The Supermodel School of Poetry Pop
BY BRENDAN BERNHARD
There is something to be said for the silence of the page. On it, a poem three neat quatrains, say can speak, indestructibly, to the eye, ear, and mind.
But there is also something to be said for singing along. Recently I found myself doing just that to a poem by, of all people, Emily Dickinson, as performed by, of all people, Carla Bruni, the Italian ex-supermodel and ex-girlfriend of Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, and Donald Trump. Dickinson’s poem, “I Went to Heaven,” is featured on Ms. Bruni’s new album, “No Promises.” On it, she sets to music poems by W.B. Yeats, Dorothy Parker, Walter de la Mare, W.H. Auden, and Christina Rossetti, among others.
To the strumming of an acoustic guitar, the Dickinson poem or can it now also be classified as a song lyric? begins:
I went to Heaven
Twas a small Town
Lit, with a Ruby
Lathed, with Down
Stiller, than the fields
At the full Dew
Beautiful, as Pictures
No Man drew.
As you might expect, it’s very beautiful. Paul Muldoon, who won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and has co-written rock songs himself (he collaborated with the late Warren Zevon), has not heard Ms. Bruni’s album, but said, “anything that expands our sense of what poetry might be, that poetry is not a scary object written by a bunch of dead guys to be held at arms’ length, is really good news.”
Mr. Muldoon pointed out that much of Dickinson’s poetry is written “in what is essentially a hymn structure,” and can therefore readily be set to music. “It’s almost impossible not to be able to set it to music,” he said.
Even poetry-lovers have poets they don’t quite “get.” For me, Dickinson has been one of them. The revelation in hearing her verse sung was that I no longer really needed to. Because I was enjoying the music, Dickinson’s words (which become progressively stranger as the poem proceeds) were able to seduce me slowly, hypnotically, because a successful pop song is, by definition, something listened to repeatedly. That’s why it’s a stroke of genius to place poems that might strike some as off-puttingly archaic on the page in a pop setting: The music does the work for you, while the words can seep slowly into your mind.
Ms. Bruni, 39, has a small, husky voice whose charm lies in its tousled, just-got-out-of-bed timbre. She recently told the Times of London that she began reading English and American poetry in order to find inspiration for her own songwriting. And then the idea came simply to record the poems she was reading. People have done this before Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison have each recorded a poem by Yeats, and Leonard Cohen has sung poems by Lorca and Byron. In 2002, the Scottish singer James Grant released an excellent album of poetry, “I Shot the Albatross”; last summer, the American Kris Delmhorst released “Strange Conversation,” a CD based on poems by Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Robert Browning, and others; and Deb Talan of The Weepies set an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem to music in 2001.
But Ms. Bruni may be the first bona fide pop star (her last album, 2003’s “Quelqu’un M’a Dit,” sold 2 million copies) to make an entire record out of great poems while barely changing a word other than to repeat lines as substitute-refrains.
“No Promises” will be released as an import on the Naïve label on February 4 (much of it can be heard for free at carlabruni.com and myspace.com/carlabruni), and in France and Germany it is epected to be a hit. Some of the interpretations are questionable, and Ms. Bruni’s pronunciation, despite the coaching of British songstress Marianne Faithfull, is uneven, if charmingly so. A video in which Ms. Bruni, looking très supermodel, is driven around Paris as she sings another Dickinson poem, “If You Were Coming in the Fall,” may be one of the more spectacular mismatches between word and image in the history of, well, music videos. On the other hand, the opening lines “If you were coming in the fall / I’d brush the summer by / With half a smile and half a spurn / As housewives do a fly” do sound unexpectedly rock ‘n’ roll.
To her credit, Ms. Bruni has been quite imaginative in her selections. She has also understood that much of the poetry we associate with the classroom is no more traditional than the lyrics of Bob Dylan or Pete Doherty of Babyshambles, and that there are potentially thousands of great English and American poems begging to be enmeshed in electric guitars and downloaded onto iPods. It’s an idea that appeals to John Wesley Harding, the Brooklyn-based songwriter and novelist (under the name Wesley Stace).
“Songwriters need a break now and then, and I could see it as a refreshing way to write songs without worrying about what you’re going to say in them, but still creating a meaningful album that you really liked,” he said.
While there are lyricists, such as ex-Pavement front man Stephen Malkmus, whose words evoke the experimentalism of a contemporary poet like John Ashbery, most rock lyrics are closer to the 19th century, both in form and content. It’s an odd but inescapable fact that rock music, the most revolutionary cultural force of the last 50 years, has kept the traditional virtues of rhyme and meter alive. (The same is true of rap.) Mr. Dylan once quoted a couplet by Shelley “What is it you buy so dear / With your pain and with your fear?” and noted that he might have written it himself, although Elvis Costello seems a likelier candidate.
“Up until a certain time, maybe in the 1920s, that’s the way poetry was,” Mr. Dylan once said, placing himself firmly within a pre-modernist tradition.
Reviewing a collection of essays about Mr. Dylan in the New Statesman in January 2003, the British novelist Will Self wrote, “It is not so much that Dylan’s work dare aspire to the status of poetry; it is, quite simply, that along with work by a host of other inspired songwriters, it has completely replaced poetry, in that portion of the collective soul that requires the lyrical.”
As if to prove the point, the magazine’s cover story, “Gods and Guns,” about the Anglican church’s opposition to the invasion of Iraq, was prefaced by an anti-war quatrain from Mr. Dylan’s “With God on Our Side.”
Mr. Muldoon admits that, even if Mr. Self is overstating the case, song lyrics have taken up much of the “oxygen” previously reserved for poets. So let us concede that Ms. Bruni is not only doing something interesting, but potentially useful, too. Since the practice of making students memorize poetry went out of style in the 1960s, just as pop music became ascendant, perhaps pop can now breathe some life back into it. Listening to Ms. Bruni sing the gorgeously romantic opening stanza of “Lady Weeping at the Crossroads,” one of two Auden poems on the record, it seems entirely possible:
Lady, weeping at the crossroads
Would you meet your love
In the twilight with his greyhounds,
And the hawk on his glove?
But does poetry, which creates its own internal music, require the services of a fashion modelturned-singer? Asked whether Ms. Bruni was guilty of trivializing the poet’s texts, Edward Mndelson, a Columbia University professor and Auden’s literary executor, replied that, on balance, he didn’t think so, at least from what he could hear on her Web site.
“I do think that the less emphatic the music, the better it is for the poem,” he said, noting the straightforward arrangements. “So maybe she’s actually a better poem-setter than composers who write better music.” (“Lady Weeping at the Crossroads” was originally set to music by Benjamin Britten.)
One of Ms. Bruni’s most successful interpretations is of Dorothy Parker’s “Afternoon,” in which a woman nearing middle-age anticipates the day when, done with desire, she’ll “draw her curtains to the town” and resign herself to having “memory to share my bed / and peace to share my fire.” In her restrained way, Ms. Bruni approaches a more thrashing, 4/4, punkish arrangement. When she gets to the lines “And I’ll forget the way of tears / And rock and stir my tea,” she steps up the tempo sufficiently to make you forget that “rock” refers to a chair rather than dancing around a room.
Raised in France, Ms. Bruni is a brittle chanteuse at heart. But you can imagine any number of Anglo-Saxon female rockers tearing into it with gusto. Let’s hope the trend continues, and a few more singers pick up the baton.
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Entrepreneurial Culture
Why European economies lag behind the U.S.
BY EDMUND S. PHELPS
Monday, February 12, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
The nations of Continental Western Europe, in the reforms they make to try to raise their economic performance, may prove to be a testing ground for the view that culture matters for a society’s economic results.
As is increasingly admitted, the economic performance in nearly every Continental country is generally poor compared to the U.S. and a few other countries that share the U.S.’s characteristics. Productivity in the Continental Big Three–Germany, France and Italy–stopped gaining ground on the U.S. in the early 1990s, then lost ground as a result of recent slowdowns and the U.S. speed-up. Unemployment rates are generally far higher than those in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Ireland. And labor force participation rates have been lower for decades. Relatedly, the employee engagement and job satisfaction reported in surveys are mostly lower, too.
It is reasonable to infer that the economic systems on the Continent are not well structured for high performance. In my view, the Continental economies began to be underperformers in the interwar period, and have remained so–with corrective steps here and further missteps there–from the postwar decades onward. There was no sense of a structural deficiency during the “glorious years” from the mid-’50s through the ’70s when the low-hanging fruit of unexploited technologies overseas and Europeans’ drive to regain the wealth they had lost in the war powered rapid growth and high employment. Today, there is the sense that a problem exists.
What could be the origins of such underperformance? It may be that the relatively poor job satisfaction and employee engagement on the Continent are a proximate cause–though not the underlying cause –of the poorer participation and unemployment rates. And high unemployment could lead to a mismatch of worker to job, causing job dissatisfaction and employee disengagement. The task is to find the underlying cause, or causes, of the entire syndrome of poorer employment, productivity, employee engagement and job satisfaction.
Many economists attribute the Continent’s higher unemployment and lower participation, if not also its lower productivity, to the Continent’s social model–in particular, the plethora of social insurance entitlements and the taxes to pay for them. The standard argument is fallacious, though. The consequent reduction of after-tax wage rates is unlikely to be an enduring disincentive to work, for reduced earnings will bring reduced saving; and once private wealth has fallen to its former ratio to after-tax wages, people will be as motivated to work as before.
An indictment of entitlements has to focus on the huge “social wealth” that the welfare state creates at the stroke of the pen. Yet statistical tests of the effects of welfare spending on employment yield erratic results. In any case, it is hard to see that scaling down entitlements would be transformative for economic performance. (Indeed, some economists see increased wealth, social plus private, as raising the population’s willingness to weather market shocks and helping entrepreneurs to finance innovation. I am skeptical.)
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In my thesis, the Continental economies’ root problem is a dearth of economic dynamism-loosely, the rate of commercially successful innovation. A country’s dynamism, being slow to change, is not measured by the growth rate over any short- or medium-length span. The level of dynamism is a matter of how fertile the country is in coming up with innovative ideas having prospects of profitability, how adept it is at identifying and nourishing the ideas with the best prospects, and how prepared it is in evaluating and trying out the new products and methods that are launched onto the market.
There is evidence of such a dearth. Germany, Italy and France appear to possess less dynamism than do the U.S. and the others. Far fewer firms break into the top ranks in the former, and fewer employees are reported to have jobs with extensive freedom in decision-making–which is essential at companies engaged in novel, and thus creative, activity.
Further, I argue that the cause of that dearth of dynamism lies in the sort of “economic model” found in most, if not all, of the Continental countries. A country’s economic model determines its economic dynamism. The dynamism that the economic model possesses is in turn a crucial determinant of the country’s economic performance: Where there is more entrepreneurial activity–and thus more innovation, as well as all the financial and managerial activity it leads to– there are more jobs to fill, and those added jobs are relatively engaging and fulfilling. Participation rises accordingly and productivity climbs to a higher path. Thus I see the sort of economic model operating in the Continental countries to be a major cause– perhaps the largest cause–of their lackluster performance characteristics.
There are two dimensions to a country’s economic model. One part consists of its economic institutions. These institutions on the Continent do not look to be good for dynamism. They typically exhibit a Balkanized/segmented financial sector favoring insiders, myriad impediments and penalties placed before outsider entrepreneurs, a consumer sector not venturesome about new products or short of the needed education, union voting (not just advice) in management decisions, and state interventionism. Some studies of mine on what attributes determine which of the advanced economies are the least vibrant–or the least responsive to the stimulus of a technological revolution–pointed to the strength in the less vibrant economies of inhibiting institutions such as employment protection legislation and red tape, and to the weakness of enabling institutions, such as a well-functioning stock market and ample liberal-arts education.
The other part of the economic model consists of various elements of the country’s economic culture. Some cultural attributes in a country may have direct effects on performance–on top of their indirect effects through the institutions they foster. Values and attitudes are analogous to institutions–some impede, others enable. They are as much a part of the “economy,” and possibly as important for how well it functions, as the institutions are. Clearly, any study of the sources of poor performance on the Continent that omits that part of the system can yield results only of unknown reliability.
Of course, people may at bottom all want the same things. Yet not all people may have the instinct to demand and seek the things that best serve their ultimate goals. There is evidence from University of Michigan “values surveys” that working-age people in the Continent’s Big Three differ somewhat from those in the U.S. and the other comparator countries in the number of them expressing various “values” in the workplace.
The values that might impact dynamism are of special interest here. Relatively few in te Big Three report that they want jobs offering opportunities for achievement (42% in France and 54% in Italy, versus an average of 73% in Canada and the U.S.); chances for initiative in the job (38% in France and 47% in Italy, as against an average of 53% in Canada and the U.S.), and even interesting work (59% in France and Italy, versus an average of 71.5% in Canada and the U.K). Relatively few are keen on taking responsibility, or freedom (57% in Germany and 58% in France as against 61% in the U.S. and 65% in Canada), and relatively few are happy about taking orders (Italy 1.03, of a possible 3.0, and Germany 1.13, as against 1.34 in Canada and 1.47 in the U.S.).
Perhaps many would be willing to take it for granted that the spirit of stimulation, problem-solving, mastery and discovery has impacts on a country’s dynamism and thus on its economic performance. In countries where that spirit is weak, an entrepreneurial type contemplating a start-up might be scared off by the prospect of having employees with little zest for any of those experiences. And there might be few entrepreneurial types to begin with. As luck would have it, a study of 18 advanced countries I conducted last summer found that inter-country differences in each of the performance indicators are significantly explained by the intercountry differences in the above cultural values. (Nearly all those values have significant influence on most of the indicators.)
The weakness of these values on the Continent is not the only impediment to a revival of dynamism there. There is the solidarist aim of protecting the “social partners”–communities and regions, business owners, organized labor and the professions–from disruptive market forces. There is also the consensualist aim of blocking business initiatives that lack the consent of the “stakeholders”–those, such as employees, customers and rival companies, thought to have a stake besides the owners. There is an intellectual current elevating community and society over individual engagement and personal growth, which springs from antimaterialist and egalitarian strains in Western culture. There is also the “scientism” that holds that state-directed research is the key to higher productivity. Equally, there is the tradition of hierarchical organization in Continental countries. Lastly, there a strain of anti-commercialism. “A German would rather say he had inherited his fortune than say he made it himself,” the economist Hans-Werner Sinn once remarked to me.
In my earlier work, I had organized my thinking around some intellectual currents–solidarism, consensualism, anti-commercialism and conformism–that emerged as a reaction on the Continent to the Enlightenment and to capitalism in the 19th century. It would be understandable if such a climate had a dispiriting effect on potential entrepreneurs. But to be candid, I had not imagined that Continental Man might be less entrepreneurial. It did not occur to me that he had less need for mental challenge, problem-solving, initiative and responsibility.
It may be that the Continentals finding, over the 19th and early 20th century, that there was little opportunity or reward to exercise freedom and responsibility, learned not to care much about those values. Similarly, it may be that Americans, having assimilated large doses of freedom and initiative for generations, take those things for granted. That appears to be what Tocqueville thought: “The greater involvement of Americans in governing themselves, their relatively broad education and their wider equality of opportunity all encourage the emergenceof the ‘man of action’ with the ‘skill’ to ‘grasp the chance of the moment.'”
The most basic point to carry away is that the empirical results related here lend support to the Enlightenment theme that a nation’s culture ultimately makes a difference for the nation’s economic performance in all its aspects–productivity, prosperity and personal growth.
It was a mistake of the Continental Europeans to think that they expressed the right values–right for them. These values led them to evolve economic models bringing in train a level of economic performance with which most working-age people are now discontented. Perhaps the way out–to go from unsatisfactory performance to high performance–will require not only reform of institutions but also a cultural shift that returns Europe to the philosophical roots that put it on the map to begin with.
Mr. Phelps, a professor at Columbia University, is the 2006 Nobel Laureate in economics.
