Pixies Frontman Black Francis Embedded This Poetic Form into His Songs: Did You Notice?
A form so simple we ask grade schoolers to use has a long history. But does its use qualify as an "Easter egg"?
I kind of have a thing about the phrase “easter eggs.”
Not the seasonal object, that is: the media term. The phrase “easter egg” was originally designed to identify secret content in video games but has now mutated to mean just about anything you might not notice at first glance. Especially in the age of Marvel, whose “cinematic universe” has now spawned countless easter egg compendiums, our cultural obsession with the easter egg has reached new heights. The hunger for listicles about these supposedly “hidden” secrets is strong. But are they all truly worthy of the term “easter egg”?
For example, an ad on a passing bus in Marvel’s Moon Knight references an entity first introduced in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Ok, kinda cool. A little arrow toward another film in the franchise. I guess that qualifies for me. But Buzzfeed also describes the fact that some of the director and actors’ children appear in Thor: Love and Thunder as an “easter egg.” That’s just… casting? Nepotism? Their names are also listed in the credits, so is it really a secret? Only understood by those “in-the-know”?
These are the questions that plague me. I should get a life, right?
What’s tough about this usage mutation is that it stratifies artistic elements into two categories: obvious and hidden. All hidden elements become easter eggs, including shrewd allusions to other media, subtext, etc. To reduce the work of filmmakers, video game creators, and other artists to a series of neat little treats tucked into “straightforward” top-level content is a mistake. It telegraphs the message that art is a mystery or a puzzle to be solved and that there are two kinds of artistic consumers: those who get it and those who don’t. All of this feels profoundly bad for art.
Enter poetry. The internet has become fond of referring to poetic forms, or the underlying structure of works of poetry, as an “easter egg.” For example, The Easter Egg Archive lists the Pixies song “Ana” as containing an easter egg due to its form. What do we make of that, and why was Pixies frontman Black Francis (aka Frank Black, born Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV) so fond of the form? Was it because it felt like a “secret”?
Frank Black Francis: Pixies Frontman and Musical Reinnovator
Over his four decades in rock, Black Francis has been a part of several musical projects, including Frank Black & The Catholics, Grand Duchy, and, most notably, the Pixies. His songwriting is often esoteric and always interesting. Black Francis also made use of a particular poetic form more than once: the acrostic.
Acrostics use key- or headwords to build lines from. The headword is spelled out vertically down the page, though other arrangements are possible (see former Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2017 expletive veto which he claimed was a “coincidence”). For a more traditional example, see Edgar Allan Poe’s “An Acrostic,” a love poem in which the first letter of each line spells out ELIZABETH vertically down the page: the name of the beloved. The form is older than the Hebrew Bible and is still used today.
In a 1990 interview with Music Express, Black admitted,
“I’m always playing stupid games like that. See ‘Ana’? It’s like anaGRAM. S.U.R.F.E.R., It’s a matter of needing lyrics really fast because they’re setting up the vocal mikes, and you’d better get the song done or it’s gonna be an instrumental!”
Here, he treats his engagement with poetic form as a lark: something he did out of convenience as a “quick fix” to the problem of needing lyrics (and also misidentifies the form he’s using—more on that in a second). But he’s right that engaging a form, a type of constraint, can actually assist in greasing the wheels for writing.
“Ana”
In another interview, Black Francis erroneously identified the form he was using as an “anagram,” even though what he’s really using is an acrostic:
That’s a five-line verse poem, but it’s an anagram: the first line of each verse spells “SUR-FER.” She’s, like, this naked surfer girl on a board on top of an 11-foot wave, y’know, cruising in never-never land. Never-never ocean.
—Q Magazine, September 1990
An anagram is a text comprised of the letters of a particular word or phrase (see Danez Smith’s sublime anagrammatic poem for the late Andre Leon Talley, for example). What Black used for “Ana” was an acrostic: the lyrics spell out “SURFER down the left-hand side of the page.
She's my fave Undressing in the sun Return to sea Forgetting everyone Eleven high Ride a wave
The acrostic form can jog our creativity by giving us something to begin with. In this case, a letter. Is “Ana” the most lyrically complex Pixies song? No, but it sounds great! As Black Francis said, he got the song done.
“Valley of Our Hope”
Another of Black Francis’ musical projects, Frank Black & The Catholics, recorded another song based on the acrostic form.
This is a personal one for Black Francis: the acrostic headwords here are the names of his dogs, like Nemo, Auggie, Eddie, and Tulabelle. This one feels like something Black did just because he could. But hey, whatever gets you going!
“Robert Onion”
The first letter of each line of this song spells out “ROBERT THE CASE FOR MARS ZUBRIN.” Robert Zubrin is the author of the book named in the acrostic. You truly can make an acrostic for anything. Black Francis has a lifelong interest in space and UFOs, and this book apparently made an impression on him.
I think the best acrostics offer a meaningful relationship between the lines themselves and the acrostic “solution” or key phrase that is spelled out by the lines’ initial letters. This one may point listeners to new texts, and this one comes closer than “Valley of Our Hope.” The somewhat inscrutable lyrics are made somewhat clearer when we know that the “Robert” referenced is known for his writing on terraforming Mars.
F.I.N.A.L. Thoughts
From where I’m sitting, to call a poetic form such as an acrostic an “easter egg” makes the deliberate formal considerations of a writer seem like nothing more than a neat lil’ bonus, when in fact such decisions typically have deeper connections to the content of the work as well. Thank might not be true of all Black Francis’ acrostics, but it’s true more often than not.
It also reinforces the idea that form is hidden—and only discoverable, like a poem’s “real meaning”—to the erudite few.
Now, you know how I feel: poetry is for everyone and anything that stands in the way of someone feeling like they “get” poetry is, to borrow a phrase, not my jam.
Acrostics thrive on the page, where the first letter of each line of text can be prominently perceived by the eye. In songwriting, the acrostic is indeed more hidden, as you proceed with the ear first and the eye later, if ever, when reviewing the lyrics, holding a physical album, or watching a music video (remember those?)
Leaving these practical matters aside, it’s cool to discover songwriters who are interested in generative forms like the acrostic rather than merely sonic ones, like ballad meter. Feeling stuck with your writing project? Try an acrostic, even if, at the end of the day, it’s a scaffolding you ultimately choose to remove later. You might be surprised by the results!
