Tuesday, November 22, 2011

They Might Be Giants: "Istanbul"


Structure is important. Structure brings order and a sense of purpose. Right now I'm deep into revisions of a short fiction story, and I'm struggling to keep the structure together, partly because the character experiences a freakout that I want to enhance by playing with syntax, making the structure part of the build-up itself. So structure is on my mind.

This song seems wonderfully free and unstructured. The two singers don't even end their notes together, they slide in and out of starts and stops, and a total meltdown happens about a minute in. And yet they start and end the song together, and what happens in the middle is both entertaining and musically viable.

Every song -- really, everything -- has a predetermined structure. Some just come loaded with accordions and incoherent babbling. Now if I could just find a reason to make my character an accordion player...

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