By The Landlord
"You should learn not to make personal remarks," Alice said with some severity. "It's very rude." The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he said was, "Why is a raven like a writing-desk?"
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
“Sitting on a cornflake, waiting for the van to come
Corporation tee-shirt, stupid bloody Tuesday
Man, you've been a naughty boy, you let your face grow long.”
– John Lennon on Beatles' I Am The Walrus
“I drive a Rolls-Royce
'Cause it's good for my voice.” – Marc Bolan, T Rex, Children of the Revolution
"Little red wagon, little red bike, I ain't no monkey but I know what I like …"
"He hears the ticking of the clocks and walks along with a parrot that talks … “
– Bob Dylan, Buckets of Rain and Simple Twist of Fate
When I was a kid, my dad used to say a rhyme to help remember the number of days in each month: "Thirty days hath September, April, June and no wonder. All the rest have coffee for breakfast, except gran, and she rides a bike." He was always a fan of the silly and surreal. But it does actually work, at least if you translate no wonder as November, and coffee for breakfast as 31 days and the pedalling grandmother as February with 28 days and 29 in leap years. But while there's purpose here, there's also entertainment, a bending of the rules into the daftly vivid, and a functional saying is transformed into a colourful, if slightly crazy mnemonic.
There are plenty of variants, but the magic here is that it’s also a classic non sequitur, from the Latin meaning 'does not follow', the conversational literary device often used for humorous purposes, in which there's no meaning, or at least not any conventional meaning relative to what preceded it, and often creating a splash of tangential absurdity.
And so this week, we're all about the non sequitur in song lyrics – words, phrases, or even whole lines that seem to go off at a purposeless departure. They might be surreal, funny, disturbing or pleasing, but why do they happen in song lyrics or poetry? In the lyrical examples above, it might be on purpose. John Lennon deliberately wrote such stuff to baffle those who studied the Beatles. Marc Bolan's and Bob Dylan’s examples seem also be partly fuelled by heading towards end of line rhyme, and whether they are plain silly, clever, or both, somehow they remain strangely vivid.
Overall, the potency of the non sequitur is that has has meaninglessness masquerading as meaning and that strangely, can often end up being very musical. Why? There are many artists influenced by the surrealists and the lyricism of John Lennon, writing words that have no meanings, but sound great. Shaun Ryder of the Happy Mondays and Black Grape for example, says he is in the ‘Strawberry Fields school of lyrics’, for that reason. His methodology is to writing phrases down on bits of paper, stuff them in an old teapot, and when it is time to write a song, pull out the teapot and see what comes out. It’s another version of Dadaism, and the methods also employed at various times by David Bowie and Brian Eno.
Dylan will could likely come up a lot this week as a master of the non sequitur. He doesn’t just do the non sequitur in individual lines, but has a brain that leaps tangentially from image to image, painting a strange landscape that is exactly like dreaming, as this well-known 1965 number shows:
“I shook his hand and said goodbye and went back out on the street,
When a bowling ball came down the road and knocked me off my feet.
A pay phone was ringin' and it just about blew my mind
When I picked it up and said hello, this foot came through the line.”
There are lots of overlaps between the non sequitur, the red herring and the surreal, but it’s the wild, leaping salmon of subconsciousness and imagination that joins them. There’s plenty of it in hip off. Here’s Jay-Z turning a piece of sexist braggadocio into a strangely vivid slice of non sequitur nonsense: “Oww/Hoes turn their heads like owls/I’m the man of the hour/Triple entendre don’t even ask me how.”
Probably not the owl Jay-Z pictured. Remedios Varo, Creation of the Birds (1957)
The non sequitur is often fuelled by talking at cross-purposes, whether that’s one person’s inner divisions and strata of mind, or two people. In Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, this happens a lot in the absurd world of military camp chaos:
"What are you doing?" Yossarian asked guardedly when he entered the tent, although he saw at once. "There's a leak in here," Orr said. "I'm trying to fix it." "Please stop it," said Yossarian. "You're making me nervous." "When I was a kid," Orr replied, "I used to walk around all day with crab apples in my cheeks. One in each cheek."
Or in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in which the two main characters, tramp in the park, seem to recreate a conversation of the subconscious:
ESTRAGON: What did we do yesterday?
VLADIMIR: What did we do yesterday?
ESTRAGON: Yes.
VLADIMIR: Why . . . (Angrily.) Nothing is certain when you're about.
ESTRAGON: In my opinion we were here.
VLADIMIR: (looking round) You recognise the place?
ESTRAGON: I didn't say that.
VLADIMIR: Well?
ESTRAGON: That makes no difference.
But from the surreal form of non sequitur, another main strand for this topic is the formal fallacy, which comes in many sub-forms, but essentially revealing a deductive argument that is invalid - statements that use but blinders on certain facts to make their point. For some reason the examples that come to my mind all involve animals:
Bats are mammals. Bats can fly. Pigs are mammals, so they can also fly.
Elephant repellent spray works. I sprayed our house with elephant repellent. That's why there are no elephants in our house.
Playful …
Or if we wanted to go more musical:
I can play the guitar. The guitar is a musical instrument. A trombone is an instrument, therefore I can play the trombone.
A song came on the radio. It's about bananas. Then they played another song. So it must also be about bananas.
The latter of course would be true if the second song was on a Song Bar playlist about bananas, but you get my meaning.
And then again …
But life is chock full with non sequiturs, as we flip channels and websites, take in random data, products, images, sounds. Politicians employ them all the time, responding to questions not with answers, but with other remarks, or indeed with speeches that tell a narrative that has nothing to do with anything but self-promotion. All you have to do is listen to any political debate, interview or question time. But then there’s a whole new level. Donald Trump. It was thought that his skill was to talk like the common man, not a slick orator or lawyer. But that really isn’t that case. Wince at any of Trump’s off-cue speeches are like a small child grabbing at random chunks of phrases like candy floss. It’s a frightening prospect because he’s not in a sweet candy shop, but has access to billions of dollars and nuclear weapons. His mind “comes up with various things”:
He makes Grandpa Simpson focused and on point:
What’s happening here is crazy cross-wire of cognitive bias, private leaps of the imagination coming out into the open, like a telephone conversation with the the inarticulate self that the reader or listening can only hear one side of. As Bart said to Grandpa Simpson: “How do you know so much about American history?” Grandpa replies: “I pieced it mostly together from sugar packets.” Trump gets his history and geography from watching Fox and Friends.
Wiley Inc hits the nail on right on the sidewalk
Non sequiturs are constant in the media broadcast, print or websites. For example, newspaper articles tend to include details that have nothing to do with the story. In my news editing career, it is those details I’ve always looked out for that tend to give away the agenda of that publication. So for example, in a story about a woman who was involved in a crime, The Daily Mail would more often than not have to mention her ethnicity, and whether she was an immigrant, the London Evening Standard would have to include how much house she lived in was worth, and the The Sun would have to include something about her appearance, particularly if she was sexy or curvy. Thankfully I’ve never worked, nor ever will work for any of them.
But it’s also the more elevated publications that do this. Travel writer Bill Bryson points out: “Non sequiturs are most often encountered in newspapers, where constructions such as the following are common: 'Slim, of medium height, and with sharp features, Mr. Smith's technical skills are combined with strong leadership qualities' (New York Times). What, we might ask, do Mr. Smith's height and features have to do with his leadership qualities?”
And it is on the subject of climate change, especially when arguing against it is concerned that the formal fallacy non sequitur is most commonly used, as explained by John Llewellyn:
“‘Global warming was caused by sunspots, or fluctuations in the Earth's orbit, or volcanic eruptions. Therefore it cannot be caused by mankind.’ The 'therefore' is the giveaway, the delicious non sequitur: just because Earth has warmed for one or another reason in the past is no reason why it cannot warm for a completely different reason in the future.”
But let us step now into he music, and to start things off, here’s a band with a lovely album title - Songs, Stories and Other Non Sequiturs, and selection of material playfully exploring this very subject:
So then, this week’s sensational summoner and sorter of the non sequitur, surreal or otherwise, is the superb severin! Put your suggestions in comments below by 11pm UK time on Monday for playlists published on Wednesday. Please also quote the lyrics that contain a non sequitur. As they say, music is music, eggs is eggs, and if you want buy ice-cream today make sure the record shop is open.
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