The Road More Traveled

Inside the Lyricist's Studio: Grammy Winner's Edition

A brief exploration of the important thematic veins running through the first three lines of Kelly Clarkson's delicious verbal cocktail, “Since U Been Gone”:

“Here's the thing
We started out friends
It was cool, but it was all pretend”

In these first lines, Kelly begins by introducing The Thing, which can be interpreted in this instance as a metaphorical prism through which the halogen light of Reality is refracted into its more ambiguous, scented candle-lit sub-parts. The Thing is the severed first half of an invalid categorical syllogism, an alleged truth, a truth serving as the dark, exogamous Other to its false Self. That Self becomes, ironically, Self-evident in the second verse, where the word “started” acts as a signifier, a referential device that propels our ears into a state of uneasy anticipation. A start, after all, portends an end, and we are reminded not only of this singular relationship, but also of the mortality that echoes down the halls of Man’s existence and screeches as feedback on the amplifier of our collective Voice. Are we not, after all, merely the dot on a universal question mark? Perhaps. But perhaps, instead, we are both periods of a colon, or the period and the comma of a semi-colon, or even an ellipsis. It is precisely these concepts of the Illusory and the Known that are introduced in the third line, where Kelly subtly nudges us to consider the “pretend” nature of that which was, at least prior to the pre-chorus, “cool.” The icy winds of artifice may freeze our assumptions and bring a small craft advisory to the oceans of our minds, but we must struggle to melt them, break them apart, dilute them, and reconstitute them as a Spam-like aggregate of wisdom. And then, armed with a significantly more structural-functionalist approach to our own reason, we must transform these Found Objects into the avant-garde masterpieces that they are, and we must place them in the galleries of our minds, and we must charge our souls a small admission fee for entry.

posted by She-Ra, Princess of Power @ 5:46 PM