Someone recently quoted a line from a Graham Greene novel that gave me pause. When asked for background information, the narrator in the story reflects that the requestor needs to "learn for himself the real background that holds you as a smell does."
The sense of smell does seem to "hold" us more than our other senses. It reaches deeper into our consciousness. The smell of rotten food disgusts us, and the smell of roasting turkey attracts us and draws us in. The smell of an unwashed body repels, while a whiff of perfume acts like a magnet. And the smell of something from one's past can result in a reverie of rich remembrances, not unlike the taste of the madeleine that triggered Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.
They say that the sense of smell is so acute because it's wired more directly to the brain than other senses, which is why smells are capable of triggering such powerful memories. So I got to thinking--if smell has such a powerful effect on us, where is all the great smell imagery in pop music? Maybe I'm missing something, but a perusal of my CD and record collections makes me think that we've been getting increasingly short shrifted in the sniff department over the last 20 years or so.
Even a quick search of all of Bob Dylan's lyrics (how did we ever get by without search engines on sites like bobdylan.com, anyway?) came up with only a handful of hits, and none of them are very notable. Given that things romantic are among the most commonly explored themes in pop music, and that smell plays a definite role when two people are a-tangoing, something--if you'll forgive me--smells funny here.
Speaking of funny, the sense of smell is often used to generate laughs. I'm reminded of the late Frank Zappa, whose music often exhibited his sense of humor and for whom no topic was taboo. Zappa took the olfactory offensive in "Stink-Foot" from the 1974 album Apostrophe, which included the following gem of a lyric:
My python boot was too tight
I couldn't get it off last night
A week went by
And now it's July
I finally got it off and my girlfriend cried "You got stink-foot!"
"Dead Skunk," which rocketed Loudon Wainwright III to the top of the pop music rollercoaster in 1972, was a head-on embrace of the power of smell on the American highway. Wainwright is one of the most consistently funny and poignant songwriters I know of, and his viewpoint is skewed just enough to make me wonder why there aren't more references to smell in his songs.
Another smell reference I recall is from Jethro Tull's 1971 album Aqualung, in the song "Wond'ring Aloud." I remember being taken by it the first time I heard it because I thought it somewhat unusual:
As she floats in the kitchen
I'm tasting the smell
Of toast as the butter runs
Then she comes
Spilling crumbs on the bed
And I shake my head
I found the combination of images--the taste of the smell of toast, along with the sight of crumbs on the bed--to be very powerful. I still find myself humming this tune occasionally.
Another smell reference from that era was in Van Morrison's "Into the Mystic," from the classic 1970 album Moondance:
Hark, now hear the sailors cry
Smell the sea and feel the sky
Let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic
Then we have the occasional references to the smell of death, one being John Prine's masterpiece "Sam Stone" that told the story of an addicted Vietnam vet. The last verse includes the following lines:
They played his last request
While the room smelled just like death
With an overdose hovering in the air
But life had lost its fun
And there was nothing to be done
But trade his house that he bought on the G.I. Bill
For a flag-draped casket on a local hero's hill
A more spooky reference is in Lynyrd Skynyrd's "That Smell," which was released just three days before the plane crash that took the lives of songwriter Ronnie Van Zant and two other band members. The reference was rather, uh, unambiguous:
Oooh, that smell
The smell of death is all around you
Some might suggest "Love Stinks" by the J. Geils Band and, more recently, Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," although I think Peter Wolf and Kurt Cobain were really speaking more metaphorically in these songs.
For my money, the most daringly honest--and erotic--reference to smell was made by that songwriting siren from Saskatchewan, Joni Mitchell. Although she had been dazzling the pop music world with incredible lyrics and music since about 1967, I think Mitchell hit her creative peak in the mid-1970s with the releases of Court and Spark, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, and Hejira. The latter album, released in 1976, profoundly affected me, especially in the song "Coyote" when she sang:
Coyote's in the coffee shop
Staring a hole in his scrambled eggs
He picks up my scent on his fingers
While he's watching the waitress's legs
Whew. That one got to me--I think I blushed when I first heard it.
Well, there you have it. Despite the fact that I listen to more music than ever, almost all of the smell lyrics I can think of are from the 1970s. Is my sense of smell deteriorating, or is pop music losing its aroma? Only the nose knows. Did I miss some of your favorites? Lemmeknow...