There are a lot of chumps out there that will try to tell you their music is poetry. You’ve heard it a thousand times before, and chances are you’ve probably gotten pretty good at calling their bluff: Their music isn’t poetry. In fact, most music isn’t.
Sure it serves other purposes. We live in a world where speakers are so widely and cheaply available that they’re cramming mini ones into greeting cards, so to say that music isn’t and essential part of life would be a whole different argument, but to say that the music that takes the awkward out of a two-man elevator ride or the beats that turn a gathering into a party are the same as the music that “moves you” (for lack of a better grasp on what verb a poem would choose to describe its act of being) is a sorry way of a looking at life.
Some music is different. Some music actively makes the choice to stop speaking about the size of its penis, and to instead tell a story about the world and all it’s surprise and wonder without even utilizing a single spoken verse.
The Three Minute Novel
Here are a couple of tunes that poked and prodded around inside me to the point where I felt I could write an entire book on just three minutes of audio. If a tune can tap so deeply into my own personal nostalgia that it unlocks memories from my childhood that I did not even know I had, that’s what I call poetry.
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