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ssical music or folk balladry or jazz rock is silly too in an analogous but slightly different way item we know it s silly and they the bands and artists know it s silly but we all pretend to take it and make it seriously but not entirely the inherent silliness is acknowledged in the form of irony that is expressed variously through lyrics vocal performance melody texture of instrumentation production more broadly so when i say that underworld are at the far serious end of the spectrum i don t deny the silliness of karl hyde s lyrics but his vocal performance layers that silliness with a self aware lack of seriousness that allows us to take them it seriously the same with james murphy s singing in lcd the knowledge that it s inherently silly for a grown man to be standing on stage pretending to be a rock star is absolutely ingrained throughout all their his music its acknowledgement of its own silliness is what allows us to take it seriously new order is a far stranger case i m working leftwards from the serious end of the spectrum to the silly or probably i should say unserious end bernard sumner s lyrics are avowedly silly or no they re not silly by and large they re crap but apart from the very rare exception i think you are a pig you should be in a zoo they are not consciously self awarely crap he says in interviews that the lyrics are barely thought about they re the last thing to be added to the song but there s nothing in his performance to suggest that they re just something songs have to have so he ll do them whereas the off handedness of james murphy s delivery allows us to see how seriously he does take his lyrics bernard is blank faced by comparison he s pop singer as clown hiding behind the entirely conventional make up of the role hot chip are an intelligent band and alexis taylor and joe goddard are expert vocal performers rather than singers as such who deliver their lyrics with true honest and honourable irony irony let s be clear doesn t mean meaning the opposite of what it says but rather always able to be read in two different ways they re serious and they re not serious they refract their seriousness through the profoundly unserious form of pop music the proof of their sincerity is that no one could possible be sincere about such things in such a mode whereas bernard sumner you might say is neither serious nor not serious in his lyrics and singing this irony is something i d like to write more on as well it occurred to me on my practice run today to reflect on the lyrics to css s let s make love when lovefoxxx sings you are so talented i m in love is she singing to me personally well clearly yes and equally clearly no am i allowed to think she means me as her words come through my earphones while i stump down the eighth mile of my half marathon yes am i allowed to think she means me as i stand in the crowd and imagine she s making eye contact with me during the performance also yes am i allowed to think she means it at any point outside of the context of the song no of course not irony the invitation to the necessity of reading a text in different even opposing ways is central to pop music because it allows us to carry that music into the rest of our life in a safe way it s meaningful and it s meaningless it s disposal art that in the important cases stays with us disposably for decades at any and every moment both it and we recognise that it could be discarded without loss but at every moment we don t we hold its disposability close why is that why do you think then we come to saint etienne beloved saint etienne they re not silly of course they re not what they are is profoundly serious about the silliest thing in the world pop music i m not sure i can write about saint etienne just now with their final album coming later this year maybe there ll be a chance then below is my playlist in a working state any suggestions gratefully received next week i plan to write in more detail about one song on the list not yet mentioned that i think is the greatest running song ever also i m raising money for nhs together on my great north run please donate here share this share on x opens in new window x email a link to a friend opens in new window email print opens in new window print share on facebook opens in new window facebook like loading written by jonathan gibbs leave a comment posted in uncategorized tagged with music may 20 2025 f scott fitzgerald and nicholson baker the greatest two semi colons in all literature i promised i was going to share my favourite semi colon in all literature this accolade used to belong to f scott fitzgerald for a beautifully ironical semi colon in his story or perhaps novella may day which i ll share again now here is the whole paragraph which comes in the fourth part of the story when we have already met first of all gordon sterrett a yale alumnus and world war i veteran down on his luck and his ex girlfriend edith bradin who as we can see quite fancies getting back together with him edith less fatuously would have been content to cure gordon sterrett there was a quality of weakness in gordon that she wanted to take care of there was a helplessness in him that she wanted to protect and she wanted someone she had known a long while someone who had loved her a long while she was a little tired she wanted to get married out of a pile of letters half a dozen pictures and as many memories and this weariness she had decided that next time she saw gordon their relations were going to be changed she would say something that would change them there was this evening this was her evening all evenings were her evenings for the avoidance of doubt it s second semi colon in the paragraph that is the near unsurpassable one the first one is perfectly good it does what semi colons should primarily be used for to take two sentences that aren t quite logically connected like you do with a colon like i m doing in this sentences and bring them closer together to bring them into relation with one another there was a quality of weakness in gordon that she wanted to take care of there was a helplessness in him that she wanted to protect the second thought is not a logical consequence of the first rather it s partly an expansion of it that is also partly a reworking of it edith is rethinking her thought about gordon revising and refining it i like to think of semi colons as being janus faced pointing the reader backwards as well as forwards they backpedal the bike encourage you to rewind or skip backwards and look at this new sentence in the light of or alongside the earlier one but the second semi colon oh the second semi colon it is the third sentence in a row that is built of different parallel elements the first is the one quoted above the second is a continuation of that one and she wanted someone she had known a long while someone who had loved her a long while here the second part is again an expansion and a revision of the first part you couldn t replace that comma with a semi colon though that would be grammatically incorrect you could write it and she wanted someone she had known a long while she wanted someone who had loved her a long while but that would be syntactically repetitive it really wouldn t work you want the idea that her mind is beginning to slide to slip gears which is the effect you get with the comma splice the opposite punctuating process as i explain here and lose focus then you get it she was a little tired she wanted to get married it s completely correct as a construction but it s operating on a different principle whereas the first example showed someone refining and revising a thought here you have a quite marvellous and quietly hilarious non sequitur an almost flailing attempt by edith to account for her lack of focus as well as a rewind or skip backwards button for the sentence the semi colon can also function as a fulcrum the balance of a set of weighing scales that asks the reader to hold the two parts of the sentence in balance and measure them against each other the thought she was a little tired has the same weight for edith the same significance as the thought she wanted to get married which is delightfully daft as if marriage might be the cure for tiredness semi colon as rewind or skip back button semi colon as fulcrum for a set of weighing scales but semi colons like all punctuation marks are also rhythmic devices that indicate to the reader the pace and regularity with which they should read the prose in question what students don t understand about the semi colon is that it doesn t have rules you need to follow there are rules kinda but like all punctuation rules they are more broadly conventions and can be bent and broken by those who know them well but that it does demand an aesthetic it s not enough to use it right you ve got to use it well take any two sentences in this post that are separated by a full stop replace that full stop with a semi colon and decapitalise the first letter of that comes after it and hey presto you ve got a grammatically correct sentence but it almost certainly adds nothing to the reading experience and indeed it s notable that the rest of this self same paragraph of fitzgerald continues to vary its sentence length and syntactic strategies after nearly losing control of her thought process almost falling into a daze you might say edith gathers herself and marshals her forces out of a pile of letters half a dozen pictures and as many memories and this weariness she had decided that next time she saw gordon their relations were going to be changed she is now back in charge of her thinking the final four sentences are short assertive almost martial in their chest beating affirmation of self she would say something that would change them there was this evening this was her evening all evenings were her evenings edith is manifesting edith it has to be said is hyperbolising for many years i held up fitzgerald s semi colon as the greatest in all literature but a couple of years ago i found one i loved even more that was more purely gorgeously exemplary of what semi colons can do of what they suggest about the possibilities of prose this comes from nicholson baker s splendid room temperature his short second novel of 1990 that takes 116 pages to narrate twenty odd seconds worth of train of thought of new dad mike as sat in an armchair he gives his and his wife s patty s baby nicknamed the bug her bottle of milk as with many of baker s books the narrative is constructed almost entirely out of digressionary thoughts about well about all manner of things but if you buy the contemporary nostrum that love equals attention then baker and his protagonist are chock full of love so many overlooked aspects of the world are worthy of his attention but all of these thought process lead back to his family it s a thoroughly heartwarming domestic message that is only and all the more palatable for the weird avenues it takes to get there the semi colon comes towards the end of the ninth chapter or section of fifteen which picks up a previous digression in which mike was remembering how he loves listening to his wife patty write in her notebook which she does at night recording the latest bug events mike listening and trying to decode from the sound of her pen on the page the words she s writing this digression was pack in chapter three to give you an idea of the convolutedness of the novel s narrative operation anyway chapter nine is eleven pages long covering ten and two half pages and in it baker deploys no fewer than ten semi colons the stupendous one is the last of these but i ll take you through the others first it s important i knew her spelling was uncertain of course but i thought her imagination and seperate and ellephant were bits of colorful camouflage that her brain cleverly hid behind so that her intelligence would inspire affection rather than jealousy and when mrs nesmith my third grade teacher once sneeringly circled exqused on a note my mother had hastily written for me i felt a greater pointedness of dislike toward that rouged and girdled witch than when she ridiculed my beatle haircut or told jim heydemann and me that we would go blind reading jules verne mike is thinking about his mother and the way she had tried to civilise and educate him and how at times he d been mean to her about her spelling the semi colon here it must be said is unconventional in that it defies the simple guidance that it should connect two complete sentences and because the second half of this one begins with and it would perhaps be more correct to use a second em dash to close the parenthesis but certainly the semi colon helps the reader in following the sense of the sentence these unlike fitzgerald will mostly be long sentences long sentences are part of the digressive strategy of room temperature so appropriate punctuation here meaning helpful as well as precision engineered phrasing is essential but my mother s informal punctuation in the op ed letter came as a complete surprise and the fact that my immediate instinctive response to it was to point out the misplaced commas so harshly that she wept the only time as far as i remember that i ever hurt her feelings for she understood and was even amused by my teenage request that whenever the two of us walked down the street together she would please walk at least three yards ahead of me so that people wouldn t know we were related and she even played along in her compliance whistling walking with a theatrical solitariness checking her pocketbook pausing abruptly to glance at a window display as if these faulty commas called into question our standing as a family the fact that i had been instinctively so cruel made me double up with misery when after i was married i came across some sentences in boswell that were punctuated just as hers had been this continuation of mike s previous thought about his snotty childhood treatment of his mother comes on the next page there s at least one more digression seperating them and takes the form of a 163 word sentence in which a semi colon is used twice and again to pause before an and conjunction that properly should be marked off with a comma this is very much the way that semi colons used to be used in the 19 th century when people regularly wrote many hundred words long sentences and many thousand words long paragraphs the reader needed help to get through the thicket like a rock climber uses protection as they ascend the rock face that if they should fall will catch their rope and halt their descent before they hit the ground a semi colon in a long sentence can do the same thing can give you a point of safety to retreat to to regroup and set forth again you can skim the long sentence that contains the next two examples if you like but this you should know it s in the part of the chapter in which mike digresses into his love of the comma as punctuation ma...