When I thought about what song to choose for our last day of class, one in which we’re talking about the poetics of songs, I thought of “Taking Pictures” by Sam Phillips. In addition to being a recording artist, she provided most of the songs used as the score for the television show “The Gilmore Girls.” A recurring character on the show was the town troubadour, played by Grant Lee Phillips (also a musician, but no relation, as far as I know). In one particular episode, he leaves his position as the town troubadour to tour with Neil Young, and throughout the town, prospective new troubadours pop up, eager to fill the role. One of those hopefuls is none other than Sam Phillips, singing a snippet of “Taking Pictures.”
What’s the connection? I thought it was interesting to think about this connection between song and poetry, and that the troubadour was our way into the connection between poetry and song. A quick look at Wikipedia can fill you in on what a troubadour is, but essentially, he was a medieval European lyrical poet who would sing his poems publicly. Since I think so many of us will argue that songs are poetry, I wonder what we see as the difference, or why we eagerly listen to music, but only more occasionally or rarely read poetry.
In “Taking Pictures,” Phillips creates an image-laden scenario in which taking a photograph makes things disappear. There’s a speaker, and someone she’s speaking to. There’s a sense of haziness or fogginess created from her words, as things that exist dematerialize. There’s also an interesting paradox: “Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.” Nostalgia is the longing for what once was, a grief that things are no longer the way there were. Claiming that nostalgia itself isn’t what it once was is to have nostalgia for nostalgia–only nostalgia in the past.
The use of repetition in this song is reminiscent of other poems we read this semester, only we rarely had a situation in which lines were repeated one directly after the other. It certainly plays off the ear, creating a sense of having heard the line before, perhaps creating a sense of echo or lingering.
