Chapter 1 - The Deep Freeze
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"Cracking"
The ten songs on "Suzanne Vega," released in the spring of 1985, remain undated, unmediated by nostalgia. "Cracking," the curtain-raiser for the album, is a particularly appropriate opening -- it foreshadows many of her later recordings: the stark instrumentation, the prominent acoustic guitar, the centrality of rhythm and beat, the short, sharp, jagged consonants and vowels juxtaposed against flowing guitar and bass lines. Present are her signature themes of interior worlds of imagination and fantasy set in hard, urban landscapes. Here too is the shadow of rap music: Vega's affinity for rap's rhythms and structures are one source of an enduring contradiction and tension in her music - her image, among many, as a "folk" singer of pastoral songs, and the reality of her pluralist musical interests.
"I feel this kind of strange affinity for rap music and the way that they use the language: short words with lots of consonants, and it's hard and it's fast and it's rhythmic." [1]
Throughout "Cracking" Vega alternates between the free-flowing lines of the 16 bar guitar chorus, accompanied by a wordless vocal accent, and the verses which emphasize the beat through its monosyllabic structure:
It's a one time thing
It just happens a lot
To reinforce the beat, Vega clearly demarks the two syllables of "hap - pens" and adds a beat before adding "a - lot." In a subversive tactic she will use to wonderful affect in later songs, Vega draws the listener into the story with the words:
Walk with me
and we will see what we have got.
Immediately we are implicated, we are invited, without our consent, certainly without choice, to accompany the narrator on her journey. The "walk" is reinforced by the pace of the song, the 4/4 time, and the beat of Vega's carefully enunciated syllables. The simplicity of the lines in this song and elsewhere throughout her work is in the best tradition of poets such as the American poet William Carlos Williams. "Cracking" shares the same stark beauty as Williams' well-known poem, "The Red Wheel Barrow:"
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
As a model of pure, almost architectural structure, "Cracking" might well be without peer. The composition consists of but 98 words; the most complex word being "afternoon." The role assumed by her acoustic guitar is stripped-down and skeletal. She establishes a repetitive, hypnotic pattern primarily with the G, B and E strings, and gives emphasis to the bass notes. In a role reversal (heard in a number of her recordings), the bass line carries the melody, while the voice and remainder of the guitar parts assume the duties of the rhythm section.
The images used throughout "Cracking" bear the mark of thought and
care. Each image is simple ("water dripping from a tree" or "ice
on a sidewalk") yet none is a cliché. When Vega does introduce a
familiar pop song image ("My heart is broken") she immediately cuts
the legs from under us with one of her most wonderful phrases: "It's worn
out at the knees."