Book and a Cover

This song appears as a bonus track on Vega's "Best Of" compilation, an import (from the US perspective, anyway) titled Tried and True. One source says the song was released in 1987, but the compilation was not released until 1999. In any case, the song...

Yes, the title refers to the old saw "don't judge a book by its cover."

The rest of the song merely elaborates on that theme. The speaker even says, "Don't judge so quickly," in case it was unclear (which it wasn't).

"Pictures lie," she continues, a lesson driven home by the Photoshopped ads of models found everywhere today: "What's that they taught you?/ To revere a kind of beauty?" as if other kinds of beauty were not worth reverence... or that the physical kind even is.

We were taught not to judge by appearances... but then also taught "to paint on that pretty veneer/

And try to hide whatever's dirty."

Because... what else lies? "Faces," and real ones not ones in photos, this time. "They'll tell you one thing and then another." But if beauty is skin deep, then it's important to "see what lies... Under the skin."

But there is some comfort, if the eye can be fooled, in what the ear can tell. "Come here and I will whisper true," the speaker beckons.

What will we hear? "The things I know of you/ And you will recognize them / As near to you as breath and bone." This last line is the best in the song, for its originality, a quality sadly lacking in the rest of the lyrics.

These "things I know," she says, are "So dear to me, and yours alone/ And I will love you for them." The power of knowing someone intimately and personally is far greater, and forms a more adhesive bond, than mere superficiality and surface-knowledge.

Overall, the song is rather thin. It's really unnecessary as a sermon; the axiom it's titled for already says the same thing... in only seven words. 

It would have been stronger, perhaps, if the imagery of a "book" had more thoroughly explored. Books are written, read, shared, borrowed, lost, discovered, damaged, repaired, sidled side-by-side with others, marked and marked up... in how many ways is a book like a person? If we look past the "cover" of a face, open and read the "book" of a person's soul... etc. Both people and books have "spines"...

There is a rich mine, here, that went un-dug. 

And the paradox of being taught that surfaces don't matter, but also being taught how to construct a pretty surface-- this theme, worthy of a whole song itself, is brought up, only to go unexplored.

The idea behind the cliche is that a cover can under-promise what a book holds. Well, it can over-promise, too. Like this song, unfortunately.

Next Song: Rosemary