Subjective versus objective

Some songwriters succeed for a while in lending weight to their subjective musings through the power of their music, as in the case of Stevie Wonder. In the early Seventies, he began writing songs from the point of view of a blind, black man (something which he had managed to resist throughout the Sixties) and consequently became very short sighted. Stevie has said in interviews that he likes to write a song while still feeling the emotion that the song is meant to express, so as to make it easier to achieve the right musical mood, or something. Whatever: this is the primary conceit of subjectivity: a subjective artist will take his heartache (for instance) and try to write a song about it right there and then, without regard for thousands of years of poetical tradition. Starting from scratch in such a way might strike one as rather arrogant, if it were not rather palpably indicative of deep insecurity: by setting a personal experience to music, a subjective songwriter means to convince us of the profundity of his emotional response. He (ab)uses music to give credence to his feelings, as if to say: “My personal experience engendered this beautiful (sad, angry, depressed, violent) musical mood. How profound my feelings are!” The modern songwriter is a vain man. Who is he trying to kid: surely everyone knows that you have to be an emotional cripple to be a songwriter.

A subjective artist is a bad artist. Writing a song about heartache, he will, as in the case of Stevie Wonder, keep in his creative consciousness only the image of his recent lover and the pain she has caused him. Unsurprisingly, the resulting song will be filled with lamenting sighs, woeful exclamations and, most tellingly: pleading questions. It will have a title along the lines of: “Why won’t you love me?” Listening to a Stevie Wonder record from the early Seventies is like listening to a ten-year-old whining: You will hear Stevie betray neither the slightest sense of humour, nor the least amount of self-knowledge. Stevie is still so close to the emotions about which he is writing, that he has no real notion of where they came from or what they mean. That is what happens when a blind man tries to look at himself.

When an objective artist has his heart broken, the last thing he will do is reach for his guitar. He will wait ten years, add a few more heartaches to his creative consciousness and find a decisive answer as to why “she won’t love him.” In other words, he creates distance between himself and his subject.

Art allows people to look at themselves from a distance, to take a break from the pressures of being continuously inside their own skin. If ‘honest’ emotional reportage is all to which you aspire as an artist, you should go into journalism and leave art to those who know that until your lovers suddenly roll into one archetypal heartbreaker before your very eyes, and all your meaningless heartache has matured into melancholic joy, you are not ready to write a love song, or any song for that matter.