer is so mournful and disjointed: he has tried to understand and explore faith, and has lost it, or turned away.
At this point, the distortion on the guitars becomes still more ethereal, less gritty for a few measures, and the percussion stutters around, giving the impression that one is lost and searching, as though an Englishman has trekked off the beaten path in the midst of a midnight fog and cannot seem to make out London’s lights. The swirling, ascending line in the lead guitar undercut by the dramatically dark and foreboding bass guitar’s line leads into a guitar solo, cleaner than the gritty opening but more mournful and less seemingly self-assured of where it wants to go than the opening line of the song; notice also that it is a solo guitar—where is the complementary partner? We don’t know: we understand now that the mood is loneliness save for the bass, although even that only adds counterpoint and depth to the wailing guitar.
Pinnick finishes out the song with “Oh! Looking for love,” then a momentary pause in the music finds the three harmonizing with a single affirmation (”Yeah…”), followed immediately by a fractional moment’s silence before the driving guitars pick back up for the closing phrase and the singer’s voice becomes louder and more desperate—then the song ends abruptly, as though to put the seal on all that’s been said, lending finality to the sentiment: the singer is left in that state, we gather, because that is where it is left. (Contrast “67″ from the same album, which has no discernible beginning or end in the way that “Looking For Love” does.)
King’s X has a consistently moving way of setting text to music so well that they play off of each other: the music doesn’t just support and add counterpoint to the lyrics, the lyrics do the same for the music, such that neither is dominant and both are interwoven to provide utmost impact. The lyrics, sung as they are, could stand alone as a reflective poetry reading; the music, played as it is, could tell the story by itself just as well. Note that I did not pick this song because I agree with the point—I find it to be a rather fatalistic song, and quite a bit darker than my personal outlook; I chose it because the text fits the music and vice-versa, and I’m a big fan of the way King’s X express themselves through their music.
* John Farmer (1570-1601) was a composer of English madrigals very adept at word-painting. Word-painting is the usage of melody to express the same sentiment or meaning of the words sung within it; e.g., quick, high fluttering to accompany laughter, rising or falling tones to intimate the ascension or decension of a bird, &c. King’s X is a band also adept, in places, at word-painting; they are masters of matching lyric and riff.
Note: all lyric snippets are Copyright © 1996 King’s X and Atlantic Records. (I make no personal income from this site or this post. Don’t sue, thanks.)
December 29th, 2006 at 04:35:34
[…] It’s just that, perhaps, she didn’t flesh it out enough. Instead of Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance, I propose a few less abstract labels. The first one looks a lot like Pablo Francisco’s sketch of “Tommy” in his standup routine in New York on Comedy Central: “No! It’s not over! I love you! The band’s gonna make it, c’mon”—now, that’s Denial. Anger, well, maybe it looks something like this. The third level of stages of grief usually looks like something we’ve all done before, at some time or another, involving some good work that we promise to do (consistently or not) in exchange for a change of a situation for the better. Of course, none of us hold up our ends of the bargains, but that’s only because we somehow know that if we did, we’d be no better off. Depression usually looks like something of an amalgam of that which has already been described and that which is yet to come, a transitition : a little anger mixed with acceptance. […]