Vinyl Maelstrom

Do Lyrics Matter?

• Ian Forth

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Sure, we've all got a favourite carol or maybe anthem and words matter with them. Hard to imagine a hymn with la-la-las instead of lyrics halfway through.

But you know how people say "I never forget a face, but I'm no good with names." It seems to be a badge of honour for some people to say they can't be bothered with lyrics, almost as if it shows strength of character.

But do lyrics matter? What's the history of lyrics in songs? Are they becoming more popular or less? How do they fit the current zeitgeist?

Take a medium-sized dive with Vinyl Maelstrom and find out. 


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Introduction

I hope I cut myself shaving tomorrow
I hope it bleeds all day long
Our friends say it's darkest before the sun rises
We're pretty sure they're all wrong
I hope it stays dark forever
I hope the worst isn't over
And I hope you blink before I do
I hope I never get sober
And I hope when you think of me years down the line
You can't find one good thing to say
And I'd hope that if I found the strength to walk out
You'd stay the hell out of my way
I am drowning
There is no sign of land
You are coming down with me
Hand in unlovable hand

Not my words but those of John Darnielle, lead singer of the Mountain Goats, with lyrics from that group's song "No Children". 

Memorable words, for sure. But how important are lyrics in contemporary songs? Let's take a medium sized dive.


Medium sized dive

Lyrics, as I suspect you know, are words that make up a song usually consisting of verse and chorus. And the writer of lyrics is a lyricist. It's a little different with operas which are usually known as a libretto and their writer as a librettist but as this is a popular music podcast, so that need not concern us here. Lyrics can be explicit, metaphorical or abstract - to the point of unintelligibility. Other factors then come into play, such as form, tone, rhythm, articulation, metre, rhyme and so on. 

The differences between poems and songs may become less meaningful where verse is set to music. Versus can predate tunes. A singer in a band may write some lyrics out and take them to musicians in the band who write to it; that process may be reversed; or words and music might dance together during the development of the song.

There are songs, but there are also anthems, ballads, carols, folk songs, hymns lullaies, marches, rounds, spirituals and more. Generally speaking with these, there is a clear lyrical direction and the music fits in around it. With dance music for example, it's generally but not always the other way around.

OK. Time for an entirely reasonable debate. Do lyrics matter?


Music first in commercial pop

In my music group there are nine of us. I'd say that for three of us lyrics really matter. So extrapolating from our database we can see that for the universe of music listeners 33% care about lyrics. I suppose I'm duty bound to add: caution, small sample size.

I think that there are heaps of genres in which the lyrics are critical. We talked about some of them a few moments ago. You couldn't have a meaningless anthem or ballad. Carols can have beautiful melodies but it tends to be the words that linger. Lullabies are very soothing, but they also have to have soothing words to fill up the metre .

In contemporary music, if we briefly look outside commercial pop bands, like the Mountain Goats who we quoted at the top of the programme, or Half Man Half Biscuit, a cult English group specialising in the marginal aspects of popular culture, or characters such as Jonathan Coulton, who plough a similar furrow in the US - all of these prioritise lyrics. To be realistic with Half Man Half Biscuit their musicianship is not what people keep coming back for.

With pop it's different. There have been great pop songs with great lyrics, of course there have. They needn't even be complicated. "Young hearts run free" has a simple but important message, as does "I Will Survive" and "Don't you want me".

There have been developments over the years though. Song like "Maggie Mae" by Rod Stewart from the '70s doesn't have a story as such, but one feels one knows the characters quite deeply by the end of the three minute song . Similarly, "Up the junction" by Squeeze is a brilliant summation of a character arc which you almost feel could be a Play for Today or even an entire film done in 3 minutes .

But it's hard to imagine a song like Maggie Mae or indeed Up the Junction being produced now and becoming a top ten hit. I'm not saying it couldn't happen it's just less likely. Max Martin - who with Taylor Swift wrote "Shake it off" and the "Weeknd's "Blinding lights" - clearly regards lyrics as secondary to melodies, with his formula that he calls "melodic maths". The words have to stick to a strict number of syllables.


Are lyrics staging a comeback?

But is the world changing? Looking at some of the biggest artists of the last few years, many at the very least placed lyrics on an equal pedestal to the tune. Now you might argue they come from the margins of music, but they're very much front and central these days.

Very obvious example is Charlie XCX's Brat. Some songs are bangers, for sure. But not all of them. The album has a strong lyrical thread and some songs really prioritised the lyrics themselves in their depiction of fragility and anxiety in their early 30s. "I might say something stupid", "I think about it all the time", "Girl, so confusing". 

Then there's Olivia Rodrigo. "I read all of your self help books so you'd think that I was smart." Billie Eilish …..  Lana Del Rey  …..  Taylor Swift.


Lyrics don’t have to mean anything

There’s a song called Rock Music by Pixies which I like to put on to burn off some excess emotion.

The lyrics so far as I can tell go like this:

Jack Jack Jack Jack Jack Jack

Apparently when I looked it up, he’s singing: "Your mouth's a mile away" 8 times in a row. If anything that decreases my attachment to the song.

And another example:

"Tutti frutti, oh rootie
Tutti frutti, oh rootie
Tutti frutti, oh rootie
Tutti frutti, oh rootie
Tutti frutti, oh rootie
A wop bop a loo bop a lop ba ba"

I've got a friend who doesn't know the words to "Born to run" by Bruce Springsteen, as far as I can tell anyway, but nonetheless can sing along to the entire song when driving. 

So the point being, lyrics as such don't have to mean anything in the strict definition of what words mean.

I would argue however that the meaning of rock music by Pixies is in the emotional intent. Another good example is scat singing in jazz music - deliberately and literally meaningless but contributing to the overall flow of the song.

Two further classic examples of semantically meaning free lyrics would be Sigur Ros's made up language and Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins in many of whom's songs it's impossible to determine individual words as such. And yet the feeling and the emotions conveyed by the singer are unmistakable.


Consider the people who are writing reviews

One of the paradoxes about writing a review of an artist or a song or an album is that it's much easier to write about the thing that people care least about. And honestly, that's frequently the words.

I fall into the trap sometimes of complaining about the lyrics to Wonderwall. And they are truly meaningless. What's a Wonderwall - no one knows. And here's some more Oasis lyrics:

Cos I've been standing at the station 
In need of education in the rain 
You made no preparation 
For my reputation once again 
The sink is full of fishies 
She's got dirty dishies on the brain 
And my dog's been itchin' 
Itchin' in the kitchen once again

Sure, gibberish. But you know, it doesn't matter. Or it doesn't matter nearly as much as I would like it to matter.

What I'm driving towards is that the sort of people who write music reviews for obvious reasons tend to be the sort of people who care about words. And so fairly frequently they'll focus on the words as it gives a framework to review the song or music or album. A handy lens through which to fix meaning.

And yet there might be seven people in the band and only one of them cares about the lyrics. And as we've seen with Oasis even he or she may not care about the lyrics that much. New Order were just about the most successful British band of the 1980s. After a while it became obvious that Bernard their lead singer had very little to say. The problem was compounded by the fact he inherited the lead singership of the group from Ian Curtis, who was genuinely a decent poet. The combination of these two things meant that Bernard ended up going into the studio the night before production was due and just singing whatever came into his head.

Now does that get in the way of some brilliant songs - not at all. You could argue they would be rather better with better lyrics but not by much. "I see a ship in the harbour, I can and shall obey". Those immortal words to Blue Monday that don't mean anything. In fact it was in a previous song - "Temptation" - when, if you like, the lyrical rot really set in. "Oh you've got green eyes, oh you've got blue eyes, oh you've got brown eyes" or something like that. I remember playing that song to a friend of mine who I got into Joy Division and he could hardly believe his ears.

Is it to a degree a class thing? Do I worry about lyrics more because I went to university and worried about words for years after years and years? Do I look down my nose at Noel Gallagher's attempt to string some words together, knowing that I'd be incapable of having a bands that attracted hundreds of thousands of people for a reunion tour? Well there might be something in that.