| Broadcast – Tender Buttons Lyrics | 17 years ago |
| I assumed that this song, like the album as a whole, alludes to the 1914 experimental work "Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms." Stein's well known for what she termed "antiliterature," in which she attempted to heighten the reader's awareness of language itself by "writing badly." Most of the time it seems she does this with inane repetition and silly sing-songs, but in "Tender Buttons" she organized words into senseless clusters for the sonic effect (and, I guess, to play with and subvert their dictionary definitions by creating new associations). I've always felt as though Broadcast was playing with this idea in terms of their experimental sound collages and, in this song especially, with Stein's textual experimentation. | |
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