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Why explain abstract lyrics?

Feel free to disagree and join the debate. I refer to no one in particular here, these situations used to come up all the time...

I don't understand how, when an author puts a one-to-one correspondence between a symbol-rich test or otherwise abstract lyric--how this does anything, other than diminish this writing from future readings, which must then be "misreadings", since the author himself has supplied the "keys"...

Example of what I'm talking about:

Song lyric (Mr. Author (C)2009):

Quack, quack
boom boom,
gob smacked by
duck soup

Critique:

Nice little action poem. A haiku-ish foray into hunting at close range.


The author:

"interesting take, Mr. Critique, Actually, I was reading the "tibetan Book of the Dead" while standing on my head, while thinking about the making of "Demi-glace" which is basically 40 cows reduced to a cupful of thick brothy essence, and applying this to the idea of death in today's fast-food society. "We" are the duck, "gob-smacked" is the fabric of society being ripped apart, "boom boom" is a reference to Oppenheimer, and Quack is the sham our society has become..."

But your take is interesting.

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No matter how nice the author tries to be, in these situations I always feel like there is an undercurrent of "if you were more perceptive, you would have known the true meaning of my work." I realize this is (most of the time) a projection on my part, but nevertheless, I always feel really crappy when "my interpretation" is way off from the authors. Authors "own" their texts, and no matter how hard the effort to release them for "open interpretation", readers MUST defer to an authors own reading of his/her own text, once made.

Thank God, Dylan or Lennon/McCartney had the good sense to keep their meanings to themselves. If I knew that Dylan meant "Mr. Jones" to stand for "Big Brother", or Lennon's "Walrus" to be the "scapegoat" and the egg man, the "scapegoaters"...does knowing this ADD or DIMINISH future readings? ...curious...you never heard a Dylan or a Lennon explaining their lyrics.

Often times, the authors "key" to his/her lyric IS as arcane as the one I've described, and yes, there are probably some lyricists who do play a game of "look how much smarter I as than you" but for the most part this all happens innocently enough. I don't think any of us are guilty of doing this...

It might simply be the nature of communication, and how words trigger different things in different people. Language is slippery, but that's what makes it fun, and why the text must continuously be added to, rewritten, and otherwise explored...

I might enjoy reading how an author came to write what he wrote, but I wake up the next day and that lyric means less to me, MUCH less, for now my imagination cannot turn towards it, and do its thing.

--Mike