Listening to The Munificent Seven
again tonight. It occurs to me that the narrative is
about comparable to being accosted by a drunken eccentric at the pub one
night. He might be a bright-eyed chap, eager to impart stories of his long-distant past and about as
likely to hurt a fly as lay a hand upon you. You might
even settle into your chair while he’s speaking, he tells his tales with such confidence and skill. But at the end of that hour or half hour stretch, when the drinks are finished and silence settles across the table,
and the eccentric pulls himself from his stool,
slaps you on the back good-naturedly, and disappears into the night, you might
wonder: “What the hell have
I just experienced?”
For instance Sting uses the
first person throughout. This itself is about as
unusual as day night following night, and is no
different from a million other pop songs before and after this one. Except that in ninety nine point nine percent of pop songs,
the narrator uses the second person too. To whit, most
songs are all: “I cannot do without you /
You are the cereal bowl in which I pour my
coco pops la la la.” Even where that’s not the
case, using the second person implies an
acknowledgement of the audience on the part of the musician. It’s like saying: “Look, I know I’m recording a hit record here, and squillions of filth-encrusted oiks besides you are going to
purchase this thing. But for the next
three minutes, let’s pretend it’s just you and me,
alright?” But
no. No such sop for the listener of The
Munificent Seven. This is part
of why the song reminds me of being accosted by an eccentric drunk:
you might be being addressed and you might be
listening, but your presence is never in fact
acknowledged.
Part dos of my admittedly odd simile to describe the
feeling I get listening to The Munificent Seven is this:
though the narrator might ramble on and on about
himself, the listener in fact learns almost nothing
about him. The song after all tells the tale of Sting
and his six hermanos(!), who agree to rid a
bandit-infested village of its less desirable elements in exchange for the opportunity to wed six swooning senoritas.
When the job is done and Sting realises
the promised senoritas amount to just one, he does
away with his nearest and dearest to get the girl. Beautiful no doubt. But is there a sense
that Sting is perhaps repenting the cold-blooded murder of his kin, to have the chance to get into the pants of some dark-eyed beauty?
Does it seem as though he’s fallen so deeply for this
woman that, in his eyes, the
murder of six men is worth her love? None of it.
Instead it’s like:
“Well, these are the facts.” He might
be giving testimony in court perhaps, except that the
tune is so damned jaunty. Hence my sense then
that this is like listening to a pub eccentric.
Sting might have just revealed the most sordid and
important event of his life, but does it feel like has
made the least connection with us? It does not – and
that is a touch unnerving.
