Word: brel
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...Jacques Brel opens with a number called "Marathon" that traces five decades of modern European history and decides man is trapped on an ever-accelerating, never-ending treadmill; in a later song, "Carousel," the same theme is repeated. Of course, Burt Bacharach had Dionne Warwick say, the same thing in his theme song for Valley of the Dolls, and, for me at least, just as persuasively, but then of course Bacharach can't be ranked a "poet" alongside Mr. Brel. (And although I would hate to live through a night of Burt Bacharach Is Alive and Well and Living...
...least when the Beatles told us love was all we needed, there was the chancy possibility that they were kidding their own naivete. But Brel Americanized is a Poet and that means you'd better take him seriously. And so you end up with a song that "knocks you over...
...sure, Brel does occasionally sound like an apprentice Browning-which isn't necessarily bad. In "Next" he has a bitter man protest how he lost his virginity in an army whore house...
...then Brel expands the metaphor to include all the many little rapes that a totalitarian world performs on the innocents who wander through it. The victim admits that, as much as he hates the system's inevitability, he must count himself among its damned...
...dare sing of! But it isn't poetry, either. A case could be made, I believe, that popular music rarely incorporates real honest-to-God poetry-even John Lennon's surrealistic verse depends heavily on the accompanying orchestration before exploding within us into patterns of subjective association-but in Brel's case I don't think the argument really has to be developed...