One Direction, British boy band extraordinaire, hasn’t popped up into my playlists in some time. For a few years now, I’ve taken a liking to instrumental music: classical, neoclassical, string quartet covers of pop songs, and movie scores (How To Train Your Dragon being my favorite). Everything sounds better when set to a full symphony orchestra.
On Friday, out of the blue, Harry, Liam, Louis, Niall, and Zayn made a surprise appearance in my ears as I headed into the final mile of my morning run. Admittedly, it was nice to hear their harmonies again, autotuned in a distinctly 2010s fashion. The song was Steal My Girl, and I mouthed the words under my labored breath while I ascended a particularly precipitous hill. About one minute 20 seconds in, I realized that the words I was lip-syncing weren’t words at all. It was na na na na-nana. Over and over again, and it lasted just about the rest of the run up the hill.
Call it confirmation bias, but from that moment on, I’ve heard these non-word lyrics everywhere. It would seem that, for all the poetry of meticulously crafted verses, artists sure love themselves a vocable.
Vocable is the word describing sounds in a particular language or dialect that is not technically a formal word, but has a particular meaning assigned to it. Their typical uses are either in song lyrics or exclamations, like a confused “huh,” and some vocables have more distinct meanings than others. Vocable came from vocabulum, a Latin (or French) derivation of vocare, meaning call in Latin.
When I began to tally the instances in which vocables arose, it seemed that there are nearly as many vocables as there are actual words in songs. During lunch, while listening to Hozier’s recent album, the 15th track, Unknown / Nth came on after an ad break. At the end of many lines in the chorus, Hozier rounded out his heartache with “sha-lala”. When I returned home after school, my sister was using our decrepit family iPod to play Halloween songs. Witch Doctor came on, and with it the vocable to end all vocables: Ooh ee ooh ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang. Each word more devoid of meaning than the last, but vital to the song in a way I couldn’t put my finger on.
Later that night, I realized as I was preparing to sleep that I was still, ever so quietly, mumbling One Direction. It hadn’t fully left my head since the run that morning, and now was making a resurgence.
The sensible thing to do at that point in time would’ve been to shake the song from my head, take out my Airpods, and hit the hay at a reasonable hour. But it wasn’t a school night. And everyone else in my house was asleep. And I wasn’t feeling all too sensible.
It’s rather funny. I would’ve imagined that, in a 2am bedroom concert, I would be whisper-belting some melodic declaration of one strong feeling or other, and here I was, gleefully repeating “na na na na-nana,” while having a grand old time. I suppose there’s no doubt about it. Words are nice, but sometimes a vocable says it best.
