Track of The Week: The Magnetic Fields: The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure (1999)
The Magnetic Fields is the brainchild of auteur Stephin Merrit, jaded and cynical romantic, in thrall to the Pet Shop Boys, The Beach Boys and The Smiths. Since their formation in the early 90s, Merrit has been single-mindedly chasing his muse, creating albums of perfect pop on the way.
'69 Love Songs' is Stephin Merrit's epic treatise on love, romance and the love song itself via his immaculately written electronic pop songs. Towards the end of this comprehensive, three CD affair but very much thematically at the heart of the whole enterprise, is 'The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure', a meta-pop masterpiece about the impossibility of writing love songs. In the song, Merrit imagines himself meeting Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of 20th century linguistics, on what he romantically calls 'a night like this'. De Saussure points out the utter futility trying to employ such blunt tools as language in order to portray the essence of something as complex as love, a sentiment which surely casts all pop music from the Beatles to Holland-Dozier-Holland as irrelevant and ineffectual in one fell swoop. Merrit cannot bear to hear this, and loses his temper and shoots the hapless linguist. The song is a witty and heartfelt defence of Merrit's belief that human language and music can be used to talk about love and, at the same time, symbolic of his struggle to express such a complex emotion and do justice to it purely through those tools. After all, this is partly what drove Merrit to create a three-disc A to Z of the love song and its various guises, a project which didn't exhaust all he had to say on the subject by any means. But ultimately, 'The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure' works because it is great pop music. The song is built around a catchy bass riff and luscious synth-strings, topped off with Merrit's affecting baritone and the occasional flurry of handclaps. The rhyme scheme is deliberately silly - 'Saussure / So sure / closure / bulldozer', and dry wit abounds - Merrit claims to be 'just a great composer / And not a violent man'. However, despite his heroic attempts, Merrit cannot escape de Saussure's claim that 'We don't know anything about love', which, as Ferdinand's fictional last words, come back to haunt Merritt again and again as the chorus of the song.
'69 Love Songs' is Stephin Merrit's epic treatise on love, romance and the love song itself via his immaculately written electronic pop songs. Towards the end of this comprehensive, three CD affair but very much thematically at the heart of the whole enterprise, is 'The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure', a meta-pop masterpiece about the impossibility of writing love songs. In the song, Merrit imagines himself meeting Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of 20th century linguistics, on what he romantically calls 'a night like this'. De Saussure points out the utter futility trying to employ such blunt tools as language in order to portray the essence of something as complex as love, a sentiment which surely casts all pop music from the Beatles to Holland-Dozier-Holland as irrelevant and ineffectual in one fell swoop. Merrit cannot bear to hear this, and loses his temper and shoots the hapless linguist. The song is a witty and heartfelt defence of Merrit's belief that human language and music can be used to talk about love and, at the same time, symbolic of his struggle to express such a complex emotion and do justice to it purely through those tools. After all, this is partly what drove Merrit to create a three-disc A to Z of the love song and its various guises, a project which didn't exhaust all he had to say on the subject by any means. But ultimately, 'The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure' works because it is great pop music. The song is built around a catchy bass riff and luscious synth-strings, topped off with Merrit's affecting baritone and the occasional flurry of handclaps. The rhyme scheme is deliberately silly - 'Saussure / So sure / closure / bulldozer', and dry wit abounds - Merrit claims to be 'just a great composer / And not a violent man'. However, despite his heroic attempts, Merrit cannot escape de Saussure's claim that 'We don't know anything about love', which, as Ferdinand's fictional last words, come back to haunt Merritt again and again as the chorus of the song.
posted by Jonathan Thornton at 4:45 pm
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