Another Kind of Currency: The Wordplay in "Dog Problems"
November 19, 2014
Courtesy of It’s a Fabulous Life.
One of the many things I owe my older brother for would be introducing of me to some of the music that has become my personal favorite to this day. Most of it happened when he was in high school and I, being five years his junior, in middle school. At this point my music tastes hadn’t truly been formed yet (and arguably still haven’t) but I had an idea of what I liked and what I found deplorable.
One day in, I believe, 2007 or 2008, he played me The Format’s “She Doesn’t Get It” off of their 2006 sophomore and final album Dog Problems. I was immediately hooked on this band and had to hear more. Their sound was unlike anything I had heard before—it blended influences from ’60s jangly pop and late ’70s/’80s alternative, and even some punk-ish stuff. “Dog Problems” has earned a spot in my list of favorite albums of all time and has the distinction of being one of the few albums that I own two vinyl copies of: the original 2006 pressing and the deluxe repressing done in 2014. I could go on and on raving about this album, but let’s focus. This week, we’re going to look at the title track, and especially at the wordplay and cleverness of its lyrics.
“Dog Problems” by far is one of the most unique songs on the record. It opens as a piano-based ballad, but soon breaks into a pseudo-jazz tune and alternates between the two throughout the song. This is incredibly appropriate when considering the song’s subject matter: a very messy breakup. It mirrors the feelings that one would go through in the aftermath of such a breakup, and adds to the effect of the lyrics. The second verse, in the pseudo-jazz section following a kick-ass instrumental break, details what the narrator (presumably Nate—his lyrics tend towards the personal) is feeling after the breakup.
And so I
Walk the web in search of love
But always seem to end up stuck
I’m finding flaws in everyone
I’ve reached the point where all I want
Is to sleep around, in hopes that I will
Catch back up,
We are parallel lines, we’re running in circles
We’re never meant to cross.
While the verse does to a fair bit of explaining the situation, Nate does it in very clever ways. He is dating online (“walk[ing] the web in search of loveÛ) but just wants casual sex, and since he was cheated on, he feels the need to “catch up” with his ex by sleeping around, but they are parallel lines: their paths will never cross. The next verse makes it clear that this is not his desired situation:
I’m at a
Loss you were my tangerine,
My pussycat, my trampoline
Now all I get are wincing cheeks
And dog problems; I signed a lease
Thinking my heart belonged at 93rd and Park,
Instead I broke a girl’s heart and flew back to Phoenix
To finish the year as it started.
He is still in love with his ex. He still knows all of the pet names he had for her—“tangerine,” “pussycatÛ—and she was the trampoline he needed to bounce back if he was feeling low. The fourth line is also telling of the situation. Presumably right before the breakup occurred, they’d had plans to move in together—they got a dog and signed a lease for a place to live, but the shit hit the fan. He now must deal with these problems alone, and the song flows back into a ballad.
Courtesy of The Format.
The next section is one of the most clever on the record and serves as Nate somewhat coming to terms with the situation through a poem—something he mentions struggling with at the beginning of the song (“We know I can’t construct a poem/’Cause words, like girls, get bored and runÛ) that allows him to express his feelings about her and realizes that he truly is better off without her:
B is for believing you’d always be here for me
E is for everything, even when we see it though
C, C is for seeing through you; you are a fake which brings me to
A; because, because you always run away!
While on the surface, it seems that he is making an acrostic for the word “because,” Nate is using very strong wordplay to continue the digs towards his ex and to give her a name. As you can see by the bolded letters, her name is “Becca.” It may seem like a coincidence, and the fact he stated the C twice can be seen as a stutter, but the very next line hints at my interpretation: “I never finish phrases I misspell.” While he did misspell “because,” he knew what he did. He is trying to play it off so that on the surface, he doesn’t directly call his ex out by name. The way he does it is very clever—the wordplay off of the word “Because” and her name is one of the many things that made me fall in love with this band.
I think that this level of wordplay is something not seen very often in music, something that music is truly missing if it wants to be taken as seriously as literature as a form of art and expression. Lyricists need to be creative in what they do. If they become lazy, they let the whole art form down. Sure, writing has its 50 Shades of Greys, but it has its fair share of brilliant classics. Music needs its own classics to be recognized.
