Hear That Lonesome Whippoorwill?
Most people don’t listen to lyrics. They hear them, for sure; but the lyrics aren’t the main allure of the song-listening experience. I teach a class on American Literature of the Sixties (which is really just an excuse for me to indoctrinate my students into the great music of the decade). We spend a lot of time listening to the pioneers of postmodern American songwriting, those songwriters who pushed popular music forward as a lyrical art. Almost universally and unabashedly, my students admit that they don’t really listen to the lyrics when they experience a song. For them, music is more visceral than poetic. As someone who considers lyrics to be primary in good songwriting, this majority sentiment drives me nuts! But I am certain that, at least in evolutionary terms, my students are right. The high intellectualism of lyrical craft is, for scientific reasons, insignificant to writing a pop song.
Our species (that’s modern Homo sapiens) is roughly 160,000 years old. According to most anthropological hypotheses, this aligns with the birth of language. In other words, what helped us outcompete other hominids was (very likely) our evolving linguistic capacity. (If I were ever going to be brief, this fact alone would settle the argument; no such luck.) A lot of species communicate, however, and have been doing so way longer than us. Trees, ants, dolphins: coordinated messaging isn’t particular to us. Song most certainly isn’t unique to our species. Birds and whales have been singing far longer than we. What is clear, then, is that wordless song, as a tool of communication, is old and instrumental to the survival of many species.
Unrelated to songwriting and on a different atheistic quest altogether, I read Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct last summer. He dedicates a whole chapter to the evolutionary advantages of music, song, and trance. Highlighting the foundational importance of communication, he concludes:
“it’s the sharing of information that binds a group of individuals together. This can be spoken information, but more important than words in the binding process is emotional information. This is conveyed by different, and probably much older, forms of communication than language. The vehicles of emotional information are gestures, such as dance, and evocative sounds, such as music, including wordless chanting and drumming.”
In other words, beautiful melodies and hypnotizing beats speak to us on a much deeper and more emotional level than symbolic language. He adds that music and dance likely coevolved together.
Do your favorite songs move you? Do they make you feel? Do they make you dance? It ain’t the words making your hips move like that!
Words arrived in our species hundreds of thousands of years after dance and music. Darwin knew this. In his Descent of Man he suggests: “We can thus understand how it is that music, dancing, song, and poetry are such very ancient arts. We may go even further than this and…believe that musical sounds afforded one of the bases for the development of language.” We, thus, respond neurologically to rhythm and melody for adaptive reasons in the oldest parts of our brain. I’m not sure if that answers the riddle about the chicken or the egg; nevertheless, trust how you feel. Is it the groove of a song that moves you or the words? As someone who has (regrettably) found himself (in his late-30s) dancing on top of a table to house music (of all things) in a club in Miami at 2:00 AM (it was a bachelor party, okay), I can assure you; it is most certainly the groove.
Think about music, then, as a rhythmic and melodic landscape that speaks to us, most deeply, beyond language. Our favorite songs inspire us to move and dance; it’s the beat or harmony that draws us in. Eventually you learn the lyrics (mostly you half learn the lyrics) and, when you’re alone in your car, you belt out the words in some kind of magical incantation. It’s the ancient ritual of singing (rather than deconstructing the lyrics or the meaning of the song) that transports you emotionally and spiritually. You feel connected to something: the singer, perhaps, or more likely to a moment or feeling in time that’s no longer a specific moment or feeling in time at all but, instead, a vibration or echo of that moment or feeling. Experiencing music in this way is connective and transcendent.
When you hear your favorite song, don’t you feel healed in some way? With? Alive?
The argument for the primacy of rhythm and melody in music seems evident — in the scientific record and in your personal musical experience. But, I want to at least make a bleeding-plea for the cultural value of lyrics.
In his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari ambitiously attempts to outline the evolution of human culture from the pre-lingual past to the modern day. In his research, he noticed something stark: a pattern of concentrated human achievement and cultural evolution that was unprecedented. He called this specific span of our collective history, which occurred between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, the Cognitive Revolution.
At its simplest, the Cognitive Revolution was about how our use of language evolved. Though, as I’ve established, our language was not the first among sentient creatures, ours was the first language that allowed us to connect a limited number of sounds and signs to produce a seemingly infinite number of sentence patterns, each with a distinct meaning. We also developed the ability to not simply communicate about things we see, but we made the cognitive and linguistic leap to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. We figured out a way to adapt language to do more than simply communicate. We figured out how to wield the power of language to craft complex fictional stories. Harari concludes:
“Legends, myths, gods, and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution. Many animals and human species could previously say, ‘Careful! A lion!’ Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say, ‘The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.’ This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language…. Fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things but to do so collectively.”
While some species can cooperate on mass scale and with thousands and thousands of individuals of their species group (think, again, of ants, for example) species closely related to Homo sapiens prior to the Cognitive Revolution likely had what Harari calls a “maximum natural size” or “critical threshold” of about 150 individuals. Because species groups competing for territory and resources and warring with other competitive groups require hierarchies and an intimate social order, something must have occurred during the Cognitive Revolution that allowed for our species to begin cooperating on a larger and larger scale, thus outcompeting many other species. What happened was the emergence and invention of fiction: fiction, most likely, communicated through ritual song. Telling mythological stories through songs, then, was the innovation that propelled our species to the top of the evolutionary food chain. Lyrical song, rich in fictional, poetic lore, helped us evolve en masse beyond survival and into civilization.
I admit, it’s most certainly the rhythm and melody that move you deeply. But, I submit, it’s the lyrics that draw you into our collective symbolic order. Song lyrics (if they’re trying to do something more than just move the melody) bind emotional truth to rational understanding. They raise you above the physical and impassioned and offer a portal into the intellectual. A lot of people can bang a drum and hum a tune. How many try to fit the world in a song?
