She was a winner, who became a doggie's dinner...

The fact that nobody knows how the thread title relates to the question proves my point in a way. (As is the fact it's also a direct song quote from a 'traditional-type' lyricist held in moderate esteem [personally, I would place said lyricist in 'functional' bracket, i.e. better than Elvis Costello or Ian Curtis, not as good as Afroman or Don Henley]at the time, but to reiterate, is there a place anymore for moderately-clever wordsmiths now that even X-TREMELY clever doesn't 'cut it' anymore? ('Mod clever' never did cut it with me personally but that's by-the-by)

Har har, Dave Q, it's Nick Lowe and I understand the point being made. So hush. ;-)

And Ned doesn't even LIKE lyrics!

I think the question is one of economy - a lot of 'traditional' lyrics would fit into half-a-verse of a hip-hop track which would then go on to fit in another 3-and-a-half verses of similar quality, BUT if the original half-verse said all that needed to be said then what is gained?

Dave Q's question is concentrating on a certain type of lyric though - intelligent lyrics put together by rock 'wordsmiths' - and I have found myself thinking "What's the point?" sometimes, who knows, maybe cos hip-hop *has* made them obsolete. And yet show-tunes, which rely on clever rhyming lyrics, offer very different kinds of pleasures to hip-hop: the use of pacing and space in "Send In The Clowns" (a song with fantastic lyrics) for instance.

Also some 'lyrical' rock has been all about flow - early Squeeze singles for instance!

Lyrics in pop music have never been important to the degree that most critics pretend. Critics tend to focus what they are best equipped to discuss (meaning) rather than what is important (sound).

Wordless films aren't obselete. They're just not popular, which does not = obsolete. Not in my world. But perhaps I'm missing the point. Does this future (in the original question) have to be one of traditional success?

Trad lyrics put the singer on a stage. "Attention, ladies and gents. Now I will perform this verse-set-to-music which I composed some time ago." Rap appears to flow spontaneously out of everyday life. True, it's more like a present-day movie. I would change Dave's silent movie analogy to one of dialogue and script-driven movies (Lubitsch, Mamet, etc) as opposed to more sensation and image-driven (Hitchcock, Speilberg, all modern blockbusters). In fact, it is sensation over meaning, not just Arf's sound over meaning, that is important in music. The feelings we associate with little bits of lyrics, videos and graphics work along with the sound to greater impact than any cleverly constructed verse.......Mister Jonz.

"In fact, it is sensation over meaning, not just Arf's sound over meaning, that is important in music. The feelings we associate with little bits of lyrics, videos and graphics work along with the sound to greater impact than any cleverly constructed verse."

Curt I don't disagree. But my meaning/sound dichotomy was intended to split elements of the pop music experience that get too much attention from critics from elements that get too little.

When you add imagery - "little bits of lyrics, videos and graphics" to sound you start to admit some of the stuff that critics DO feel comfortable discussing: because these are things that lend themselves to being discussed in terms of their meaning. In fact they offer even more scope for interpretation than "well constructed lyrics".

My interest is in the distortion of value that arises because of the tendency of critics to assume that the things they are equipped to discuss are the important things.

Isn't saying "hip hop has made ['traditional' lyric writing] obsolete" roughly equivalent, ideologically, to saying "rock and roll will never die"? Doesn't establishing stylistic hierarchies play by the exact rules set down by the purportedly obsolete regime?

but important to who arf-arf? if they are the things that critics are interested in and capable of talking about then it's pretty likely they are also important to critics? ad if non-critics choose to read those critics on these musics then presumaly they are important to those readers?

d'you mean important to music-makers? cf eg trained singer dan perry's hostility to whitney houston, which circles round a technical aspect NOT apparent and thus NOT important to the millions who wuv her songs? one of the reason i wish there was more dscush of technique and technology, and erm "practical theory" on ILM is that I think it shines a light on what matters to musicians.

As it happens I generally casually believe that musicians focus on what matters to THEM the better to DELIVER what matters to listeners; that listeners who think what's important to musicians is all that matters become musicians, and that musicians who are too attuned to what matters to non- musician listeners rarely actually make music that DOES matter those listeners.

Now that I've written that out I think I may be a mentalist.

...and musicians who are too attuned to what matters to music writers make Elvis Costello records or Strokes records.

Well, if the public says go take a walk all the way back to New York, does that qualify as obsolete? I guess within in the parameters of the original question it does, but I think that makes is a bad question, as it's only being capable of answered in the affirmative. I don't think anyone can make a case that trad wordsmithiness is going to become popular again; even though it was only popular for like five minutes to begin with.

-J

i think the thing happening these days with rock lyrics is that there's a growing distance between the Expression camp and the Cleverness camp, which used to co-exist in a lot more lyricists. now it's either full-on, naked (or melodramatic) emotion, or trying to make as many winking references and smartass wordplays as possible. what's rare nowadays is those who balance the 2 sides well.

as for the effect of rapping - this may be me losing the plot entirely, but i think the focus on rhyming is a little self-defeating, as far as writing good lyrics goes. when you're struggling to cram as many rhymes as you can, the actual meaning of the words becomes more and more incidental. which, oddly enough, is probably kind of a cousin to the dismally functional "moon june spoon" rhymes that a lot of rock lyricists fall into, although obviously hip hop is the far more sophisticated and interesting cousin in that family tree. and yeah, obviously some rappers are able to wrap really solid thematic structure and meaning into rhyme-intense verse, but i think that'

It depends. Ice Cube is a better lyricist than practically any rock lyricist past or present: the multiple internal rhymes are just icing on the cake. Ditto one of the guys from the Goodie Mob, not sure which because these badly designed sleeves are a pain to read. Ditto Shock G when he feels like working. As to the recent near-universal positing of Jay-Z as Poet Laureate of the Age: I don't get it, either. He seems profoundly average to me. The choice between Jay-Z and Nas feels about as pressing as the choice between Blue Bonnet and Parkay -- different brands of margarine, neither terribly good to eat.

Sorry if I made myself unclear in the original question - by 'obsolete' I don't mean 'commercially unviable', I mean, "Why the fuck would anybody bother to do it?" Like somebody insisting on using an eight-track tape player instead of CD - y'know, there's a REASON some things went out of use, the replacements were just more functional and reliable on EVERY LEVEL (i.e. they were "just better"!).

John D. - I agree re Ice Cube. But also, I consider hip-hop to be more 'rock' than indie-rock or pop are - thus, hip-hop proves 'rock & roll will never die' :)

Well, that clarification changes my answer. I don't agree that Ice Cube et al (to use your example) are the new standard model, primarily because I think hip-hop is a different form than trad songwriting.

However, it occurs to me that the more interesting opinion on this is likely to be that of the wordy songwriter. Momus to thread!

-J

Oh ok. But 'just better' in this case is hardly something that can be stated as cold hard fact. Your technolgy example, ok maybe; but an artistic or stylistic one? New ballgame. Being out of fashion has got to be a much more mercurial thing than simply being relegated to the cultural delete bin.

I'd also take issue with cleverness being the yardstick of superiority here, but I really need some lunch.

Mark

"if they are the things that critics are interested in and capable of talking about then it's pretty likely they are also important to critics?"

Fine if critics decided what's important and then wrote about it. As opposed to writing about what they can: and inferring that, because the ensuing discussion concerns itself with certain things intrinsic to or even tangential to the artwork, those (rather than other thing that are intrinsic to the art but not part of the discussion) must be the ones that matter.

The writing they produce may be important to them but that does not mean that it fairly addresses the question of what determines value in the work of art.

The question "what KIND of cheese is the moon made of" has no doubt provoked passionate disagreement in the past, and for some debaters the question of whether is was Cheddar or Caerphilly may have become quite important. But ultimately the debate shed little light on the composition of the moon.

I don't think that a lack of familiarity with the Header is any indication of the passing of literate songsmiths. We may not all be familiar with Nick Lowe, but that's probably more a function of time than of erudition.

I think the makeup of the traditional, conversant ILM crew tends more towards late twenties/early thirties to forties with a smattering of younger folk, so many forget that time has always been an eroding force, not just to the trend which one believes will be immutable because it occurred during one's youth

So if the question is: "Are the people that I used to listen to when I was young becoming less pertinent?", then I think the answer should be self-evident. But drawing a line from that to hiphop being the only viable lyrical outlet is sort of bizarre, I think. Hip-hop will also be assimilated, and then someday we will wonder if there are any troubadours left again.

yeah but what the moon is made of would be the same whatever people felt about it, whereas you can't separate what matters about music from what people think of it and use it for (and whatever else they may be, critics are also people... )

what do YOU think should be being done instead in order to "determine the value of the artwork", and how would the people who do this not be "critics" if they started doing it?

(obv that was pointed at ArfArf not you mickey... )

i might add that i think that ALL records are arguments with other records, so that the word "critics" to me actually encompasses all musicians — but i realise that's a weird way of looking at it, and anyway redefinitions aren't refutations...

Well I agree everyone is a critic - I don't think that is an extreme position.

I also agree my moon analogy doesn't hold good in the places you suggest. But it still illustrates my basic point. If artistic value resides primarily in things that are difficult to discuss; and as a result we end up discussing other things, that do lend themselves to discussion; then we should avoid deluding ourselves that value resides in the subject matter of our discussion. The subject matter of the discussion may is important in the context of the discussion, but that does not mean that it is addressing what is important in the work of art. It appears to me that pop critics are extremely bad at avoiding this trap. They actually come to believe that, say, "Ghost Town" was a good record because it "reflected the alienation of Thatcher's Britain" and not because of the way it sounded.

I am not suggesting that a musicological approach is the solution. I happen to believe that critics would generally benefit from more musical awareness but it would be a palliative, not a solution. Musician's taste tends to be distorted by other factors: conservatism, excessive reverence for technique and sophistication and so on. I think these factors mean that some distrust of musician's taste among writers is justified, although it is interesting how often writers come round to seeing things from musicians' points of view. Unlike writers, musicians always liked Disco or Abba as much as punk.

A musicological approach has other problems: for example, finding a vocabulary for communicating musical ideas to non-musicians. And the simple fact that musical analysis also misses the essence of value. No analysis can explain why a great melody is a great melody.

The truth is that what gives music value is mysterious and difficult to communicate. Critics who discuss what is discussable and not what is valuable may be doing the best they can, faced with an intractable problem. What I would like to see, though, is some recognition of the facts: that they are forced to operate on the periphery of things and with an inadequate vocabulary. But this implies a degree of humility in a profession that has patented its own brand of insecure arrogance. What we are much more likely to get is the same old same old "isn't it sooo fucking sad that Strokes fans still think they are hip" kind of irrelevant bullshit.

yeah sorry for pushing you arf arf: with the not-small caveat that i actually really really like as writing *some* of the rock writing you greatly dislike, i almost entirely agree with what you just said

what i *do* wonder though, is that if a "critical language" — competle with diagrams, MP3s, sound wave analysis, I dunno — appeared which COULD address this mysterious stuff, would music get better? or would we find that the sense of mystery was ITSELF important enugh that value veered off to inhabit things which this language DIDN'T address?

Mark

Well I'm afraid can't think of any. My caveat is that, relative to many people at ILM, I've read a small amount of writing about pop and generally I've read it in a fairly desultory and inattentive way. (Which is not to say that I haven't wasted much more time reading it than I feel I could reasonably justify as time well spent). So it's just possible that there's a pop writer out there I'd really rate as a writer if I read him/her. I doubt it though.

"traditional" lyrics make good & functional hooks and choruses, eh dave?

Sterling has a point - most big hip-hop and R&B hits have rapid-fire verses and then big dumb trad choruses, lyrically speaking.

Trying to work out what my girlfriend likes so I can make tapes for her - and she doesn't give a shit about lyrics - I've noticed how a lot of great hip-hop hooks rest on neologisms or pronunciation twists ("H to the Izzo"; Mary J - "Hatoration"; Most Outkast tracks - "back of the boose"; "hands in the ay-uh" etc), which suggests a joy in language-as-sound, maybe something missing from most 'wordsmiths' (though not from 'rock' in general cf. Trashmen). Of course these pronunciations are only new to listeners like me and her, probably - maybe that's the secret of 'crossover'.

Tom: 1st two are very neologistic, and the Izzo thing was coined by snoop as a lark on the first single from his last album, then Jay-Z lifted it in a sort of "you made a hot joke, i made a new language" way. The second two are just exaggerated southern accents.

Sterling's posts today are very good.

ILx ca. 1919: Is there any future for traditional filmic mise-en-scene now that Dziga Vertov's "Man With a Movie Camera" (the original music video, invented in the silent era!) has made it obsolete? A: Sure, we can be flexible like that.

Tracer: this makes rap the small underground director... & dylan the victor. Also, most filmic technique had not even been invented by 1919... which might be the real point, that the lines between singing and mcing in American music are getting more blurred (while becoming more sharp in UK stuff) and the innovation all will fit together not in a convulsive act (rap is already that) but a reconciliation born of the development of nu musical oppositions (which are blossoming even now?)

Yeah, I wanted to flip it, because montage and rapid cutting must have felt so revolutionary then, sort of the way hip hop vocals do now. Which techniques remain useful and which are discarded have to do with art's agenda in society. Eisenstein's montages are direly schematic now to us who have accrued a lifetime's worth of surreal and meaningful/meaningless cuts/joins. We use films for subtler and more personal ends now. But other things, like Vertov's machinic editing, is still hopelessly beyond our ken and takeable only in small MTV doses. Maybe someday brains will evolve that can listen to a whole Busta Rhymes album at one go.

If that album is "Anarchy" I don't think the day will ever come.