The Beatles even cultivated this sort of personal connection to their audience. In their early songs, Paul McCartney says, he and John intentionally — somewhat calculatingly — tried to inject personal pronouns into as many of the early lyrics as they could. They took seriously the task of forging a relationship with their fans in a very personal way. "She Loves You," "I Want to Hold Your Hand," "P.S. I Love You," "Love Me Do," "Please Please Me," "From Me to You."
Don’t forget "And I Love Her," among a bunch of others. And by egomania I am referring to the audience not (only) the performers. This passage is from Daniel J. Levitin’s new and quite interesting The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature.
I don’t view personal pronouns as personal at all. Pronouns are vague by nature. They teach in English 101 that vague writing (e.g. using pronouns) is ususally a sign of writing immaturity. My story would be that they just got better as they went along.
If anything, the Beatles’ use of pronouns reinforces their collective oriented (and certainly anti-ego) underpinnings (see, for example, “Within You, Without You”).
Alas, I still remain a huge Beatles fan.
I gave up on this Levitin book. It is sorely lacking in clear writing of any depth. His previous book, “This is your brain on music” or something like that– is outstanding. This one is poorly written, which gets in the way nearly every page. I wonder if he had a real editor on this one- it does not read like he did. Even his references to trite pop songs seemed to be misguided (although I am no fan of 60s and 70s music so maybe my bias is creeping in here).
I just received “The panic of 1907″ and am looking forward to actually finishing a book for a change.
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