The song by Bros ‘When will I, will I be famous?’ with lyrics by Tom Watkins and Nicky Graham seems silly enough when it gets into your head like the ear worm it is. But I often find that seeing the lyrics in print rather changes how you read and interpret it, when not driven by the over-insistent repetitive rhythm of the music. As you read it the repetion of ‘will I’ seems richer and more ambiguous, more full of the dialectical nature of the whole lyric. For the lyric is a kind of dramatic dialogue, in which I talks to another who addresses the speaking ‘I’ in its replies as ‘you’. It matters not whether you imagine two real people, or three like the iconic narcissistic brothers’ with a non-brotherly partner on the stage singing it, for the song may be some internal dialogue, where identical personae impersonate inner voices. Free of the music these voices can sound ironic about each other, as in the rather wonderful verse, when the preparations that ‘I’ has made to be famous are rather, in my READING of them full of irony, perhaps even sarcasm that strikes even to referencing the bottle-tan and manufactured sun-bleached hair-dye look of Matt Goss and sibling:
Yes, you're suitably at one With your body and the sun Yes, you are You've read Karl Marx And you've taught yourself to dance You're the best by far But you keep asking the question Whoa, you're not supposed to mention, hey .....
I have never been sure where ‘Karl Marx’ came into this except that it seems to suggest that the ‘learning’ of the narcissist addressed (or self-addressed) in the lyric is as cosmetic as its play with the equation of the body with the Apollonian sun of art. What art and learning the ‘I’ of the lyric, this voice seems to be saying, is as shallow as a the faux-sexual stomp dancing of the enactment of the song, the bottled sun-tan or sun-bleach hair-dye. And right enough, for this voice says that the ‘I’ it knows as ‘you’ is only ever ‘suitably at one‘ with itself and the sun, and is divided by the fact that it self-questions and splits its itself into an object and subject, a ‘you’and an ‘I’. It does so by asking ‘the question / … you’re not supposed to mention’; the question in its opening and repeated chorus. And once you see the self-multiplying going on through the virtue of self-questioning in this lyric, you see it everywhere. Let’s take the first line of the song and the chorus each time, which is presumably ‘the question / … you’re not supposed to mention’. Here it is:
When will I, will I be famous?
Being read, rather than just heard to an over-forceful beat, this is not one question with the word ‘will’ repeated but two questions from a divided personality, somewhat like The Two Voices in Alfred Tennyson‘s narcissitic-cum-suicidal poem, written in 1842, of that name:
A still small voice spake unto me,
"Thou art so full of misery,
Were it not better not to be?"
Then to the still small voice I said;
"Let me not cast in endless shade
What is so wonderfully made".
Tennyson dranmatises his inner questioning like the Bros lyric but more clearly. Nevertheless, the protagonists are, on one side, someone who admires what they are (something ‘so wonderfully made’) and on the other, another voice who notices only that they both ‘art so full of misery’. The Bros song modernises the art of self-making so that it is about being a ‘dedicated follower of fashion’ (the irony carried over from that comic song by The Kinks):
You're a slave to fashion
And your life is full of passion
It's the way you are
You've suffered for your art
With the jogging in the park
You know you should go far
But why two voices in the first line of the song: ‘When will I, will I be famous?’. Read it using different intonation, forbidden by the musical accompaniment and the question splits into two at the caesura of the line. Try reading the intonation on the word ‘will’ differently in each case, and it becomes a driver of a second question, the one that the lyric is ‘not supposed to mention’ openly. For the question: ‘When will I be famous’ requires a simple answer refering to a time-space, an event that will mark fame having arrived as it must one day, The other question, the forbidden one, is ‘Will I be famous?’, which presupposes the doubt the lyric dramatises that ‘fame’may not be the fate of people of thin artistic, intellectual and aesthetic appeal brought on by artifice, not art. It is like comparing the laurels awarded to the hard work of the artist, the follower of the Sun, Apollo, to the fake sun-tan of the Bros fellas looking for ‘my picture in the paper’. The line that cements that there are two voices with two questions [one each]; the second more toxic than the first because asking about the existential not the temporal-durational tat the first one is doing.
When- when- when- when will I? Will I? Will I?
The ‘I’ and the ‘you’ get impossibly mixed up later in the lyric. The two cannot now divide themselves from each other. The two are ‘at one’ in gloom – a sad kind of atonement (at-one-ment) as they ‘tear’ at each other’s right to command ‘oneness’.
Tell me, when?
I can't answer your question
I can't wait, it's driving me insane
And your impossible impatience (impatience)
Tearing at my brain
In contrast, we can choose not to allow your own doubt to commune with that ‘barren voice’ advising ending it all,says Tennyson. The Tennysonian ‘still small voice’ urging to suicide is a shrill one when it merely shouts ‘Will I?’ twice in the Bros song. In the song read as a poem, the two voices make each other ‘insane’, as in this dramatic moment of splitting. Tennyson invokes a third voice, one of wonder at the beauty of the external world to answer his dilemma and emerge refreshed from the dialectic of a doubting and a ‘gloomy’ suicidal voice:
So variously seem'd all things wrought,
I marvell'd how the mind was brought
To anchor by one gloomy thought;
And wherefore rather I made choice
To commune with that barren voice,
Than him that said, "Rejoice! rejoice!"
The Bros song just divides in two. In the end, both voices become ‘impatient’ and ‘unable to ‘wait’. The first can’t wait for fame, the second can’t wait for the first to realise its own narcissistic drive and that some questions are unanswerable; not least whether the desire for ‘fame’ will ever be met, or even should be while the tactics for aiming at it are as shallow as fake sun-tan, as far removed from the strictures of Apollo as you can get.
Well here’s the full lyric. read it and decide for yourself;
When will I, will I be famous? Oh oh oh woah woah Yes, you're suitably at one With your body and the sun Yes, you are You've read Karl Marx And you've taught yourself to dance You're the best by far But you keep asking the question Whoa, you're not supposed to mention, hey When will I, will I be famous? I can't answer, I can't answer that When will I see my picture in the paper? I can't answer, I can't answer that When will I, will I be famous? You keep asking me, babe You're a slave to fashion And your life is full of passion It's the way you are You've suffered for your art With the jogging in the park You know you should go far But you keep asking the question (ooh) Whoa, you're not supposed to mention (I'm not supposed to mention (yeah) When will I, will I be famous? I can't answer, I can't answer that When will I see my picture in the paper? I can't answer (I can't wait) I can't answer that Oh, I can't tell you when You'll see your name Up in lights When will I, will I be famous? You keep asking me, babe I can't wait You won't suffer in silence (suffer) You're a talent, you know that I've noticed (I've noticed) You'd like to be a legend (ooh, ooh) A big star over night Tell me, when? I can't answer your question I can't wait, it's driving me insane And your impossible impatience (impatience) Tearing at my brain It's tearing I can't take it, take it much more When- when- when- when will I? Will I? Will I? When will I, will I be famous? I can't answer, I can't answer that When will I, will I be famous? I can't answer, I can't answer that When will I, will I be famous? I can't answer, I can't answer that When will I see my picture in the paper? I can't answer, I can't answer that When will I? When, when, tell me when? I can't answer, I can't tell you I can't answer that When will I, will I be famous? Songwriters: Tom Watkins, Nicky Graham. For non-commercial use only.
With all my love
Steven xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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