THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH YELLOW BRICK: AS POP-CULTURE’S METAPHOR FOR DISILLUSIONMENT

BOJANA VUJIN Faculty of Philosophy, Novi Sad

Abstract: Baum’s has both thrilled and puzzled generations since the publication of The Wonderful in 1900. The paper will explore the utopian/ dystopian connotations of Emerald City and Oz in connection with rock poetry, with Elton John’s ‘Goodbye ’ and Scissor Sisters’ ‘’ chosen as examples of pop-culture’s continuing fascination with Baum’s flawed paradise. Key words: children’s literature, pop-culture, postmodernism, rock poetry

1. Introduction: On Pop-Culture and Rock Poetry

Once upon a time, the world of academia was a proverbial tweed- wearing killjoy waxing lyrical on the beauties of Tennysonian metre, never to be tricked into lowering itself to the levels of the exploration of popular culture. Some decades later, enter Postmodernism and voila! – Buffy the Vampire Slayer becomes a legitimate focus of many an academic study and Bob Dylan is lauded as the ultimate poet. ‘Postmodernism’, as Angela McRobbie (1995:13) points out,

has entered into a more diverse number of vocabularies more quickly than most other intellectual categories. It has spread outwards from the realms of art history into political theory and on the pages of youth culture magazines, record sleeves and the fashion spreads of Vogue.

Trying to shake off the fuddy-duddy image of yore, criticism turned to the ‘things of the moment’ as props for serious intellectual analyses. Granted, much of this incentive lies behind the fact that popular culture slowly became the default, relegating its highbrow counterpart to the realms of something ‘old’ and ‘boring’ that newer generations couldn’t connect with. One of the best examples of this situation is the late 20th century prevalence of rock and pop poetry in public consciousness over the traditional forms that had dominated the hearts and minds of audiences in the old salad days.

2. Why Lyrics Matter

Continuing in the tradition of troubadours and other such artists- entertainers, pop musicians took advantage of the fact that, in the mid-2Oth century era of affordable records and new technologies, traditional, written poetry started to lose its mass appeal. The poet-superstar of earlier epochs (epitomised in Romanticism’s Lord Byron) was no longer there, having been supplanted by a microphone-wielding showman, while words, previously filling the pages of books meant to be read in silence or enjoyed at recitals found their new home in songs, as lyrical accompaniment to the primary – melodic – content. Producer Gus Dudgeon says that “people don’t listen to songs for the lyrics” (Classic Albums: 2001), which is partially true – otherwise no one would ever listen to anything sung in a language they don’t understand – however, it must be said that, once people do pay attention to lyrics, they cannot not think about their meaning, or at least their emotional resonance. Once this process starts for the casual listener, it is only a matter of time before professionals start appropriating song lyrics for various research-related purposes. In the words of Simon Frith (1988:123),

In a culture in which few people make music but everyone makes conversation, access to songs is primarily through their words. If music gives lyrics their linguistic vitality, lyrics give songs their social use.

Thus, music and lyrics become part of wider socio-cultural study, not least in terms of being interpreted as indicative to or expressive of the plurality of meanings, contexts and truths. Once again, Frith (1988:107) points out that

[t]he most sophisticated content analysts have /.../ used lyrics as evidence not of popular culture as such, but of popular cultural confusion.

3. Children’s Literature and Popular Culture

Academic study of song lyrics is, therefore, usually (though by no means exclusively) seen as appropriation of pop-culture for literary or sociological purposes. When it comes to the world of literature proper, there are some creative forms similar to lyrics, in that they encompass both art and entertainment, and can be described as more ‘popular’ than ‘highbrow’. One of these is the ever-so-evasive (in terms of definition, at least) children’s literature. “Children’s books”, according to Peter Hunt (2007:1),

have been largely beneath the notice of intellectual and cultural gurus. /.../ They are overtly important educationally and commercially – with consequences across the culture, from language to politics: most adults, and almost certainly the vast majority of those in positions of power and influence, read children’s books as children, and it is inconceivable that the ideologies permeating those books had no influence on their development. The books have, none the less, been marginalised.

Just like song lyrics, children’s literature is a ripe playground for all sorts of scholarly pursuits – it has been the research focus of studies in fields ranging from sociology and psychology to literature and therapy. Both are often seen as pure entertainment, and although there are examples of both where such a view is justified (neither ‘Love Me Do’ nor the Goosebumps series have ever pretended to be particularly ‘deep’), the view that neither can ever be anything more than easy pastime is short-sighted and condescending. And, of course, there have been numerous instances of the two bouncing off and taking inspiration from each other – from Lewis Carroll’s presence in John Lennon’s work to Led Zeppelin’s take on Tolkien’s world. If one was to look for an example of a children’s book that has been so large a presence in public conscious that people have almost forgotten that there was a book in the first place, and not a folk tale carved in stone, they need not look any further than L. Frank Baum’s world of Oz.

3.1. The World of Oz The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), the first in the series of many books about the magical that Baum would eventually write, has had generations in its thrall from the moment it saw the light of day. Is there anyone not familiar with the story of the little farm girl from Kansas who gets whisked away by a tornado to the fairyland of Oz, where she meets three new friends lacking in self-confidence, and together they set on a journey along the yellow brick road to the Emerald City in search of the omnipotent Wizard of Oz? The rub – for there is always a rub – lies in the fact that the said wizard is not powerful at all, but, as he himself says, a ‘humbug’ (Baum 1993:103), and the magical greenness of Emerald City is all mirrors and smokescreen, for its existence depends on green-coloured lenses everybody is made to wear. And of course, both and her friends do not really need the wizard to get the things they desire, for they possess them already and he merely provides them with a placebo. The tale of pretty fantasy and ultimate self-reliance has struck a chord in the hearts of many; the case, however, can be made for the Emerald City as a nasty little dystopia, even if not deliberately created as such by its author. Although at first glance a timeless tale of fantasy, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) expresses more about the age, as a period of disruption and uncertainty, than its author, who claimed himself to be non-political, probably intended. (Cogan Thacker, Webb 2002:85) This falseness [of the Emerald City and the Wizard himself] suggests a comment on American consumerism and the uneasy relationship between appearance and ‘truth’. (Cogan Thacker, Webb 2002:89)

This uneasy relationship gets even rockier when Dorothy, who for a while settled for trusting even ‘The Great and Terrible Humbug’ (Baum 1993:107) loses what hope she had of ever returning home. Disappointment, sadness and loss all conflate and it is unclear if either appearance or ‘truth’ has got the slightest chance of resolving her situation. It comes as no surprise then that the wonderful, dazzling place comes across as a metaphor for disillusionment.

4. Rockers, Poets and Oz

Finally merging all of the previously mentioned concepts together, we can see how exactly Emerald City came to signify disillusionment to pop- culture artists. Since The Wizard of Oz is part of children’s fiction canon, and given Hunt’s idea that children’s fiction informs the development and ideological construct of all individuals who read it, it is not much of a stretch to posit that for the individuals who are familiar with Baum’s work and who, as creative artists, are looking for an apt representation of the double-edged sword that any seemingly perfect place or state is, Emerald City and Oz itself might serve as a particularly convenient metaphor. Add to that the fact that the presence of Oz was forever cemented in minds of audiences round the globe by the famous 1939 film adaptation, starring Judy Garland, and this metaphor is more or less a given for any pop-culture observer, connoisseur or aficionado. Two such examples from rock poetry are to be examined more closely in the remainder of the paper.

4.1. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road The first of these is the titular song from Elton John’s seminal 1973 album, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Often lauded as John’s Sgt. Pepper, the album boasts such hits as ‘Candle in the Wind’, ‘Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting’ and ‘Bennie and the Jets’, but the most memorable track in it is easily ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ itself. Music critic Stewart Mason calls the song “a small masterpiece of ‘70s soft rock’”, claiming that “lyrically, the song is evocative of faded Hollywood glamour in the manner of Sunset Boulevard.” (Mason web) The song consists of a series of what seem to be rhetorical questions demanded of an unnamed person; and complaints about the kind of existence the lyrical subject feels is not right for him. Throughout the song, there is a distinct feel of nostalgia – in

I should have stayed on the farm I should have listened to my old man we can see that the lyrical subject is regretting his decision to, presumably, come to the big city and that he is a young person, probably wide-eyed and filled with great expectations at the beginning, but now disillusioned and bitter. The ‘farm’ is an interesting choice of words, for it points to the connections between , the simple farm-girl protagonist of The Wizard of Oz, and our disappointed hero. When speaking of the book, Cogan Thacker,Webb (2002:88) state that

[c]ompared to the colour of the Emerald City and the liveliness of the characters encountered in Oz, a desire to return to the prairie is difficult to understand.

However, the protagonist of ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ offers his experience in the city in a much more negative light, when he says

I’m not a present for your friends to open This boy is too young to be singing the blues thus giving us a possible context of someone being in a relationship with an older person where he is regarded as a trophy, or perhaps referring to the high society in general, or both. The second verse reinforces the idea of an older, powerful lover who is not really in love with the lyrical subject, for, when he leaves as he is apparently threatening/deciding to do, said lover won’t lose much sleep over it:

It’ll take you a couple of vodka and tonics To set you on your feet again Maybe you’ll get a replacement There’s plenty like me to be found

The disillusionment with this kind of life can best be seen in the chorus:

So goodbye yellow brick road Where the dogs of society howl You can’t plant me in your penthouse I’m going back to my plough Back to the howling old owl in the woods Hunting the horny back toad Oh I’ve finally decided my future lies Beyond the yellow brick road

The motif of farm is again mentioned (‘plough’), and another one is reinforced – the one of returning to the sphere, if not the world of, childhood (‘hunting the horny back toad’ as a pastime activity ties in nicely with the regret of not having listened to ‘my old man’ and ‘this boy’ being ‘too young to be singing the blues’). Another connection with The Wizard of Oz is present in the decision that the ‘future lies beyond the yellow brick road’ – this is in keeping with Dorothy’s realisation that the solution to her problems and the road to her happiness are actually not ‘somewhere over the rainbow’, but, on the contrary, that ‘there’s no place like home’.

While talking about the song, journalist Robert Sandall said that The strength of ‘Yellow Brick Road’ or certainly something that contributes to its lasting appeal is the fact that it does actually reflect on the dark side of life and the dark side of celebrity. (Classic Albums:2001)

While it is certainly possible to interpret the content this way, and this interpretation does tie in rather nicely with the Sunset Boulevard theme, the actual author of the lyrics, Bernie Taupin, states that

I don’t think it was about disillusionment of fame, I think it was more about the battle I had of being a country kid coming to town, being originally a little out of my depth. But at the same time I think it could have been about the all-encompassing world of fame and rock and roll. Is it all that it’s cracked up to be? Possibly not. (Classic Albums: 2001)

Or, in the words of one of the most respected British lyricists, Sir Tim Rice,

Often the fulfilment of the ambition can be worse than not fulfilling it. (Classic Albums: 2001)

4.2. Return to Oz ‘Return to Oz’ is the closing number on Scissor Sisters’ 2004 debut album, entitled simply Scissor Sisters, and penned by the band’s frontman Jake Shears. The song takes its title from the 1985 film sequel to The Wizard of Oz, based on two subsequent novels in Oz lore, The Land of Oz and . In the film, Dorothy returns to Oz and finds it in a horrible state – everything is destroyed, the yellow brick road is desecrated and the people have been turned to crystal. This introduction itself is enough to show us that, no matter how cruel the world in Elton John’s ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’, it cannot compare to the utter devastation that is present in ‘Return to Oz’. Shears himself said that the song was about the abuse of crystal meth in the American gay community. The first line of the lyrics – ‘once there was a man’ – starts off as a fairy tale; this, together with the title, may lead us to believe that the song may be fantasy-themed, like the ones brought forth in the ‘70s by Led Zeppelin and early Queen. However, the next few lines shatter this illusion, and establish the theme of real suffering instead:

But when his night came to an end He tried to grasp for his last friend And pretend that he could wish himself health on a four-leaf clover

The last line also introduces the theme of terminal illness, something that will be mentioned again, in the middle eight:

Deep inside their sunken faces and their wild rolling eyes, But their callous words reveal That they can no longer feel Love or sex appeal The patchwork girl has come to cinch the deal

If ‘sunken faces’ and ‘wild eyes’ aren’t enough to create an image of illness, the loss of any possibility to feel (presumably physical) ‘love or sex appeal’ points to an incurable STD, and the idea is driven further home with the introduction of ‘the patchwork girl’ who has come to ‘cinch the deal’. The patchwork girl may refer to , another one in the series of Oz novels, but is could also be a reference to the AIDS Memorial Quilt, made of many patches, serving as a memorial and celebration of the lives of those who died of the disease. Given that the theme of the song is the abuse of crystal methamphetamine, which has, in recent years, been the number one cause behind the rising number of HIV infections among young gay people; it is not too much of a stretch to interpret this verse as referring to AIDS. The chorus is, again, a sorrowful lament over the state of things:

Is this the return to Oz? The grass is dead, the gold is brown And the sky has claws. There’s a wind-up man walking round and round What once was emerald city’s now a crystal town.

The yellow brick road has turned from gold to brown, and the sky with claws indicates something threatening. The ‘wind-up man’, on the surface level, refers to Tic-Toc, a mechanical man Dorothy finds upon her return to Oz, but, on a metaphorical level, it might refer to people who can no longer function without external help (‘winding-up’) of drugs. Finally, the last line which describes the literal state of Emerald City filled with crystallised figures of its enchanted denizens is, underneath the surface, a metaphor for the big city of one’s dreams turning into a threatening place filled with drugs, pain and death. When asked about the meaning of the song, Scissor Sisters member Baby Daddy said

You’d have to ask Jake about it. I think he wrote it with Seattle in mind, with all the crystal meth tragedy over there. To me it’s a song about San Francisco and to a lot of others it’s about New York but it can be about anywhere. I wouldn’t say that it was one specific incident, but I think everyone in the band and in our group of friends has been touched in some way by the problems it’s talking about. (The Crystal Prison: web)

Elton John’s world, while undoubtedly harsh and disillusioning, seems quite warm in comparison with the world of Scissor Sisters. The reasons for this may lie in the fact that John’s song deals with the personal, giving the listener hope that the lyrical subject will make it, having decided to seek his future ‘beyond the yellow brick road’; while Shears’ lyrics describe a communal problem that is slowly destroying many lives, leaving the listener with little indication that things will improve. The world of 2004 is certainly a lot different from the world of 1973. Still, the metaphor of Oz seems to work just fine for both of them. And Baum would probably be thrilled about it.

5. Conclusion

Our boring old tweed-wearer from the beginning may not be too happy with pop-culture’s forms of expression being used together with ‘real’ literature (though he probably wouldn’t consider children’s literature to be ‘real’ anyway) in a single research paper, but he would soon be proven wrong. In a world where everything can be – and indeed is – a text worthy of exploration, one cannot simply choose to ignore the connections that are there for the taking and playing with. When it comes to both music and children’s literature, entertainment and play are absolutely necessary for the proper enjoyment and understanding of the work in question. And after all, is there anything wrong with being entertained?

References Anon. ‘The Crystal Prison’. 2004. Available: http://www.cosmomovieawards.com/ig/20041018.htm [2010, May 18] Baum, F. L. 1993 (1900). The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Ware: Wordsworth Classics. Classic Albums: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Dir. Bob Smeaton. Eagle Rock Entertainment, 2001. DVD Cogan Thacker, D. and J. Webb. 2002. Introducing Children’s Literature: From Romanticism to Postmodernism. London-New York: Routledge. Frith, S. 1988. Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop. New York: Routledge. Hunt, P. (ed.). 2007 (1999). Understanding Children’s Literature. Oxon: Routledge. John, E. 1973. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. DJM Records. Mason, S. ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’: Song Review. Available: http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=33:uyapqo7qojda [2010, May 15] McRobbie, A. 1995 (1994). Postmodernism and Popular Culture. London-New York: Routledge. Scissor Sisters. Scissor Sisters. Polydor. 2004.

Notes on the author Bojana Vujin teaches English and American Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy, Novi Sad, Serbia. She wrote her Master’s thesis on Nabokov’s dramas and is currently writing her doctoral thesis on British rock poetry. She has published one collection of short stories (Theseus, 2001).