As I wade through a pile of papers during finals week, I’m constantly in search of good body paragraphs built around close, insightful readings of the novel or play or poem under consideration.
When the pickings are slim, I gain sustenance from what I imagine is a typical source of comfort for literature professors, this paragraph from Rob Sheffield’s wonderful book Dreaming the Beatles where he details what Paul McCartney gets wrong in the song, “My Love.”
“My Love” is a fascinating disaster, if you happen to love Paul, because it’s a string of very un-Paul-like mistakes. He forgets all the Paul tricks he knows better than anyone else ever has. In fact, he goes so wrong here breaking his own rules, it’s an index of everything he usually gets right. His lifelong attention to pronouns fails him—this is a love ballad where the word “you” does not appear, nor do “she” or “her,” not even “we.” It’s all “I,” “me,” “my.” You can’t call this a rookie mistake since rookies know better, mostly because rookies are imitating Paul. So he wrote a love song and left out the woman; he also invited an orchestra, without giving them anything to play. He adds a colossally terrible guitar solo, when the track’s already way too long (four minutes, practically a minute per word). Not his own guitar solo: he lets a sideman barge in to make this butt-ugly (and no doubt sincerely self-expressive) noise. A ghastly sax solo would have made a certain sense, but this is a bluesy guitar solo, with no place in a lounge ballad like this.”
It begins with a nice debatable claim (i.e. “This song is a clunker, albeit one that clunks for intriguing reasons”), and follows it up with a brilliant analysis of the song’s pronouns. Of all the evidence Sheffield could give, I think his observation that “you” or “she” never appears in the song is so smart. He then develops this observation in a witty sentence: “he wrote a love song and left out the woman.” Sheffield never leaves a song half-analyzed, and in the remaining half of the song, he articulates what’s wrong with the song’s orchestration and guitar solo. It’s a new kind of evidence, and it receives its own development.
If Sheffield can muster up this kind of insight about a song just to show how poor it is, how much more should we be able to articulate the beauty of God’s truth both in our explication of scripture and in the books we’ve read that demand further unpacking.