Fred Gibson’s phrase “unobstructed by metaphor” riveted me on first hearing (NYT Audio, “The xx Singer’s Solo Album Is Its Own Kind of Coming Out”). His remark applies to Romy Madley Croft’s lyrics to the songs on her first solo album, on which Gibson collaborated.

I wonder whether contemporary poetry isn’t sometimes weighed down by metaphors that come a cropper? There’s a vein of conventional blather that poetry “speaks directly” to the soul, or whatever receptor one posits, but often as not that’s hardly the case. Metaphorical mayhem may be implicated.

It seems to me that a successful metaphor should explode in your head when you step on it, not make you dig it up and whack it. (Yes, I said “head.” My cognitive faculty tuned to language, not my heart or my bowels, is where I process poetry.)

You want to see successful metaphors? They are in the last sentences of the first two paragraphs below (my bolding). And the last paragraph points usefully to what a metaphor should do, which is “highlight a musical or lyrical point.”

You might not know that you know these records. You may never have heard of The Honeydrippers or their song “Impeach the President,” but its first two measures powered hits by Janet Jackson and Alanis Morissette. If you dug Hanson’s “MMMBop” or Justin Bieber’s “Die in Your Arms,” or Travis Scott’s recent hit “HYAENA,” it’s because, once upon a time, some D.J. excavated two copies [of] Melvin Bliss’s “Synthetic Substitution.” It’s telling that each of these fundamental break records were released exactly 50 years ago, in 1973. The trace elements in hip-hop’s big bang still vibrate in our musical DNA…

Hip-hop tracks retell parents’ and grandparents’ histories, their migrations both great and small. Each sample source recalls an ancestor; each song is a layer cake of historical reference, an orgasm of memory…

A piece of 1940s New York, frozen in time by a New Yorker in the 80s as part of an underground New York musical culture, available still at the press of a pad to highlight a musical or lyrical point.

(Dan Charnas, “Hip-Hop Is the Music of Vinyl Librarians,” New York Times, 9-15-23)

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