Ballroom Dancing

Photo by Gary Miller

Saying the Unsayable with Jarvis Cocker

Austin Convention Center, Wednesday, March 18

Armed with a large wooden pointing stick, ex-Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker straddled the line between rock star and professor Wednesday afternoon with a lecture on lyrics. A standing-room-only crowd packed the session, which kicked off with the seemingly anticlimactic assertion that lyrics aren't all that important in pop music. Cocker played the Kingsmen's unintelligible version of "Louie, Louie" to illustrate this. "Why are these lyrics good?" he asked. "Because they are." Even so, Cocker referenced everyone from Dory Previn to Hot Chocolate to show how a good lyric is often what makes the sale when coupled with good music and a good performance. He broke up the didactic portions of his presentation with acoustic-guitar interludes, including a rare performance of his 1978 songwriting debut, "Shakespeare Rock." "We were too inept to play other people's songs, so we had to write our own," Cocker quipped. Arguing against the idea that lyrics equal poetry, he equated reading lyrics while listening to music to isolating drum tracks. His discourse on "the tyranny of rhyme" was especially funny and illuminating. While most anyone can spot a cheap rhyme, Cocker compared and contrasted food-related lyrics from ABC, Nick Cave, and Des'ree like an engineer would explain stress failures. If Cocker quits his day job, surely there's a place in academia for such discourse.