Re: question/observation Hifolks,
impetuous fool that I am, I'm going to come to the defence of JA, cosI'm an unreconstructed Yes fan and I DON'T CARE!
(Springsteen? overblown, distorted rubbish for me)
Any fule kno that JZA writes in a stream of consciousness style. Thisis not pretention for the sake of it. Any classical music fan who'sever listened to William Walton's Facade (with lyrics by OsbertSitwell) will see a similarity in the approach.
And 'Mountains come out of the sky and they stand there' isn'tcobblers -JA explains in Chris Welch's peerless biog of the band thatthe line came from seeing the scottish mountains while on tour.Swathed in mist around the edges, to him it looked as though theyweren't attached to the ground. Anyone who has ever seen a mistymorning in the mountains will have seen this phenomenon.
So it's not cobblers -just a natty one liner based on personalexperience.
I'm not saying that all JA's lyrics are immediately accessible, and JAhimself has admitted that some lyrics are assembled because he likesthe sound of the words in phonetic effect rather than meaning, just asyou might put 'wrong' notes or chords in a piece of music.
When Frank Zappa first heard Varese's 'Ionisation' he didn't knowwords like atonal or polytonality -what he DID think was 'I like thesechords, THESE CHORDS ARE MEAN!'
So occasionally JA falls on his arse creatively -welcome to humanity.We all do it, and at his worst he's no worse than any other 'rockhero' And it's better than 'ooh baby, get on down, lick my ∗∗∗ and ∗∗∗my ∗∗∗, I'm a hard lovin man all night long' or 'Paaaaarty!" or'Yo, bitch, I'm da mean, I got da rap fo you (until someone shoots methat is)'
And I positive LURVE the lyrics on 'Magnification'. Yes Symphonic ismy all time fave DVD. Now there's musical profundity for you!
And you cannow get your ammo out and start shooting me to bits.
Dave.
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> FWIW, my two penn'orth is that JA sometimes wrote
lyrics that sounded wonderful while having no real meaning (althoughSouth Side Of The Sky is apparently about the loss of a polarexpedition), but more often wrote lyrics that, while also having nomeaning, were thoroughly banal. He then shifted across to drippy lovesongs, also banal. Stick with the holy trinity of The YesAlbum/Fragile/Close To The Edge. :-)
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> Andy T.
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