Literature permeates all aspects of life. Stories like Romeo and Juliet and Harry Potter are—even for those who have never read them—required cultural capital.
Every time someone mentions a new episode of Love is Blind, they are paying homage to a phrase invented five hundred years ago by William Shakespeare. Whenever something political happens and 1984 starts trending on Twitter, George Orwell’s 1949 novel sees a bump in sales. Each October, people parade through the streets dressed as characters created by Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker in the 1800s, though Dracula makes a better costume than Frankenstein.
Literature references aren’t reserved for people at the DMV who read The Metamorphosis during their freshman literature class. Literature and music were inseparable at their conception, with modern music originating partially through classic operas. Today, popular music has evolved but its origins remain staunchly literary. Lyrics themselves are a type of literary endeavor, and artists today often reference novels of the past, both consciously and unconsciously.
Here are a few stand-out literary references in contemporary popular music, along with some analysis of what makes them notable.
First on the list is Lil Wayne and Kendrick Lamar’s song “Mona Lisa.” Given both these artists’ notoriety for lyrical acrobatics and storytelling, it is fitting that their collaboration should reference another legendary American wordsmith. Though the song’s obvious high-art reference is to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Lamar drops a seemingly inconsequential nod to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, towards the end of the song. The literary reference frames the song’s dark conclusion, with Lamar drawing parallels to the great American novel throughout his verse.
“Mona Lisa” could be considered a literary work itself. Its structure deviates from the typical verse-chorus-verse song arrangement as the rappers opt for a stream-of-consciousness storytelling method. Wayne takes the vocal lead for the first two-thirds of the song, narrating a story of a woman who sleeps with wealthy men and helps others rob her suitors.
The allusions to The Great Gatsby do not begin until Lamar starts rapping in the third verse. He focuses on the woman’s relationship with a nondescript wealthy man, opening his verse by describing the couple’s materialistic courtship.
Lamar raps, “Every day she wake up with a different color makeup / And a promise he gon’ take her to the movie and the mall.” In one of The Great Gatsby’s most iconic scenes, Jay Gatsby throws “shirts of sheer linen and thick silk” around his room as his love interest, Daisy Buchanan, looks on (Fitzgerald 92). The shirts, “which lost their folds as they fell … in many colored disarray”, represent Gatsby’s throw-away wealth and the lifestyle he has built in an attempt to earn Daisy’s love (Fitzgerald 92).
Lamar introduces his listeners to the relationship in “Mona Lisa” through a depiction of love expressed materially, similar to how Gatsby first expresses his love for Daisy with a tour of his mansion and wardrobe, showing off the luxury he hopes to offer her. In both the novel and the song, materially expressed emotion proves futile.
As Lamar drives the narrative forward, the man’s love for the woman continues to build as Lamar’s character grows weary of infidelity. In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby is aware of Daisy’s marriage to Tom Buchanan. Still, Gatsby maintains that Daisy loves only him.
Lamar uses his character’s understanding of the woman’s other lover to build tension throughout the song. Similarly, Fitzgerald’s plot revolves around Daisy’s love for two men. In “Mona Lisa”, this tension comes to a boiling point as Lamar directly references the modernist novel.
Lamar raps “she asked him / Did he want to make love in a yellow taxi? / Never gave two fucks, jumped in the backseat / Woke up in the morning to The Great Gatsby,” alluding to the novel twice in three lines. Though seemingly inconsequential, Lamar’s detailing of the taxi as yellow draws a parallel to Gatsby’s notably yellow convertible. In the novel, a hit-and-run accident in the yellow car sets off a chain of events that leads to Gatsby’s demise.
In “Mona Lisa”, the man discovers evidence that his lover is unfaithful while in the backseat of the “yellow taxi”, leading to his demise. In both stories, the car is the vehicle that seals the main character’s fate.
If this relationship seems like a stretch, Lamar’s rhyming of “taxi” with “Gatsby” two lines later confirms the connection. “Woke up in the morning to The Great Gatsby” could be a nonsensical name-drop. Its intentionality, however, is clear given that the wealthy man wakes up and sees the remainder of his life parallel Jay Gatsby’s final moments. In other words, he wakes up in the morning and lives out the plot of The Great Gatsby.
In Fitzgerald’s novel, Gatsby confronts both Daisy and her husband Tom stating “in her heart she never loved any one except me” (Fitzgerald 130). Gatsby demands that Daisy leave Tom for him as Daisy retreats “further and further into herself” alarmed at the brutal clash between her two lovers (Fitzgerald 134).
In “Mona Lisa”, Kendrick berates his lover for her infidelity as the song’s tension rises. Convinced of her affair, he demands “Tell me who love you, I bet I love harder”, mirroring Gatsby’s conviction that his love is more valid than Tom’s. Like Daisy, the woman seemingly cowers as the story’s tension comes to its forefront.
Though Gatsby does not kill himself in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald leaves his protagonist with no option besides death. He has focused his entire life on earning Daisy’s love, and when that moment passes, he is left with nothing. Regarding Gatsby’s death, Fitzgerald writes that “perhaps he no longer cared” (Fitzgerald 161). Further hinting at Gatsby’s disillusionment with life, Fitzgerald suggests that “he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream” (Fitzgerald 161). Though not literally a suicide, Gatsby’s death might well have been.
In “Mona Lisa”, Lamar’s character experiences a similar disillusionment. Like Gatsby, he discovers that the woman he loves loves someone else. Addressing the woman in the first person, Lamar reminds her of “all the shit that I did for your daughter” as he spirals mentally out of control. In the verse’s final lines, he gets his gun and raps “since you like rappers that’s killing that pussy, I’m killing myself”.
Perhaps the easiest reference of the three to analyze is Radiohead’s “Exit Music (For A Film)”. Appearing on the English band’s esteemed 1997 album OK Computer, the song mourns the story of a contemporary pair based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
Despite headlining one of Radiohead’s most cohesive, polished albums, Radiohead originally wrote “Exit Music (For A Film)” for the 1996 Romeo + Juliet film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. When the band decided to include the track on their album, however, it was removed from the movie and instead chosen to play during the film’s credits.
“Soundtracks are a bit naff nowadays,” Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood explained of the song’s inception. “They just stick on some contemporary music. We wanted to be a bit more intelligent than that.”
“The only thing I don’t like is ‘Exit Music…’ appears over the end credits, so it will just play to the sound of loads of chairs banging upright,” guitarist Ed O’Brien added.
Though written to accompany a literal retelling of Shakespeare’s 1597 tragedy, “Exit Music (For A Film)” only sticks loosely to the original story. It is easy to listen to the song without making a connection to the drama as neither Romeo nor Juliet is mentioned by name, and the play’s famous ending is left open-ended by the song.
“Thom [Yorke] looked at Shakespeare’s original text and tried to incorporate it into the song—but he gave up on that quickly,” O’Brien said of the songwriting process. “But I still think it fits with the film amazingly well, especially as the lyrics are actually quite personal.”
The song opens with a scene presumably pulled from act three scene five of Shakespeare’s play. In the original story, Romeo and Juliet wake up together in Juliet’s chamber after spending the night together. In Shakespeare’s version, Romeo flees as Juliet’s mother comes into the room to announce that she must marry Paris. The song dodges these details, instead focusing on the couple’s plans to flee and start a new life together.
“Wake from your sleep / The drying of your tears / Today we escape, we escape,” Yorke sings in the first verse of “Exit Music (For a Film).” Yorke narrates Romeo and Juliet with heavy foreshadowing, remaining conscious of the story’s dark outcome. In the next verse, Yorke instructs his subject—presumably Juliet—to pack her things before her father hears and “all hell breaks loose.”
In Shakespeare’s play, Juliet does not pack her things to run away with Romeo, but instead crafts a plan to escape with her lover. She takes a serum that puts her to sleep in an attempt to convince her family of her death, but due to a miscommunication, Romeo is also convinced of her death. Romeo, then, visits his seemingly departed lover and kills himself by her side. When Juliet wakes to a dead Romeo, she stabs herself to death.
“All hell breaks loose” in Shakespeare’s play, but Radiohead’s version tells a more simplistic story. Yorke avoids the elaborate death-faking storyline, instead opting for a more ambiguous approach to the lovers’ fate.
Toward the middle of the song, Yorke skips to the end of Shakespeare’s play, assuming Romeo’s place beside the presumably dead Juliet. “Breathe, keep breathing,” he instructs. “I can’t do this alone.”
Yorke’s character, Romeo, refuses to go on without his lover as suicide becomes implicit. Though York does not directly reference death, he implies the pair’s fate with the line “now we are one in everlasting peace.” This, however, is the only mention of the couple’s deaths.
At the end of the song, Yorke, assuming Romeo’s point-of-view, lashes out against the forces keeping him from his lover. In the context of Romeo and Juliet, Yorke’s line “we hope your rules and wisdom choke you” is interpreted as directed towards the warring Capulet and Montague families and the broader Verona social structure.
The final lines of the song take on this motif as Yorke repeats “we hope that you choke / that you choke.” This is the most significant divergence from Shakespeare’s script. At the end of the play, the Montague and Capulet families bond over their dead children and the love they once had. In Romeo and Juliet’s wake, then, they declare peace in Verona. “Exit Music (For a Film)” makes no mention of peace at its end. Instead, it ends on a particularly violent note of repeated spite toward outside forces.
Radiohead’s song tells a loose version of the Romeo and Juliet story, but it is left open-ended enough to be applied to any set of lovers faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Yorke’s pessimistic “Exit Music (For a Film)” is a tragic spin on a tragic tale, leaving the listener moved regardless of their understanding of Shakespeare’s work.
Like Kendrick Lamar and Lil Wayne, much of The Hold Steady’s discography could be categorized as literary work. The band—originally from Minnesota but now based out of New York—has spent the better part of two decades turning out albums brimming with Springsteen-esq narrative depth and fine-tuned lyricism while maintaining a garagey-bar-rock sound.
The Hold Steady’s 2006 album Boys and Girls in America borrows name from Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road. The first song on that album, “Stuck Between Stations” repeats the namesake line, mentions Kerouac’s protagonist by name, and brings attention to another mid-20th-century literary figure, John Berryman.
In “Stuck Between Stations,” lead singer Craig Fin sets the stage for an examination into undisciplined youth by calling back to Kerouac and On the Road by mentioning its protagonist, Sal Paradise. He sings, “There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right / Boys and girls in America—they have such a sad time together / … / Crushing one another with colossal expectations / Dependent, undisciplined, sleeping late.” The first verse frames the rest of the song by establishing it as an examination of the types of people who might appear in a Kerouac novel, or those who are “dependent, undisciplined” and “sleeping late.”
On the Road loosely narrates a group of young characters bouncing around North America without any purpose or meaning beyond enjoying new experiences, or, in Kerouac’s words, “kicks”. Fin’s reference comes from the middle of a paragraph towards the beginning of the novel. Kerouac writes, “Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together. Sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk—real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious” (Kerouac 58). Like Fin, Kerouac uses the line to negatively characterize young people’s behavior as spontaneous and ignorant in rejecting society’s guidelines.
Though Kerouac’s line seems dismissive of the lifestyle Fin outlines, that is not the song’s message. Fin’s inclusion of the word “sometimes” before “I think Sal Paradise is right” leaves open a small window of approval. This window stretches larger as John Berryman is introduced as the antithesis of the lifestyle represented by Kerouac.
Unlike the Beatnik lifestyle advocated for by Kerouac, Berryman represents a circle of, in Fin’s words, “doctors and deep thinkers” that are “critically acclaimed and respected.” Though Fin does not depict Berryman as a ‘square,’ he operates in the social order Kerouac rebels against. Outside of the song’s world, Berryman and Kerouac’s parallel stories further this narrative. Both men attended Columbia University, but Kerouac dropped out while Berryman went on to earn his master’s degree. Berryman continued to work in academia throughout his career. Kerouac, on the other hand, spent his days hopping around the country working odd jobs in fire lookouts and on railways while writing in sporadic drug-fueled spurts. Berryman’s poetry, though often free verse, still faced far tighter constraints than Kerouac’s prose. While one writer worried over rhyme schemes and stanzas, the other neglected grammatical and stylistic conventions while paving the way for an entirely new generation of writers.
In “Stuck Between Stations,” Kerouac’s rule-breaking wins out. The song’s characters meet a drunk John Berryman in Minnesota, and by the end of the night, he has thrown himself off a bridge to his death. Fin sings, “that was that night that we thought John Berryman could fly
But he didn’t, so he died.” This is how the poet died in real life. He takes the correct path through life, but ends up more depressed than the free characters. In the song, Berryman “was drunk and exhausted, but he was critically acclaimed and respected.” His social standing and established literary reputation are not enough for the poet to transcend the problems of alcoholism and the weight of the world, and the song follows him to his demise.
Meanwhile, the path through life framed by the song’s early On the Road reference prevails. The characters lack Berryman’s standing but are free of the “colossal expectations” that cause the poet’s death. The Hold Steady describes Berryman’s tragic tale in one song, but the album’s name is a reference to Kerouac. Though the band is not entirely dismissive of societal order, it suggests that Kerouac might have been onto something. “Stuck Between Stations” is not an ode to On the Road, but rather a celebration of the youthful freedom Kerouac represents.
These are just three examples of literature and music intersecting. If you want to hear more, check out this playlist and try to spot and make sense of the references yourself.
Ethan Ott writes for the Content Team. He wrote the article. Abbott Swanson is on the Art Team. She made the graphic.
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