Recently, when I was doing my daily ritual of mindlessly scrolling through the Internet, I came across a meme that got a nice little chortle out of me. It read “Rip Emily Dickinson. You would have loved ‘Good Luck, Babe!‘” For the readers who aren’t familiar, ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ is a song that was released earlier this year by singer/songwriter Chappell Roan, who (in my own personal opinion) deserves all the accolades and is a big bright shining star. If you can’t tell, I’m a fan, and I may be just the slightest bit biased.
Now I would be remiss to not mention, that yes, I understand the joke stems from Emily Dickinson’s sexuality being something oft-discussed, and how Chappell Roan is a part of the LGBTQIA community and has many fans from that demographic. (Aren’t jokes funnier when you explain them?)That said, this meme got me thinking: would Ms. Dickinson really have liked the music? I mean, sure, it would have sounded foreign to her, as Chappell Roan uses a lot of 80s synth pop and Y2K music as influences, and it is very clearly heard in the melodies. Also, personal taste can be hard to gauge especially since, spoiler alert, Emily Dickinson is dead, and she is refusing to answer my calls from the Ouija board. So all I can do is look at it this way: Based on the writing styles that both artists express themselves with, what are the comparisons? How similar are they? Would they look at each other and say, “Girl…same”?
Let’s begin with theme. According to the Emily Dickinson Museum website, she wrote about what she knew and regularly “used images from nature, religion, law, music, commerce, medicine, fashion and domestic activities to probe universal themes: the wonders of nature, the identity of the self, death and immortality, and love.” For example, I usually think about her poem “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” when she is brought up. In this poem, she uses the imagery of riding along with Death, personified, looking at life until they reach the eternity of the hereafter. I always loved the description she put into the ride. The long yet fleeting life we all stroll through, hanging heavy with so few words, and though we never anticipate death, he will come for us, regardless.
Similarly, Chappell Roan uses her own lived experiences to insert vivid imagery into her verses that describe her day-to-day life and cathartically express her own identity of self, sexuality, love and loss. Now, Roan only has one album out, so there isn’t as extensive a collection as Dickinson, but I do think that, so far, there is some crossover in themes and use of imagery. In ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ Roan uses the imagery of someone “arms out like an angel through the car sunroof” to describe her foolishness in this situationship she found herself in. Sure, it feels free and exhilarating as the wind whips across your face, but who knows what’s coming down the road that could send you flying into a freefall…or having a moment like in the movie “Hereditary.”
Next, let’s look at form, which is where we see a lot more deviation between the two, but that might have more to do with how poems and lyrics are formatted differently. Firstly, Dickinson wrote typically short poems that used dashes and cleverly placed capitalization to stress certain words, pull focus and, in my opinion, add a bit of visual artistry to the work itself. When looking at the lyrics to ‘Good Luck Babe!’ I initially think that the length may have been a bit of deterrent to Dickinson. However, remember Dickinson was inspired by music, and according to an online resource found through the University of Massachusetts Amherst website, I was able to look at a few of the songs she had mentioned in some of her correspondences and find that the length wouldn’t have been a problem. Also, through repetition and vocal emphasis, Roan can achieve similar effects than Dickinson was able to achieve through her own writing, pulling focus to words and phrases that she wants the listeners to really hear.
A final thing I wanted to note is that while Dickinson regularly writes poems in the first person, you aren’t meant to assume that the person speaking is Dickinson. She even has said, “When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse – it does not mean – me – but a supposed person”. However, I do believe this is because of Dickinson being a very reserved and reclusive person and had wanted to add this layer as a defense mechanism to almost hinder the reader from seeing the real her. That’s purely conjecture though, so who can say? This is different from Roan, who often uses the first person to talk about her own experiences, bearing her soul to the listener, and when referring to anyone else, always distinctly says so. However, it has been noted that she writes in a way that evokes relatability through shared Gen-Z experiences, and honestly, speaking as a millennial and not a part of that demographic, there is a bit of relatability that I see myself, and I feel that Dickinson would also be able to see herself in some of the songs. The speaker could very easily be someone else or this “supposed person” and is meant to resonate with the listener either empathetically or sympathetically.
So where does this leave us? I know this is only a short and broad comparison between the two and we could really get into it by looking at each work line by line, but I don’t want to bore you with my prose and incessant fan-ing out. But maybe this will inspire you, dear reader, to go out and look for other works that Emily Dickinson or other poets would have loved. Maybe TS Elliot would have loved Taylor Swift’s “Tortured Poets Department.” And before you disagree, remember that one of the reasons Andrew Lloyd Weber was able to get permission to do “Cats” was because he pitched it as songs like the band Hot Gossip. Perhaps Edgar Allen Poe would have stanned Lana Del Rey’s “Born to Die.” Sure, maybe this was just an excuse for me to wax poetic about Chappell Roan for a few paragraphs, but that wasn’t the entire purpose. I ultimately wanted to encourage you to go out and think about poetry and music and find those similarities or differences (even though Poetry Month has now come and gone at the time of writing this), and how the library can help you. We have a plethora of music on CDs and books filled with poems, and that doesn’t even get into the multitude of options through our online resources like Libby and Hoopla.
One final note that needs to be said…I do think Emily Dickinson would have loved “Good Luck, Babe!”