By The Landlord
“Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice; Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet
“Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.” – Bruce Lee
“Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud.” – Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter
“I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.” – Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
“You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway. No one wants advice - only corroboration.” – John Steinbeck
“I always advise people never to give advice.” – P.G. Wodehouse
“I don't want to advise anyone to do anything, apart from try and stay alive. That's my advice - don't die.” – Lemmy
Welcome to the Advice Line. Can I help? Or can you help me? How should I proceed here? Any thoughts? Advice is a strange currency – freely offered, yet rarely taken, almost like the reverse of money. And it’s generously scattered across all walks of life and forms of human communication, from airy, flighty social media to heavy proverbs on ageing gravestones. It’s in many artforms, literature, philosophy, film, poetry, and often in the lyrics of songs, whether as quoted in a narrative or offered in more general terms. It might be practical or philosophical, benevolent or biased, critical or contradictory. Never do this. Always do that. Go your own way. Follow your heart. Ignore your head. Go with your instinct and urges. Good advice and bad, the homespun and the learned, the erudite and the earthy, the practical and the ethereal, everything from relationships to fixing your hair, from being yourself to training your dog.
It might be a little tempting to stray into idioms and proverbs this week, which has been touched on in the past with huge response, and also among closest topic here that the Song Bar was the topic of ignoring advice and being stubborn, the latter being the principle subject of those excellent playlists. But while general wisdom in advice form may be common, it might be preferable to make this week’s advice topic as colourful, obscure and specific as possible, so the strangest most unusual, and more detailed the advice, the better. So for example while songs that tell you to love yourself might be very worthy, are there any out there that explain how to maintain your moustache, how to train a bear, or not to get into a relationship with a tennis player, as love means nothing to them? Drum and cymbal crash …
Let’s jump into a few example that have more than likely been picked for other topics and are perhaps rather obvious already, allowing space for other advice songs to be suggested. To demand respect, and respect yourself are wonderfully and respectively advised, for example by Aretha Franklin and the Staple Singers. Christina Aguilera is keen to remind anyone that “you’re beautiful” and that “no matter what they say words can’t bring you down”. Michael Jackson worried a lot about being beautiful, undoubtedly spent much time in front of the mirror worrying about his appearance, but did he take his own advice a little too literally in Man In The Mirror?
“If you want to make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself, and then make a change.”
Meanwhile R.E.M. advised that while Everybody Hurts, it’s best to:
“When your day is long
And the night, the night is yours alone
When you're sure you've had enough
Of this life, well hang on.”
But how about something that mixes the practical with the philosophical?
Extra washing instructions …
And what to write next? Bobby McFerrin’s songs are full of advice in different forms. “Don’t worry, be happy” is his go-to advice to self and others, while in Opportunity, the advice from an impressive old friend turns out bad: “With a plan guaranteed, showed me the papers as he walked me to the car. His shoes finest leather He said: “You could wear this style. Follow my advice…”
Many advice songs report that which is passed from parent to child, ignored or otherwise, but in Harry Chapin’s case, and Cat’s In The Cradle, the advice is given more generally as behavioural pattern that picks up on small details, son seeking instruction from his father in a series of delayed promises, ignoring own advice, but the ultimate irony in that son ends up following the implicit actions of the other:
“My son turned ten just the other day
He said, thanks for the ball, dad, come on let's play
Can you teach me to throw, I said, ah, not today
I got a lot to do, he said, that's okay
And he, he walked away, but his smile never dimmed
It said, I'm gonna be like him, yeah
You know I'm gonna be like him …”
By contrast some songs, particularly when referencing age and youth, also offer advice in the most direct and varied form. The words of film director Baz Luhrmann’s 1999 hit song "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)", also known as "The Sunscreen Song” were largely taken from an essay titled “Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young", also known as "Wear Sunscreen”. It was written as a hypothetical commencement speech by columnist Mary Schmich, originally published in June 1997 in the Chicago Tribune. The essay, giving various pieces of advice on how to live a happier life and avoid common frustrations, was mistakenly thought to be given by author Kurt Vonnegut at MIT. But in any case, Baz’s rendition has plenty of amusing lines:
“Be careful whose advice you buy but be patient with those who supply it
Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past
From the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts
And recycling it for more than it's worth …
But trust me on the sunscreen.”
And it’s not just sunscreen that applies to everybody:
Follow the safety advice …
So as I fling open the Song Bar doors for another week’s business, there’s a big crowd of guests queuing not only to offer advice but also seek it. It’s a classic scene of customers sipping drinks, seeking guidance from the barman, but then offering up their own. Samuel Taylor Coleridge has his wine, and tells me that: “Advice is like snow - the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind.”
It’s a lovely image to start. In the philosopher’s corner, Aeschylus and Sophocles are getting stuck into the topic as well as a big flagon. “No enemy is worse than bad advice,” says Sophocles. “Yes my friend,” replies Aeschylus. “It is easy when we are in prosperity to give advice to the afflicted.”
And who’s that propping up the Bar, almost falling off his stool? It’s barfly and poet Charles Bukowski of course. Quoting his own Hot Water Music, he says with cackle:
“What is your advice to young writers?”
“Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes.”
He’s certainly taking his own advice liberally, but others don’t do that so smoothly. “Advice is like castor oil, easy enough to give but dreadful uneasy to take,” says Josh Billings, aka the 19th-century American humorist Henry Wheeler Shaw.
“Yes, advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t,” adds the author Erica Jong.
Let’s hope no one ignored this one:
Not subtle, but definitely tender …
Helen Fielding, author of the popular Bridget Jones Diary books, which were originally a column in the Independent newspaper, has a bottle of champagne and is liberally offering some life advice from her “Rules for Living by Olivia Joules”, which include these vital items:
1. Never panic. Stop, breathe, think.
2. No one is thinking about you. They're thinking about themselves, just like you.
3. Never change haircut or colour before an important event.
4. Nothing is either as bad or good as it seems.
5. Do as you would be done by, e.g. thou shalt not kill.
6. It is better to buy one expensive thing that you really like than several cheap ones that you only quite like.
7. Hardly anything matters: if you get upset, ask yourself, "Does it really matter?"
8. The key to success lies in how you pick yourself up from failure.
9. Be honest and kind.
10. Only buy clothes that make you feel like doing a small dance.
11. Trust your instincts, not your overactive imagination.
12. When overwhelmed by disaster, check if it's really a disaster by doing the following: (a) think, "Oh, fuck it," (b) look on the bright side, and if that doesn't work, look on the funny side. If neither of the above works then maybe it is a disaster so turn to items 1 and 4.
13. Don't expect the world to be safe or life to be fair.”
Song Bar regular Oscar Wilde is here as usual, and isn’t all that impressed, just like in his book The Picture of Dorian Gray, which offers this cutting remark: “People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.”
Some signs of advice seem rather obvious …
Some less so …
Shirley Temple’s also in the house, doing a little dance on our stage. “I have one piece of advice for those of you who want to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award: Start early!” she proclaims.
Joining Oscar Wilde for a tipple, Noel Coward shakes his head, and response to the unsinkable golden haired lollypop is not the most conventional parental, or adult-to-child advice, but is wonderfully specific:
“Don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington.”
Gore Vidal joins the two others, and his advice is a lovely inversion and subversion of parental-child advice: “Never have children, only grandchildren.”
It’s certainly one method …
Perhaps the best way is to have another drink. Is that a piece of advice? Perhaps it is, but could things get a bit too much, as in this excerpt from the film The Student Prince, starring Edmund Purdom and Anne Blyth, with a song ironically first heard on Broadway during the prohibition era:
But as things get even rowdier here at the Bar, let’s close by looking into some original instructions. Advice has been offered long before most of these guests. During Elizabethan times, there was a book that for a long period outsold the Bible, which of course in itself has no shortage of the stuff. The book is Thomas Tusser’s Fiue Hundred Pointes of Good Husbandrie, a fabulously witty, pithy book of practical and life advice for the 16th-century English household, written in rhyming couplets that was fun and easy to remember for many who could not read but could lean around the hearth. Thomas Tusser (1524-1580) was an English poet and farmer’s Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, an expanded version of his original title, A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie, first published in 1557.
Thomas Tusser’s timeless work of practical and life advice in the 16th century
It includes timeless advice on everything from clothes mending to horse and pig maintenance, food preparation to etiquette, and some of the original is usefully available to peruse here online.
For example, here’s some colourful advice on table manners:
“At dinner and supper the table doth craue
good fellowly neighbour good manner to haue.
Aduise thee well therefore, ere tongue be too free,
or slapsauce be noted too saucie to bee.”
And on schools, he advises against pushy parents who tho move their children around too much:
Thus in the childe though wit ynough we finde,
And teacher good néere hand or other where,
And time as apt as may be thought with minde,
Nor cause in such thing much to doubt or feare.
Yet cocking Mams, and shifting Dads, from schooles,
Make pregnant wits to prooue vnlearned fooles.
And to close, on servants, he advises, rather vividly and beautifully, that the best ones sing while they do their duties:
“The lesse of thy counsell thy seruants doe knowe,
Their dutie the better such seruants shall showe.
Good musicke regard,
Good seruants reward.
Such seruants are oftenest painfull and good,
that sing in their labour, as birdes in the wood.”
And so then my duties come to a close, and it’s my pleasure to pass the musical baton onto this week’s guest guru, the wise and highly knowledgeable Uncleben. Please place your advice-based songs in comments below for deadline at 11pm GMT UK time on Monday, for playlists published next week. Any pieces of advice generously and gratefully received.
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