quoting lyrics as evidence of a singer-songwriter's merit: c/d?

Thom Yorke is the worst victim of this. Every time people go "OMG OMG Thom Yorke's lyrics" and then follow it up with something like "Who's in a bunker? Women and children first!", they might as well follow that up with "Uh, I guess you had to be there."

Anyway, obviously dud. This isn't I Love Poetry, and plenty of lyrics that sound like crystalline perfection when voiced to an affecting melody through an emoting human throat can fall with a massive splat when dropped naked on the page.

It's equally amateurish to quote good lyrics out of context as some sort of synechdochal stand-in for the experience of a song. Being a music writer = finding a way to write about music.*

*Though I acknowledge that college papers and neighborhood circulars and what-not offer a forum for amateurs get to figure this out, get their reps in, test their ability, and etc etc.

EXACTLY what i was getting at.

Banhart's wordless count-off to his subtly accomplished fingerpicked guitar work betrays a casual ideal, even as couplets like, "I knew, I knew I could stand tall/ I could lay low," seem typically Banhartian in their benign whimsy.

"can be," yes, but then i feel bad for artists like dolores o'riordan whose worst lyrics always get quoted as examples of "worst lyrics" (and yeah, i know, they really are that bad), but who mostly has some very pleasant, simple, pretty love songs in her catalogue.

you're allowed to talk about lyrics, but don't be so lazy as to assume the lyrics will write the review for you. they need a good framing, something to make readers understand and care.

bottom line: it's music not literature.

Yes. And for Ween. And for all of hip-hop.

It struck me as quite wise to constrain the inquiry to methodology for demonstrating the relative merit of a "singer-songwriter."

thanks. i gave a bit of thought to how i wanted to phrase that. "songwriters" do work in a vacuum, in a way, and "singers" are just interpreters.

Oh fuck off though: IT HAS WORDS. It's quite often made by people who care about the quality and content of those words. I don't even particularly care about lyrics 85% of the time -- i.e., when it's obvious the person who wrote them doesn't much care, either -- and I'd STILL say that a don't-talk-about-lyrics rule is about as ridiculous as a "don't even mention drum sounds" rule; they're a part of the total content, as much available for aesthetic use as anything else. And I can't imagine being so intellectually uncurious that you wouldn't be interested in things like thematic threads, at least in the rare instances where they're not bullshit and actually somewhat interesting to think about (i.e., Morrissey, as opposed to the Shins or something)! I don't know if it's some mutant strain of anti-intellectualism or just sheer embarrassment at actually liking anything anyone has to say, but it's comical to me the way nobody will talk about a new artist's lyrics -- and then, once ten years have passed and the critical acceptance is firm enough, it's suddenly okay to start delving into the stuff. And I get the feeling that it's because eww, being interested in and getting into lyrics is something pop fans who listen to top-40 singles on the radio do, oh no, we are so much more interested in the music, man.

I dunno: it pisses me off that the vast majority of artists write inept or regurgitated or cliche or just place-filler lyrics, and then as soon as someone makes an effort to do otherwise that has any visible ambition, it's treated as some kind of grad-school gimmick or "pretentious" or something like that -- i.e. sure, let's beat down anyone who actually tries to do something worth talking about.

xpost nbsco they do the dismissal thing to hide that they don't actually know anything about lyrics!

which sorta lets the writer off the hook (a little), but the practice of junior-whopper mini-reviews is still evil.

(And I understand all the complaints in this thread about dropping lyrics into reviews in a way that only really says "hey look I liked this line, isn't it great," but the call then shouldn't be NOT to talk about lyrics, it should be to actually talk about what makes the line worthwhile, what's interesting about it. I dunno, I quoted a bunch of lyrics on that 10km thread, and I'd like to think I tried to unpack the majority of them; surely that's the important part.)

I respectfully disagree! I think that in most cases, understanding (say) enjambment & rhyme schemes & the play of personae are key to talking at all about lyrics, and I think that the governing way of talking about lyrics in rock (and rap, and country) criticism is a woefully uninteresting "it moved me or struck me as clever" vs. "it didn't grab me" dialectic. you may not need to say anything about prosody or meter or the literary tradition in which Art Brut's lyrics place themselves to talk about them, but what you have to say about them is probably gonna be more interesting if you do.

and if there's no discernable music you could point that out and have some fun with it. personally, with something called Father Fucker I'd begin AND end with the title. wait, wasn't that a Geo Michael song?

when I read the term "wordplay" I reach for my revolver...

Mr. Nabisco: it's because I love and respect literature that I'm offended by knee-jerk lyric quotes in rock reviews. this kind of superfical erudition always strikes me as philistinism, actually.

it is.

I haven't seen any call in this thread for not talking about lyrics. far from it - the only issue taken is with substitution of a part (a couple of lines from the lyric) for the whole (the song, the recording, the artist). also substitution of a snide or gushing response to the words for doing the critic's work, which comes across as reductive at best, but more likely sloppy or plain not-all-that-bright.

which comes back to, writing about music - including pop music - including lyrics - is not easy.

one thing i hate is when a writer criticizes lyrics for seemingly being "meaningless," when what the reviewer should be saying is "meaningless to ME, because i can't be arsed to think about what the lyricist could be getting at."

Mr Mraz, meet Mr Coleslaw...

i know this reads like "no man, dylan's mid '60s lyrics really ARE meaningful, y'all jus jelus" but what i think i mean is that people have gotten so used to every sentence and bit of syntax being immediately parseable (TO THEM, ahem), they take it for granted and tend to forget that not everyone chooses such a direct approach to unpack what's on their mind.

ah yes, the OTHER dark side of pitchforkitude.

cumbersome images of Arthurian adventure convolute its message: "Let's smash the magic wonder window...in the halls of Abel's fault." I mean, the stagnant melody's uninspiring enough, but who'd actually rally around the credo "Snuff the mortal candelabra's light"?

This is deeply confused rhetoric masquerading as insight into lyrics: what's "Arthurian" about the line quoted? In what way is "snuff the mortal candelabra's light" a credo: was it especially marked or something? If the line really is "...in the halls of Abel's fault" (and note that using ellipsis when making a point about somebody's lyrics is a li'l fishy), what could possibly be going on? If the point is precisely to criticise the apparent senselessness of "the halls of Abel's fault" (and, as it would appear, to use this line as substantive for general lyrical tendencies in the album), why not quickly point out that faults aren't often thought of as having halls - rather than striking a pose that suggests "I caught your meaning and found it lacking"? And so forth. Not that the quoted lyrics sound especially inspired - I have no idea who the Doleful Lions are - but it doesn't sound as though the person writing about them really has any idea what's bad about their lyrics.

[nb I swear this was the first review I looked at randomly for an example, I didn't cherrypick the worst thing I could find]

xpost I see somebody besides me already played the Hister trope so 'sall good

bravo - you'da thought that Gertrude Stein, James Joyce - heck, John Ashbery - woulda took kerr of that whole "b-but lyrics mus necessarily produce linear, subject-verb-object sense to me" approach a long time ago.