What Is Sap?

It's hard to define precisely what makes one song sappy and another song just emotional. We have found that the songs we consider sappy tend to share certain characteristics:
  1. Overweening emotion. Emotional content so over the top that it just makes you gag. All good songs have some emotional content, of course. But there's a difference between sad (say, Elton John's original version of "Candle in the Wind") and shove-it-in-your-face, cram-it-down-your-throat maudlin (Terry Jacks' "Seasons in the Sun").
  2. Arrangement. Some songs have inappropriate arrangements. For instance, "Billy Don't Be a Hero" is about a guy who dies and leaves behind a grieving fiancee, but you'd never know that from its totally danceable beat. Other songs have arrangements that just shove them right over the edge into sap-land -- the bombastic orchestration of Barry Manilow's "I Write the Songs."
  3. Religion. Mentioning God in anything other than an ironic way (such as Joan Osborne's "One of Us," definitely not a sappy song) puts a song on the express train to Sappyland.
  4. Death. Not an automatic sappifier; but songs that lament a lost loved one do tend toward sap. "Teen Angel" is sappy; "Dead Man's Curve" is not.
  5. Children Speaking/Singing. Almost a shoo-in. Unless the child singing is Frankie Lymon or Michael Jackson, it's going to be sap.
  6. Self-Pity. Another no-brainer. I dare you, name a self-pitying song that isn't sap.
  7. Too Much Information (TMI). I don't know what a butterfly kiss is, and I don't want to know. I also don't want to spend three minutes listening to some schmoe sing about them.
  8. Love. Now that's a tricky one. The line between romantic and sappy is fine indeed; in the case of "Annie's Song" by John Denver, only the fact that he had since divorced Annie put the song over the edge for me. One person's insufferable sap may be another's sweet romance.

-- SAPster Randi