The Arctic Monkeys song designed to be utter nonsense: “It’s much more vague”
Any artist sitting down with pen and paper will want something to say besides simple rock and roll lyrics. There have already been plenty of songs about heartache and love lost, but most people want to tell a story every time they have a guitar in their hand that goes far beyond just the traditional routes everyone else takes. Sometimes, it’s esoteric like Bob Dylan or poetic like Patti Smith, but if you’re Alex Turner, you’ll turn in something absolutely insane like Arctic Monkeys’ ‘Black Treacle’ every now and again.
That’s not to say that Arctic Monkeys weren’t brilliant wordsmiths in their own right. Whatever People Say I Am is still one of the most thoughtful looks into English nightlife, and hearing Turner open up his first record talking about setting everyone up for disappointment is one of the most biting and hilarious things anyone has ever attempted.
But after blowing up that quickly, there’s probably a good reason why the post-Favourite Worst Nightmare period sounded like it did. There was still a lot of ground to cover in their old sound, but looking through Humbug, the band was already looking through different pieces that hadn’t been explored before.
And if that desert landscape wasn’t enough, Suck It and See may as well have been the sound of the Sheffield kids finally going to California, especially with the sunshine of the title track. Despite the pure bombast in the background, though, the wordplay in ‘Black Treacle’ is so strange that it might as well be giving Michael Stipe a run for his money on the early REM records.
As much as there are pieces that seem to make sense, each line feels like an individual picture in your mind rather than giving you the entire finished piece. While the broad explanation for this could easily be the phrase “Turner did drugs,” there’s a lot more going on underneath the surface when he sings about the stars telling him that his lover is not coming out that night.
According to Turner, that kind of heartache doesn’t necessarily have to make sense, saying, “Something I’ve discovered as I’ve gone on is that it’s cool to let the words sometimes take more of a back seat. I think there’s like two types of songs (that I write) where some of them, I want people to, like, understand where it is and almost be right there with you. Then there’s other things that are more like ‘Black Treacle’ or ‘Crying Lightning’ from the last one, where it’s much more vague, and I want to keep it that way.”
But just because a song is incoherent doesn’t make it bad. If so, we’d have to throw out over half of John Lennon’s psychedelic period, and given the effects on the guitar, this might as well have been the precursor to when Turner adopted the same kind of retro pastiche that would appear later on AM.
If anything, the fact that it doesn’t make sense is what this brand of psychedelic tune has always been about. No right-minded person would probably wax poetic about the vast intricacies of belly button piercings in the sky, but the reason it works is because it means something different to everyone who hears it.
