literary influences on pop - classic or dud?

and i'm sure there are tons of others.

I am trying to say: add literature and stir. It may not come off, but then again it may add a bit of flavour that wouldn't have been there otherwise.

I think it's great though, just as much as any type of influence is great. If they all come together in a good way, then it's fantastic. The problem is that a lot of artists who are heavy on the literary allusions ARE pretentious gits who go on and on about how important their literary influences are. If they'd shut up they'd be much more bearable.

Oh, and totally destroy ALL references to hobbits in music.

Has any band EVER been any good that named itself for (a) someone else's novel/poem (b) someone else's LP/song (c) someone else's movie/TV show (d) non-fiction/documentaries/other even less likely inspirations?

Obviously this is decreasing order of dudness as I'm reading it/guessing it.

[Obviously naming your LP for someone else's LP can be stupid ("Giant Steps") or completely brilliant (can't think of an example; must be several: I liked that War called their LP U2, but the LP itself was very boring).]

last chapter of ulysses. i was surprised he got that far, but maybe he didn't, maybe he and joyce are just on the same wavelength.

'you shouldn't talk to me, find better company, there's better people to know, you'll only end up like rimbaud, get shot by verlaine'

2. I really do have to say those two immortal words 'Lloyd' and 'Cole' here.

But the others Sterling mentions are all naming their records/songs after books or whatever: which is a somewhat different matter. Bands/ artistes have to come up with dozens if not hundreds of track-titles: it's the one-off We-Present-Ourselves-Now moment of the bandname where it seems to me mostly just lamentable to reach for whatever you hope will be seen to be yr favoured reading/viewing. (What a ugly sentence...)

Starsailor being the pluperfectly naff example.

On the other hand, The Fall. (Perhaps I shd have researched this before I jumped in. Though I'd still maintain this is a better name if not a Camus ref.)

Lit references - Similar to pastiche/cliches, useful but frequently abused. but so often it's just another unqualified reference - gain kudos through association with something they know about but don't understand. I don't mind these reference so long as there's a reason, or obviously no reason. It reminds me of Jacques le Con's referencing of the eighties - "cause it's cool" "yeah, but why's it cool" "cause it's cool"

I'm actually afraid of mentioning this, but I always thought Bob Dylan pulled it off

Ah yes on-topic: Kate Bush - The Sensual World, song inspired apparently by last chapter of Ulysses. Always thought it was mysterious and sorta sexy.

Dylan obvious example of getting it *wrong*

Slavish, humourless homage to the beats? etc etc?

'hickory dickory dock, it was twelve o'clock / cinderella ain't home must be givin up the cock / i don't doubt it, she is kind of freaky of course / had a fight with snow white, she was fuckin her dwarves / saw a fight over colors too /red riding hood and little boy blue'

and then it samples the flintstones, bugs bunny, and andrew dice clay at the end. that's so cool.

But,

"Slavish, humourless homage to the beats?"

certainly. Also endless comparisons with Rimbaud that I just don't get. But I have this personal mythology where Dylan figures as some evil king who almost destroys popmusic by letting the Word overshadow intensity, regardless of crap voice and music. Something which Patti Smith understood much better. What I find interesting in Smith is not so much here poetic indebtness to Baudelaire but just that intensity. good example: that moment where words spill over in the introduction to 'Rock 'n Roll Nigger' and the guitar starts to rise.

not on ILM, I'm sure! :-)

I'm a sporadic Dylan fan, but I agree, the Rimbaud references must keep getting made by people who have never read Rimbaud. Dylan is at heart a great big soppy sentimentalist, the last thing Rimbaud was.

Ditto for most Rimbaud-Rock "connections". The only ones I can see working are Patti Smith, and perhaps Television, although you'll forgive me if I claim more of a debt to Mallarme, despite the singer's alias. Or did Dylan write a load of songs about ruthlessly efficient African slave trading?

Oh, Pete be careful out here, many strange things happen in the treacherous alleyways of ILM. Springsteen getting an almost unanimous Classic vote, that sort of thing ;)

Televison again a case where I don't see the connection. One wonders why one always speaks of "19th century French symbolist poetry" as an influence on Television, without explaining what influence exactly. Someone care to give it a try though? Maybe I'll put on 'Marquee Moon' again.

The dominance of the 'word', well it's a small territory that he inherited from folk/blues, but he moved with the times and continued to rule it absolutely. I'm sure he didn't understand music as well as others. He bucked the trends and made his own way through the changes. The voice, or his expressive playing is central to all the music, and that's consistent throughout, but the words won't date as bad as the music. The lit references are just more points of reference to pin him down, mis-leading or not, it's like saying you don't like duff notes.

Tom Verlaine's lyrics often make meaning fold over on itself ("watching the corners turn corners") in exactly the same way Mallarme experimented with hyperbolic tautologies ("the musician of hollow nothingness") which kind of negated any meaning but kept a structure of linguistic elegance afloat in the meaninglessness anyway. This was a very controlled and artificial experiment, almost a linguistic structural equation, and as far as these things have any meaning in comparison, it seems to me that Television do the same thing with their music...

because they had a controlled frenzy in juxtaposing notes, from a purely muso point of view Verlaine was absolutely not a conventional guitarist - he throws himself off into strange, illogical keys, then resolves the difference, and finds a way back into the song in an amazingly elegant and unpredictable way. It all seems like a highly artificial, poised musical equation, (topped off by a smattering of defiant Rimbaud-esque streetwise harangues).

As someone said elsewhere, Bangs et al were invoking the macho element of Rimbaud when they talked about duelling switchblade guitars... I prefer the model of the studious, faultlessly elegant Mallarme.. no lice in his hair!

Just a couple unrelated as evidence to classic or dud status... Nick Cave and others draw upon the vein of Southern Gothic, with Faulkner and O'Connor. And what about those great monolithic presences on hip-hop, Machiavelli and Sun Tzu? The music be quite lost without their guiding lights.

I was listening to 'What's Wrong With This Picture' on the new Lloyd Cole/Negatives album yesterday and was struck by the oddness of Five Leaves Left as a musical reference point for someone who is supposed to be an ironic "European SOB". But then I realized that the primary reference must be to paper for rolling cigarettes, which fits, esp. if the tobacco is Gauloise or something, and that the Nick Drake album is only a secondary reference, for what's hidden beneath that cool exterior. (Or maybe his fans would think of the Nick Drake album first?) Layered references are really cool. (Sorry the reference isn't strictly literary.)

hee

From the pitchfork review of Marquee Moon. I love that "not in a fey way": He named himself after Verlaine, but not y'know, in a gay way or anything.

Has any band EVER been any good that named itself for (a) someone else's novel/poem (b) someone else's LP/song (c) someone else's movie/TV show (d) non-fiction/documentaries/other even less likely inspirations?
Regarding A, I already mentioned The Wake (name derived from Finnegan's Wake). Regarding B, Rip Rig and Panic named for a Rahsaan Roland Kirk LP. C, Breathless, Xiu Xiu (although many people that have heard them don't like them). D, Scritti Politti = a bastardisation of the title of a Gramsci text.