Mark Knopfler is the most literate songwriter in rock — not in the sense of writing about books, though he has done that too, but in the sense of understanding that a lyric is a compressed narrative, that what is not said in a song is as important as what is said, and that the most effective songwriting tells the audience enough to recognize the situation without telling them enough to limit their identification with it. His songs are full of characters — specific people in specific situations — and the characters are always more complicated than they first appear.
The specific complication that has produced the most sustained public misunderstanding in his career is the relationship between the characters in his songs and the positions those characters are assumed to hold. Because Knopfler writes from inside his characters — because he gives them voice without consistently providing the authorial commentary that would establish his moral distance from them — the characters’ views have sometimes been attributed to Knopfler himself, which is the specific misreading that realistic fiction has always produced and that songwriting produces with particular frequency because the first person is both harder to avoid and more seductive to use.
1. Money for Nothing (1985)
The most famous example of the specific misreading — a song narrated by a working-class man watching music videos on television and expressing a specific resentment toward the musicians he sees, using language that reflects the narrator’s education and attitudes rather than Knopfler’s own. The homophobic slur in the lyric was the narrator’s language. Knopfler has said repeatedly and specifically that the song is a portrait of a character whose attitudes he does not share, delivered in that character’s language because the language is the characterization. The song has been edited for broadcast. Knopfler has said the editing misunderstands what the song is.
2. Sultans of Swing (1978)
The song that made Dire Straits famous — a portrait of a jazz band playing for an indifferent audience in a south London bar, described with the specific affection of someone who has been in that bar and understood what the musicians were doing and why they were doing it for no one. Knopfler has said the song is about the specific dignity of playing music for its own sake rather than for an audience, about the jazz musicians who understood something about their music that the empty pub did not diminish. It has been heard as a song about rock and roll aspiration. It is a song about the opposite.
3. Romeo and Juliet (1980)
A love song narrated by the man who was left — specific, autobiographical in feeling if not in literal fact, about the specific humiliation of being the one who loved more completely. Knopfler has said the song is not about a specific relationship, which is either accurate or the statement of someone protecting the privacy of someone who would prefer not to be identified. The song has been heard as straightforwardly romantic. It is about the specific pain of romantic asymmetry, which is a different and darker subject.
4. Industrial Disease (1982)
A satirical piece — one of the most overtly comic in Knopfler’s catalog — that has been heard by some audiences as a straightforward critique of specific political positions and by others as a satire of everyone who holds strong political positions regardless of content. Knopfler has declined to specify which reading is correct, which is itself the correct response to a piece of writing whose effectiveness depends on its ambiguity. He has said it is about a specific kind of British national mood in the early 1980s and has not elaborated.
5. Private Dancer (1984)
Written by Knopfler but recorded by Tina Turner — the song that became a defining moment of Turner’s career and that produced a vocal performance so complete that many people who know the song do not know Knopfler wrote it. He has said he wrote it specifically for a female voice — that the character required a perspective he could not deliver himself — and that Turner’s recording is the song’s definitive version because Turner understood the character in a way that his own delivery of the demo had not fully achieved.
Knopfler’s fingerpicking technique — he does not use a pick, generating his tone directly from his fingers — produces a warmth and a specificity of touch that studio engineers have described as unlike any other guitar sound they have recorded. The tone is the character’s tone as much as the lyric is — something specific that could not have been produced any other way.