Previously I mentioned that Brian Eno and David Byrne named their seminal album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts without reading the book of the same title. The latest issue of Philip Christman’s The Tourist newsletter talks about other song titles taken from unread books:
Joy Division recorded the song “Atrocity Exhibition,” which in mood and feel is a pretty exact match to the almost unendurably grim J.G. Ballard novella of the same name. JD and Ballard are often mentioned together, as having a similar sensibility. But Ian Curtis wrote the song without having yet read the book–all he needed was the title. It’s as though he knew the book without knowing it. The inspiration for Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” was her catching the last few minutes of a 1967 TV adaptation of the novel as a child; though she did eventually get around to reading the book, you get the sense that her doing so was almost an afterthought. The song is about those last couple minutes, that demanding ghost at the window, as seen by a nine-year-old musical genius. {…}
{A way to think about it} is that our half-formed conceptions and the things that inspire them are both actualities–the song Ian Curtis started hearing in his head when he learned that there existed a novel called The Atrocity Exhibition and the actual novel, The Atrocity Exhibition, are both real things, and they need to be kept in some sort of ecological balance in order for both to fully exist. The song isn’t ready to confront the novel until it’s had some time to grow.
I remember, in my teenage punk band, naming songs after artsy books and movies I hadn’t read or watched. My motivation was to appear smarter and more rounded than I was but, I assume, it’s the same end result as Christman notes above. ‘Art’ is shaped by the ghosts and impressions of its inspirations, despite whether those inspirations are fully ingested or understood.
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