Art & Creativity Quote by E. Y. Harburg

Harburg’s line is a neat piece of songwriter propaganda: a compact argument for why the pop song isn’t “just entertainment” but a cognitive technology. He builds it like a staircase. Words live in the head: they spark thought. Music lives in the body: it triggers feeling. Then he smashes the boundary with the final claim - the song as a hybrid that hijacks both systems at once, turning an idea into an emotion you can’t simply dismiss.

The intent is partly professional pride, but it’s also a quiet theory of persuasion. If words alone can be debated, and music alone can be enjoyed without consequence, the song is where meaning becomes sticky. You don’t merely understand the lyric; you experience it. That’s the subtext: songs sneak past your inner fact-checker. A good chorus doesn’t win an argument; it makes an argument feel like your own memory.

Context matters here. Harburg wrote in the golden age of American songwriting and mass media, where a tune could travel further and faster than a speech, and where lyricists smuggled politics and social critique into mainstream culture. (He penned “Over the Rainbow,” an anthem of longing disguised as a lullaby.) His quote reads like a defense of craft under commercial pressure: the songwriter’s job is to weld language to melody so tightly that a thought becomes lived experience - portable, repeatable, and hard to unfeel.