Tuesday, November 16, 2010

"Pop" Language


That's the word cloud of the lyrics of Beatles song.

Almost instantly you can see one of the keys of their success: universally recognizable English. Seriously, if you look at the lyrics of many of their songs ("Come Together"?), they use very simple English with words that can carry a lot of emotional freight.

And look at those pronouns! I have had many a Shakespeare teacher talking about how you never emphasize the personal pronouns; here, the Beatles are basically singing about the listener, singing about themselves, and singing about that relationship ("Want" "Tell" "Do" etc.).