Thank you to everyone who's responded so far - please keep the comments coming, as I'm really enjoying reading them. I know I'm not going to get round to covering every excellent point made, but I'll make a start:
Posted by Astronaut
Literary Merit as poetry? This depends on which definition of the term ‘poetry’ you wish to adopt. Poetry and lyrics are 2 quite distinct genres.
This has always been my feeling. While I think DS writes lyrics which are far more intelligent and literate than your average pop/rock lyric (I had a bit of a twilight zone moment when I read your post, because Morrissey and Neil Tennant were also the first names that sprang to my mind when I tried to think of lyric writers comparable to Sylvian in quality!) I've always thought it was a little strange that he describes them as "poetry." I'm usually faintly disappointed when I see the words written down, because they rarely have anything like the same power on paper that they have in their proper context, supported by the mood of the music and the vocal expression he puts into them.
For me they're a huge, huge part of why I love Sylvian, but I find them practically impossible to divorce from the music and the way DS uses his voice.
Posted by Waves
Also Waterfront made me have tears in my eyes recently. It is of course not only the lyric, but the complete song.
Yes! Waterfront is probably the song I'd choose if someone put a gun to my head and made me choose a favourite DS song, on the basis of lyrics only. "Watch the train steam full ahead, as it takes the bend/Empty carriages lose their tracks and tumble to their end/So the world shrinks drop by drop as the wine goes to your head/Swollen angels point and laugh, 'This time your God is dead'" - a whole series of macabrely beautiful images that convey the derangement and paranoia of deep depression perfectly, without sounding whingy or clicheed.
Posted by anortherncod
I do appreciate what I interpret to be Sylvian's use of words "because they sound nice"; I don't mean that in a banal sense, but, for example, there's a certain hook about "Deviation/step on your fingers/Deviation/step on your toes".
Absolutely! Well, the sound of words IS a huge part of poetry and I always think that it's no accident that David's brother is a drummer - there is something very rhythmic about DS's songwriting, including his lyrics. A personal favourite of mine from the sound poitn of view is the line from "Serotonin": "I kick the sheets, they rise and fall like mountain ranges at my feet" - can't explain why, I just love it.
Posted by tallulahtaurus
I like his lyrics because they seem to cover moods that I am familiar with from my own life. Dissappointment, frustration then glorious stretches of happiness and faith. I appreciate that his lyrics can more adequetly express how I feel than I can.
I absolutely, totally, 100% agree. When most people try to express deep feelings in words, they end up sounding naff and clicheed, and what they write doesn't convey their experience to anyone else, no matter how sincere the emotion behind their writing is. David has a rare gift. When I listen to his songs (to borrow a line from Kate Bush) "I could feel what he was feeling".
I'm not always 100% certain that the moods, experiences and feelings that his songs touch in me are necessarily the ones DS intended, though, bringing us back to point 4.
Example 1: I had a good-natured debate with another fan on davidsylvian.net a few years ago about what the song "Brilliant Trees" is "really about". My correspondent was adamant that the song was a love song to Yuka, while I was equally convinced that it (or at least the first verse) was about David's relationship with his family - partly because the imagery of trees and roots is a conventional metaphor for the family, but mostly because the lines, "When you come to me, I'll question myself again/ Is this grip on life still my own? /When every step I take leads me so far away. /Every thought should bring me closer home" seemed to me to convey beautifully the fear of the barrier that a life lived in the intellectual, middle-class milieu of the arts is erecting between him and his working-class family.
Faced with my opponent's arguments, however, I eventually had to back down and concede that the song probably
was about Yuka, and that the reason why I am so attached to "my" interpretation is because it speaks to my own experience - like David, I'm from a working-class background, but now work in the arts.
Example 2: Atom and Cell always, without fail, reduces me to tears, because of the line "Pictures are pasted to shop windows and walls, like a poor man's Boltanski, lost one and all", which immediately throws me back to King's Cross in the aftermath of the July 7th bombings (I was living there at the time). I assume that he wrote the line about a similar rash of desperately sad fly posters stuck to walls in New York by relatives of the missing after September 11th, but I could be quite, quite wrong about that, and the line may well be about something utterly different.
Does this matter? Does it make my interpretation "wrong" because it happens to not be the one sitting in David's head at the time he put pen to paper?
I'm afraid I've always been with Barthes on this one, that in the act of writing an author enters into his own death. (I'm a huge fan of JK Rowling, but it drives me mental the way that she keeps giving interviews after the books have come out where she tries to totally control how readers interpret the series. I'm like "Well, if it's so vitally important that that's what it means, why didn't you make it much clearer in the ****ing book?!")
Posted by Astronaut
He has also said in interviews c.1991/2 that the RTC album is about death. No room for other interpretations - it's about death. End of everything. Full stop.
Yes, and he's also said that "The Shining of Things" is about his break-up with Yuka. He's also said some (in my opinion) quite outrageous things about what he thinks of people who prefer Japan to his solo work, so he is still someone who tries to control what his listeners think and feel! I'll have to find the quotation where he says he wants to leave meaning open to the individual, because I could swear I did read it somewhere. (Edit: I don't think this was the one, but in this interview he does talk quite a lot about trying to keep lyrics open to different interpretations:
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/31303-interview-david-sylvian)
tallulahtaurus, don't apologise for being less keen on SOTB and
anortherncod don't apologise for not thinking DS the best lyricist in the world. We all know that if you didn't love him, you wouldn't be here in the first place, and I'm sure we can all voice our own preferences without anyone taking offence. I'd better not get started on what I don't like in the lyrics, though, because that probably
would start WW3!