Content area

Full text

 

Songs featuring clock-related images in titles and lyrics are common. Ironically, the precision of time-in seconds, minutes, and hours-is often blurred to illustrate emotional distress, romantic bliss, or other dimensions of stress or exhilaration. This brief essay and extensive discography provide an overview of popular recordings that explore flexible formats of time as metaphors depicting life situations. More than 300 songs from the past century are listed.

Timing is everything. Punctuality is expected. The clock measures our lives. Don't be late. But don't arrive too early. Don't waste time. Whether hanging on the kitchen wall, wrapped around the wrist, or displayed in a public bell tower, the circular face with ever-rotating radiants (second, minute, and hour hands) competes with its ubiquitous digital brothers and sisters for temporal authority. Time clocks in employment settings differ markedly from shot clocks in basketball or game clocks in football. Yet mechanisms of moments inform, organize, and bedevil human life. Everyone strives to beat the clock. No one can make time stand still. Many who encounter the mythic 15 minutes of celebrity must eventually return to 9-to-5 weekday drudgery. Business office employees anticipate the Friday happy hour-a 120-to-180-minute libation opportunity-and the weekend time off the clock. Down time. Personal time. Private time.

Singers and songwriters concoct and circulate meanings of time beyond clock numerals. They utilize audience understandings about cultural clocking patterns when crafting lyrics and song titles. This is hardly surprising. Most popular culture ventures rely upon formula-oriented settings and phrasings to attract interest, to spur mental or emotional involvement, and (for genuinely creative artists) to introduce a fresh idea or two. Using the two sweeps of the hour hand, songsters depict a myriad of daytime and nighttime adventures. From midnight to noon and from noon to midnight, the a.m. and p.m. activities of men and women are imagined and chronicled in contemporary lyrics.

Why is the musical/lyrical commentary featuring chronology so unique? Why do so many recorded tunes address topics of time? The following essay speculates that time in music, especially designated clock time in seconds, minutes, and hours, is rarely real. It is almost universally metaphorical. Relying on broadly understood conventions of personal and social behavior, recording artists mine memories to produce lyrical reveries. While classic...

Show less