Roses are Red, Violets are Blue...

...Shakespeare is art,
...and Sixpence, too!

About a week ago, the fine blog Mere Comments (linked at the right) offered this post regarding love poetry through the ages. Anthony Esolen, the contributer who made the post, questioned whether his selections from the past were useful in measuring popular culture and comparing those cultures with this. I immediately cried foul when he selected What a Girl Wants (lyrics here) by Jessica Simpson as our modern representative.

The problem with bubblegum pop typified in Brittney Spears, Jessica Simpson, Jennifer Lopez and the general hip crowd c. 1999 is that their songs are mass-produced by a few common writers. My Backstreet Boys albums' liner notes list the songwriter Max Martin on almost every track from their first three discs (Backstreet Boys, Millennium and Black & Blue) before Brian Littrell took on more songwriting duties for Never Gone. Therefore, we do not consider this the poetry of the masses, but the poetry of one individual put into mass production. For true popular poetry, we have to turn to rock music, a few pop groups (Sixpence None the Richer, Five for Fighting) and even hip-hop.

Consider even further this notion: it has been 500 years since Shakespeare. What crap from his generation has been filtered out of our cultural memory over that time? More importantly, with the advent of acid-based printing in the late 18th century, the mass publication of written material went too whole new heights. Prior to this era, that which was valuable survived in quality print and nothing else. Now, anyone can print something. So, in 500 years, what musical lyrics will survive? Will Jessica Simpson be filtered out? God, I hope so. In 500 years, I want my great-great-[...]-grandchildren to know I listened to stuff like this:

I packed his books up, left the office
Went to tell the wife the news
She fell in shock, the baby kicked,
And shed a tear inside the womb
I breathe in, I breathe out
Soak the ground up with my eyes
It's hard to say a healing word
When your tongue is paralyzed
(Sixpence None the Richer, "Paralyzed," Divine Discontent, 2002)

Babies underneath their beds
(In) hospitals that cannot treat them
All the pain that money causes,
All the comfort of cathedrals
All the cries of thirsty children,
This is our inheritance,
All the rage of watching mothers,
This is our greatest offense
(Jars of Clay, "Oh My God," Good Monsters, 2006)

I was just guessing at numbers and figures,
Pulling your puzzles apart
Questions of science, science and progress
Do not speak as loud as my heart
And tell me you love me, come back and haunt me
(Coldplay, "The Scientist," A Rush of Blood to the Head, 2002)

And I am nothing of a builder,
But here I dreamt I was an architect
And I built this balustrade
To keep you home, to keep you safe
(The Decemberists, "Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect," Castaways and Cutouts, 2002)

Little boy prays to God to answer his song
To hold her hand when everyone else's are gone
Time goes by and the wounds slowly turn into scars
So he makes his final wish on the midnight stars
(Vertical Horizon, "Children's Lullaby," There and Back Again, 1992)