We spend a lot of time arguing about intention in art. We ask, “What did the artist mean?” as if the art can only mean what the artist intends.
This is a fallacy. Art begins with the artist’s intention, perhaps, but then enters the world, is seen/read/heard and remade as it intersects with the audience and the audience’s experiences and imagination. Art is a process. It starts with the inspiration, moves through revision, through the working and reworking that takes the spark and makes it into something more realized. It then leaves the artist, ceases to be the property of just the artist’s imagination and becomes something bigger.
Art provides clues hat we follow, that might point us to the interpretation the artist intends, but he artist does not, cannot control this process. We take different paths to our interpretations, end up in different places.
I’m in he car. “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” comes on the radio. It is the version by The Animals, considered by many the definitive version. I’m singing along, as I do, and I start to hear something in the song I had not before, begin to reimagine its meaning to fit something very personal.
The singer/narrator is apologizing for an unnamed transgression, but I can’t help but see this apology through a mental health lens. I suffer periodic bouts of anxiety, triggered by a form of obsessive compulsive disorder that takes the form of “stuck” or obsessive thoughts and guilt. I won’t go into the specifics now, but it can be debilitating, and can easily be misread by others.
This is the case for many who struggle through anxiety, OCD, bi-polar disorder and so on. These conditions often are misunderstood as weakness, or they create short fuses and frustration that might come off as anger. I hear this now, as Eric Burdon sings the second verse, in which the singer/narrator makes his plaintive request for pardon:
If I seem edgy, I want you to know
That I never meant to take it out on you
Life has it's problems and I've got my share
And that's one thing I never meant to do
'Cause I love you
He pleads that he has “thoughts like any other man” and he can find himself “alone and regretting / Some foolish thing, some foolish thing I've done.” And he wants his lover to understand him, to know that his “intentions are good.”
The history of the song’s composition offers some clues, but these clues are too narrow, too focused on the songwriters and not the singers or the listeners, who also play a role.
This is the story, as Wikipedia tells it (I know it is a less-than-reliable source, but it does offer citations to other authors): “Composer and arranger Horace Ott came up with the melody and chorus lyrics after a temporary falling out with his girlfriend (and wife-to-be), Gloria Caldwell. So, a song of apology, of a lover showing remorse for bad behavior directed at the love object. And while that element is central, the song does more by offering less — no justification, no alibis. The song points to “foolish things” but pointedly does not name them. The listener is left to wonder what these “thoughts” and deeds are. Are they rage induced by jealous paranoia? Angry words? Something else? And what are the “foolish things”? The song leaves these questions open, which in turn leaves it open to an array of interpretations, which may be guided by a host of other clues, including the tempo and music, the vocal style, the gender of the singer, their reputations, and so on.
Burdon’s vocal mixes a desire for absolution with an underlying menace, while Nina Simone, who was the first to record the song, slows it down and emphasizes a sense of pain and mourning that, some critics (according to Wikipedia) connected to her civil rights work.
My goal here is not to offer a definitive interpretation, but instead to demonstrate that art — whether song, poem, or painting — is not static, that its meaning is not something ingrained in the work or set for by the creator as if it were sacred. Art functions in dialog with a reader, in conversations with readers, with other works, with history, and with the times in which it is produced.