This one hurts for me to do. Jimmy Webb, the guy that wrote this, is one of the great songwriters of all time. By The Time I Get To Phoenix? Ace. Wichita Lineman? Galveston? All I Know? All wonderful, deep, complex, beautiful songs. And then we have MacArthur Park, which is one of his biggest hits, famously recorded by Donna Summer among others. And while the music is great, the lyrics....oh my lord, are they awful. The metaphors make so little sense it's almost painful, the song is barely coherent, and no one even knows why the hell it's called MacArthur Park. Well, maybe they do, but you've sure got me. I think it's supposed to be a lament to a lost love, but when you have lyrics like what I'm going to highlight below, it could really be about anything. Well, anything that sucks, that is.
Mac Arthur's Park is melting in the dark
all the sweet green icing flowing down
someone left the cake out in the rain
I don't think that I can take it
'cause it took so long to bake it
and I'll never have that recipe again
Oh, nooo!
And yes, that "Oh, nooo!" is accurate; the line is sung with very unnecessary passion.
So where to begin? I don't even know if I can. That whole section about how the guy can't take it, and it took so long to bake it, is just so horrible it makes me cringe every time I hear/read it. I mean, come on, there HAS to be a better metaphor than someone leaving a friggin cake out in the rain and not having the recipe again for losing love. It's just so extended and painfully awkward. Look, I'm a college admissions counselor at a school that highly favors writing, and if this was sent in as a writing sample, guess what would happen? DENY! OK, fine, I'd look at his grades too, but still...
The worst part of all of this is that I had the opportunity to see Jimmy Webb perform his own music live in New York, and it is easily in my top ten concerts all-time. He was warm, personable, was in great form on the piano, played fantastic songs all night, Chris Noth was in the audience, it was all good....until the final song, which was of course MacArthur Park. I had to stifle my laughter as he passionately sang these lyrics, and it honestly soured the concert a little bit for me, as I was dreading the song's appearance. Let this be a lesson to us all; even the greats can have sucky songs.
You know, I remember having this kind of reaction to a Tango dance concert. There was a whole audience applauding wildly, and I was going so this is really dumb. Sometimes we just aren't educated enough to appreciate something, but I have to say, the old cake lyrics truly don't strike me as that kind of thing. Maybe something juicy and tragic was going on in the singer's life at the time that people remember when they hear the song? Just trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.
ReplyDelete-- Mom
I like MacArthur Park. Webb says that the lyrics aren't psychedelic babble, but rather real images from his frequent visits to MacArthur Park with hlis girlfriend (Linda Ronstadt's cousin, Susan). The cake was a reference to the many birthday cakes he saw from celebrants at the park;
ReplyDeleteI actually like the lyrical structure of the passage you mentioned, where the narrator/singer acknowledges that the cake is a metaphor in the line "and I'll never have the recipe again." That shift of person is cool to me -- sort of breaking down the fourth wall, if I may mix metaphors.
DF
DF (who could you be?),
ReplyDeleteSee, this is my biggest problem with the song. You have to do research to understand the meaning, which I'm always bothered by with lyrics unless there's some deep political/historical symbolism behind it, and even with the knowledge of what the cake means I still think the lyrics are trying way too hard. I also think the complexity of the lyrical structure not to mention the oddness of the metaphor of the cake melting in the rain doesn't work to the song's favor, although it is unique.
Check out the Wikipedia entry for the song; there's a whole section about how much the song has been parodied and ridiculed, especially Richard Harris' version.