Fantasy and intellectual ownership

Have you ever listened closely to Beck's lyrics? One of my favorite lines goes..."Rampart boys with loaded rifles /
Guatemalan soccer ball instant replays / Mango ladies, vendedores / And a busstop singer Banda macho chorus." It isn't quite fair of me to present them this way. I mean, part of what makes them great is the way they relate to the beat and the sound effects. Anyway, doesn't it seem like it would be easy to write these lyrics, in terms of content or subject matter? Just pick a couple phrases out of the air and paste them together, right?

Now that you're pefectly set up for my punchline...the answer is NO. I tried, really, really hard to write something like this and it came out ridiculous. Or maybe it's just that I don't have the confidence to say it all with conviction. Confidence is everything...

If you read my previous post about "Exotic Locations and Romanticization" you will better understand the crux of my argument. I assumed, up until this very moment, that I could never write lyrics like that because my lyrics would be necessarily bad. Why? Because I'm so institutionalized. I only know classrooms and sunday school rooms, right? And suburbia...Well, the point is that I thought I needed weird/cool friends and weird/cool experiences to qualify me to write this stuff. Actually, that would be helfpful, if only to give me more ideas. But when it comes to writing what you know, when it comes to being authentic, who's to say Beck knows more about loaded rifles, mango ladies, and a "Banda macho chorus" than me? You can't exactly meet these things in real life. He had to invent them and then believe in them. That's the trick, the great challenge. No more flying off to London to meet my muses in person...