why is paul banks so loathed a a lyricist

is he really that wealthy. i mean ive lived in paris and england and a quite a few places and my family isnt really rich.

I was working with a scientologist who told me the banks family is one of the wealthiest in the states.

Okay, back to work on my blog, which gives Pitchfork-style point-scores to new releases based on band members' parents tax returns. I thought I had some best-of-year shit with this one homeless subway busker, but it turns out his dad was a dentist.

did that chunklet thing ever come out?

Anyway Banks is one of those guys where when you actually read over the lyric sheet it all seems terrible, and in the end probably is terrible -- except that really, during how much of the average Interpol song are you genuinely following the flow of the text? No, he's one of those guys who mostly mumbles along rhyming and hardly drawing much attention -- and then every now and then he'll spit out something that sounds great out-of-context, and he'll really chew on that one. "Evil" is good for this: I couldn't tell you a damn thing that's actually going on in the lyrics, but I'll still go for the way he tosses out "wait in the van," and I'll still kinda marvel at the fact that "semi-erotic" pops up in there. Similarly there's that bit on the first album -- "Oh look, it stopped snowing" -- which I'll always think is kind of a great thing to hear, and which I didn't know until googling just now was followed by anything quite like, well, "my best friend's from Poland and oh he has a beard."

i red some interview where paul banks was all like "id rather be poor and have lived and created than to die having worked a high responsibility job and not created anything".

I say good luck to them they went hard, they put alot of time in ( banks used to work for interview magazine, then quit to focus on the band and worked doing crap like data entry making coffee). THey reallly were quite shit when they started out, live in particular, but htey have come a hell of a long way.

i dont think his background has anything to tdo with the lyrics.

Guess what, Miles Davis was born into an affluent family and went to Juliard before dropping out to play jazz. Guess what, so fucking what?

xpost

Classic dodge.

xpost

i don't know any of these people. they seem very defensive about interpol though

Go on talking about Interpol, though.

"privilege" look, forget i said anything. or better yet, of course people born of privilege can make good art. most european art, prior to the 20th century, was made by people born into at least moderate means. how this issue is of so much focus when discussing interpol seems strange to me. good night, fellas

is it true he has the intention of doing some solo work?

Oh, you like that. Me too. But continue the verse, shall we?

"...Your hair is so pretty and red / Baby baby you're really the best"

"you don't trust yourself for at least one minute each day"

which is pretty good, before undermining any favorable impression he might have made, with

"but you should trust in this, girl, cuz loving is coming our way"

that's gotta be deliberate, down to the rock & roll cliche of loving coming our way.

I mean, Billy Corgan is a much, much worse lyricist, perhaps the worst one working today if you measure quality against the level of pretense (the only possible way of judging rock lyrics). But I don't feel like slagging on him because there seems to be a nice consensus on the matter. There's no such consensus on Banks yet.

So but yeah, he clearly has an ear for where he needs to be doing something striking, and he can often come up with a good striking line to plug into there, and even when they don't seem so striking on the lyric sheet, there's something about the cadence or delivery that gets them there. It's all that stuff in between that looks horrible on paper. And I'd say it sounds horrible on record, but I couldn't tell you -- those are the bits I don't really hear, or at least hear as just rhyming ordinary song-words as opposed to any sort of coherent "text." You could say it's some sort of laziness that he can't pad out the verse incidentals with something of higher-quality, but I'm not sure that's it (and I think Klee's right that a lot of it is arch -- it's just that it's hard to pull of the arch/knowing thing when others of your lyrics are totally interpretable as just clumsy). (And yeah I'll bet anything a lot of that archness is fake-Morrissey, as are plenty of his vocal melodies.)

- "make playing only logical" (hmm)
- "nothing else will change" (okay standard, go on)
- "SHE CAN [X], SHE CAN [X]" (it's "read," but you don't know that yet -- you just know she can do something with an E sound, and boy can she do it, cause listen to him!)
- "it's different now that I'm poor and ageing / I'll never see this face again" (that's kinda nice)
- "you'll go STABBING / YOURSELF IN / THE NECK" (zing!)
- "she puts the she puts the weights into my little heart" (he really sells this one)

Dude is no Peter Murphy nor no Robert Smith, but he seems to know a little bit about how they managed to script difficult lines into feature spots and sell them, make them ring out right: "stabbing yourself in the neck" here reads like a stumpy cousin of, say, "cover my face as the animals die."

Wednesday, November 27th, 2002
Interpol Announce More Dates for December Tour
YOU'LL GO STABBING! THAT GUY IN!! THE SCARF!!!

And its also the way paul sings them. He sounds like hes dead. Im so thankful ive heard that song. It will keep me laughing until the end of my days

so this "mixtape" is hardly a masterpiece or anything, but... i think it's misunderstood, and honestly quite enjoyable. i think it nails the aimless postmodern vibe as much as one can nail it. i've had it on repeat all morning with no desire to turn it off yet. i mean, it's not exactly aspiring for beauty.

Paul Banks is a poet and completely misunderstood. Totally classic.

"When the cadaverous mob saves its doors for the dead man you cannot leave"
"He severed segments so secretly you like that"
"I had seven faces / thought I knew which one to wear..."

His lyrics are fucking great- combine that with his po faced delivery and you have one of the main reasons I like the band.

Having lyric sheets on the new one really spoiled some of the mystique for me. :-/

"He severed segments so secretly you like that"

Man, I can't wait for Daniel Kessler's solo album. He's promised a whole record full of ambient electronica "like music for airports" he says like he is trying so hard to get me to pay attention to him he's taking to showing up in shoegaze stripey shirts and everything.

n.b. I may be drunked

an early julian plenti gem - "just because a canyon is fascist, doesn't mean you don't hold onto your beliefs."

Julian Plenti otm

And who is this Paul Banks fellow exactly?

I dunno; you could maybe try reading the post at the top of the thread? Or is reading OPs too much work these days?

I've actually been thinking about the line "You only know me like the shoreline knows the sea" quite a bit lately.

When I first heard it, I thought it meant that the "you" knows the speaker very well, that a shoreline obviously has a long and repeated acquaintance with the sea. But the line stuck with me, and I realised it could also mean the opposite - that a shoreline knows the sea only in a (very literally) shallow sense. The shoreline knows only the external tip of the sea, that the vast bulk of the sea are depths that the shoreline has no knowledge of - that actually it could mean that the "you" has no real understanding of the speaker at all, beyond the shallow and superficial. Especially with that casual "only".

Tom D, I think he's in Genesis

Paul BanksStatement

Branwell, re: having a lyrics sheet on the new record, is it just me or are the non-sequiturs basically just completely gone now

Well, there are the non-sequiturs that didn't make it to the lyric sheets!

("I'm not gonna chase another steak until he's gone" ... wait, dude, you definitely said that in the lyrics, but it's not on the lyric sheet. What happened there, was not that actually a song lyric? I'm imagining it as an aside you shouted at Sam while you were waiting for Daniel to leave the studio so you could and Sam could make a midnight run to go eat steaks while the vegetarian was out? WTF, man?)

Granted, there have been several occasions where I've heard something and been like "WTF, did he just sing that?" and then checked the lyric sheets, and actually, no, he sang something that made slightly more sense than what I heard.

So I don't know if he's being more direct on this record. Or if many of those non-sequiturs were mis-hearings. (No, he definitely sang "let's see about this ham.")

to this day i have no clue what PDA could be about - a rape? a bad breakup? astounding that it's still so impenetrable

Yours is the only version of my desertion that I could ever subscribe to
That is all that I can do
You are a past dinner, the last winner I'm raping all around me
Until the last drop is behind you
You're so cute when you're frustrated, dear
Yeah you're so cute when you're sedated, dear
oh yes dear

Sleep tight, grim rite.
We have 200 couches where you can
Sleep tight, grim rite.
We have 200 couches where you can
Sleep tonight...

You are the only person who's completely certain there's nothing here to be into
That is all that you can do
You are a past sinner, the last winner and everything we've come to
It makes you you
But you cannot safely say, while I will be away,
that you will not consider sadly how you helped me to stray
You will not reach me I am
Resenting a position that is past resentment
And now I can consider
And now there is this distance, so-

Sleep tight, grim rite.
We have 200 couches where you can
Sleep tight, grim rite.
We have 200 couches where you can
Sleep tonight...