Five amazing songs that invented a fictional character
The line between songwriter and storyteller is a thin one. Invariably, just as an author steps up to the task of weaving a narrative to explore the “metaphor for life” as renowned story consultant Robert McKee defines it, so too does the bard or lyricist shape vignettes of moments, flash insights that evoke an internal rolling movie in our heads as a song’s transportive energy can navigate and make sense of far-flung exotic characters and scenarios that speak to our human universalism.
Perhaps it’s easier to reveal your raw, vulnerable self under the guise of a mask or alter ego. Crafting a conduit between your persona and the audience may bring out your truest affirmations or inspire a greater level of creative expression than would otherwise be possible in your humdrum, everyday self.
Music has a long tradition of dreaming up characters since time immemorial, and popular music is no different. Ever since Chuck Berry crafted the plucky Johnny B Goode as the avatar for rock ‘n’ roll’s working class, rags to riches dream, the charts have been littered with new heroes and villains for the Billboard age, inspiring whole albums dedicated to the plots of many an artist’s fictitious creation, from The Who’s Tommy rock opera to the intimate bleakness of Lou Reed’s Berlin.
With such a voluminous cast to sift through, we’ll pick an arbitrary five amazing songs that invented fictional characters.
Five songs that invented a fictional character:
5. The Beatles – ‘Eleanor Rigby’
Paul McCartney’s never been one to bare his soul with such furrowed, personal dissection as much as his songwriting partner John Lennon. While Lennon could veer into self-obsession toward the end of The Beatles’ tenure, McCartney mined the emotional chasms of the human condition via a gallery of enduring Fab fictional characters to pour all his guarded heartache or wistful nostalgia from the Fool’s introspective hill-climbing, Rita managing to issue parking tickets with enchanting allure, or Rocky Racoon’s outlaw love triangle. Even his rightly maligned ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ was supposed to represent the pitfalls and trappings of life.
Presenting a snapshot of society’s fringe wanderers, Revolver‘s ‘Eleanor Rigby’ sees McCartney at his most melancholic. Surrounded by dramatic string arrangements, his sombre sketches of a forgotten woman navigating the debris left by a society that’s forgotten her pangs with a tragic truism in a contemporary age of isolation and fraying social atomisation.
The titular name long believed to be purely invented by McCartney, the discovery of an Eleanor Rigby buried in Liverpool’s St Peter’s Parish Church, with a John McKenzie nearby, points to a possible subconscious absorption when strolling its grounds as a youth.
4. Dolly Parton – ‘Jolene’
It’s extraordinary to think that Tennessee country star and shrewd entrepreneur Dolly Parton was 13 albums in before she truly reached her commercial peak, and that’s not including her many collaborations with singer and TV personality Porter Wagoner. Off the back of the enormous crossover success of 1973’s Jolene, Parton pursued the pop charts in earnest with the help of talent manager Sandy Gallin and comfortably dominated the 1980s with hits like ‘9 to 5’, winning the triple whammy number one across the country, pop, and adult-contemporary charts.
While Johnny Cash may be touted as country music’s most acclaimed heavyweight, it’s Parton who enjoys the most recognition and mainstream presence even to this day. This is largely helped by her enduring ode to the red-haired temptress and marital wrecker Jolene from her 1973 hit, an immortal confessional of romantic insecurity and the paralysing effects of jealousy, all wrapped up in a God-given hooky package of stirring, affecting Nashville pop.
3. The Kinks – ‘Lola’
With a legacy of pithy garage rock and sharp, anglo-centric pop that countered the mid-1960s’ psychedelic flourishes, The Kinks confoundedly entered the following decade indulging in an era of arch-conceptual narratives and theatre vaudeville. This started in earnest with 1970’s Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One, an intended first chapter of a satirical examination of the music industry, and gifting the pop world with frontman Ray Davies‘ eternal Soho seductress.
Rumours abound as to the source influence of ‘Lola’, including Andy Warhol actor and walker of the wild side Candy Darling, the narrator’s confused fascination with the champagne-swigging transvestite wanders the ambiguous ardour and enthralled mystique through a hedonistic fog masterfully shaped by Davies’ narrative, late-night anecdote. Harbouring such affection for Lola, she appeared again in a sequel of sorts on ’81’s ‘Destroyer’.
2. Dr Octagon – ‘Earth People’
Always pursuing a boldly unique voice since his days in Ultramagnetic MCs, South Bronx rapper Kool Keith slyly emerged from the first hiatus of the pioneering hip-hop group with an alien foil to indulge in his love for science-fiction, weird horror, and sex at its most surreal and incomprehensible. Teaming up with producer Dan the Automator and turntablist maestro DJ Qbert, the trio set to work on crafting eerie, psychedelic beats scoring the violent, surgical exploits of Dr Octagon, the pink and white afro’d, brain-glowing gynaecologist with a salacious obsession for chimpanzee acne, experimental rectal operations, and extracting saliva glands.
Leading his extraterrestrial alias debut, Dr Octagonecologyst, ‘Earth People’ states clearly that Keith’s way beyond the East Coast–West Coast rivalry that distracted the hip hop scene at the time. “New York and California/ Earth People/ I was born on Jupiter,” our perverse medic spits atop stinging drum machines and corroded synths, conjuring an intoxicating aural trip light years ahead of anyone else in rap. Later killed in his other persona’s debut, Dr Dooom’s First Come, First Served, Dr Octagaon still stands as one of Kool Keith’s most fantastic creations and expanded hip hop’s parameters into infinitely more eccentric terrain.
1. David Bowie – ‘Ziggy Stardust’
The last word in musical reinvention, any one of David Bowie‘s gallery of guises, from Major Tom, The Thin White Duke, and Halloween Jack, offered a level of escapism from the ‘cracked actor’ that was exotic, sophisticated, and utterly captivating to a generation of kids left cold by the double-denimed seriousness that clogged the charts in the mid-1970s.
His most electric, exhilarating creation will always be the Martian rock messiah sent to Earth to warn humanity of their superficial ways, as introduced in the glam opus The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The androgynous Starman’s centrepiece song possessed with guitarist Mick Ronson‘s gargantuan riff, the entire odyssey of the ill-fated Ziggy Stardust is captured in three minutes, a cut that’s dripping with ‘classic rock’ aura yet feels urgently fresh over 50 years later.
“I’ve always thought of the 1970s as being the start of the 21st century,” Bowie would later muse, his alien rock star well and truly thrusting pop culture into the future.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.