While most songs tell some kind of a story, a lot of these stories sound the same. Many songs are about things such as falling in love, feeling lost in the world, heart break—all very personal themes, all things we can relate to. These songs are great in some ways, but they can also get old. I'm tired of hearing songs about real life.
Hearing a song completely outside that mold is so refreshing. I like songs that tell a story different from the plot of any other song. I’m not talking about songs that tackle these cliche themes differently or more artfully. For example, Childish Gambino’s song "That Power" describes a summer camp relationship beautifully, but it’s still talking about something so familiar. Very rarely do you find a song that is about something completely unique.
I call them flash fiction songs: they are short, self–contained stories that sound like the result of some crazy flash fiction exercise. The first of these flash fiction songs I ever heard was "Story 2" by clipping.
It follows a day in the life of a former arsonist who thinks back on his crimes and his closet full of charred skeletons. He misses the taste of sulfur and the shouts of the burning bodies. As he heads home from his job at the bar, he sees a familiar car, then sees the sky littered with ash, and comes home to find the house up in flames with his two children in it. He then tries to walk into the flames, only to be knocked aside by a strong hand. The song ends with him screaming “why won’t you just let me die” until the track fades.
The subject matter is wild and interesting, but also the story is told so artfully. The rhymes sound seamless. Daveed Diggs, the author of the song, also is a master of word play. He plays off the arsonist theme with lyrics like “so many buried memories that take so many tears to get them out / water hadn’t never been a friend.”
Diggs is the king of these flash fiction songs. He’s come out with a bunch of them, but my other favorite is "The Deep." It's by far the most out–there song I’ve ever heard.
It begins with a woman’s voice setting the stage for the story:
“Our mothers were pregnant African women thrown overboard while crossing the Atlantic Ocean on slave ships. We were born breathing water as we did in the womb. We built our home on the sea floor, unaware of the two–legged surface dwellers until their world came to destroy ours. With cannons, they searched for oil beneath our cities. Their greed and recklessness forced our uprising. Tonight, we remember.”
Then the beat starts, and Diggs begins detailing the uprising of these sea people. The rap is split into four verses, each one describing a different portion of the uprising as these people get closer to the surface. Right before each of these verses, the beat picks up, getting faster and faster as they reach the shore.
These stories are like audio books that you can bump to. It enhances the storytelling experience: you hear the story just as the author wanted it to be heard. Better yet, the author can enhance the story with the music, just as Diggs did with the changing BPM. Imagine what Edgar Allen Poe could do if he set “The Tell–Tale Heart” to music.
That's why I also enjoy when artists take classic tales and turn them into songs. Iron Maiden's take on Daedalus and Icarus is so fresh and entertaining even though the story has been retold hundreds of times in literature and artwork. You get to hear the emotion and feel the flow of the story.
I wish more artists would put out flash fiction songs. If even a classic like Daedalus and Icarus can be enhanced by song, why shouldn't all artists take advantage of music as a tool for telling original fiction?
