Who Has Given Up ??

[David]

Originally Posted by michelej1

Things are about Stevie, for instance some of us long said that the UTS intro was about her and it turns out it was. But you have to look for these connections. Sometimes it seems that non-shippers, who say they are disgusted by SNL, go as far out of their way to look for romance that’s not there than shippers do.

The thing that always drove me temperamentally away from my friend Nancy's board of relationship-centered interpretations wasn't the fiction of the relationship itself but the insistence on anywhere and everywhere reading autobiography into every lyric. It always made me think back to my college lit courses in authorial intent and Wimsatt and Beardsley's intentional fallacy, and how it's overshooting to continually assume that a songwriter's lyrics are either deeply personal or even autobiographically factual at all. There's no internal (internal to the song) evidence that "Did she make you break down?" is a second-person address to Lindsey Buckingham in the real world. Stevie might have said that it was—I don't know—but it doesn't necessarily follow that, just because we know real-world Stevie sent real-world Lindsey packing and he took it hard, the lyric itself relates that real-world reaction in any way. But the shippers and others project and project. By virtue of sheer amount, some projecting is probably actually factual. But it's the constant projecting that alienates me. Does every little phrase in a Stevie Nicks lyric that touches on passionate emotional ambivalence have to do with Lindsey? Shipper reactions are fictions about fictions. Of course, Stevie's mode of writing lends itself to such responses, and that's also why I don't think Stevie is one of the great writers: she never seems to stand back from her characters and observe them with any detachment or irony. The emotions they are experiencing are always and completely the emotions that we listeners are supposed to be connecting to with total ingenuousness. It's all very unsophisticated.