The Joy of Non-Lyrics
The Joy of Non-Lyrics
We complain these days about the limited nature of jingle lyrics. All too often, it’s just a quick slogan, if you’re lucky, and the name of the station - eg ‘This is Heart; this is Heart’.
But in reality lots of jingles since the 1970s have done little else than tell listeners the frequency and name of the station. I guess the shotgun era was the epicentre of this trend, but it’s never disappeared.
More interesting for me today is when jingles use singers to sing what we might call ‘non-lyrics’. The singers are singing, but they aren’t singing words.
You hear it on JAM’s ‘Beep beep beep beep yeah’ Radio One travel news jingle from 1976. But we can explain that as a clever passing reference to a silly Beatle lyric.
More distinctive are jingles that use non-words to create the sound of the station - singing meaningless words to a backing track.
These aren’t the same as the ‘Oh yeah’ lyrics we get over the ramps of so many modern talkover jingles. Instead, these are lyrics that bear no relation to English. They feel improvised, but they can’t have been. These lyrics must have been written down so that the singers all sang the same non-words.
Here’s what I mean (click on the pic above): the brilliant long voice-over bed from TM’s Design 70 package: bah bah bah bah bah ...
It’s a wonderful jingle. It also reminds us of the art of writing the powerfully expressive non-lyric cut. It’s another reminder of the way jingles constantly surprise us.
Bob Dinan
14 October 2017
Saturday, 14 October 2017
The Joy of Non-Lyrics