Sure they sound great but they make no sense

bowie's real crimes are the times he takes this delightful doggerel and insteading of tarting it up, he pumps it full of Real Emotional Resonance (via the delivery...the end of rock n' roll suicide comes to midn...)

that said, the man should be beaten with sticks for something as atrocious as "time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth." gah!

I'll get me coat

I'll get me coat

fancy a drink mark, since we're on our way out?

are they though, tom? does listening to the lyrics really enhance one's appreciation of a cecil taylor cd? (okay, maybe chinampas...) but seriously and not to be a total pedant here, i agree with you that lyrics are Important (much in the same way that the beatles were Important, ho ho.) words are important in songs for me; Lyrics aren't. (i hopes that's the - resonably subtle - distinction it is in my mind on paper.) i would have thought that you would have agreed with me that the post- dylan/cohen/whomever syndrome of Meaningful lyrics (which is what anthony's accquaintence was obvious looking for, but something that bowie couldn't support) was malignant rather than benign. it's the same sort of thing which cause a pitchfork reviewer to denigrate the "lyrics" to "one more time" over the mealy mouthed mulch of an of montreal or whatever because the indie schtuff is obv. reaching for Meaning. but the words in "one more time" - in context - have much more resonance for me than most emo-relationship drivel. it's something which has plagued hiphop since day one in the mainstream; what were the routines of the cold crush, the funky four + 1, etc. but updates on african mouth jive, louis' scatting, disco and funk's continued "de-humanizing" (i.e. non-Meaningful) of the lyric in song. once thrust in the rockist (hey, deny it) light of the media these strings of words, facinating and involving merely through their density and dizzying structure, were required to have Meaning less they be Lesser Music (which hiphop remains for a helluva a lot of people...without even getting into the "fake music" aspect.)

Yes exactly Jess - "One More Time" is a great song in part because it has brilliant lyrics. The lyrics-must-be-meaningful problem is a problem for just the reasons you say (though OMT's lyrics ARE very meaningful, more so and intentionally more so than a lot of Dylan's) BUT all I'm saying is that going "I don't care about the lyrics" is still for me like saying "I don't care about the rhythm" - fine if it works for you (Kate St C manages to say lots about pop with an admitted disdain for rhythm AND lyrics!) but there's a kind of air of superiority that hangs around it - "I don't care about the lyrics" meaning "I have moved beyond that simplistic mode".

I wish Stevie T's piece on pop and poetry was online somewhere - it makes all these points considerably more eloquently.

The Nik Cohn similar argument re. Dylan - that basically he ruined rock with his damned lyrics - doesn't stand up because every single thing that was in rock and pop lyrics before Dylan was still in them afterwards, there were just more things in them 'after Dylan' (Though unlike hip-hop a lot of the things BD most obviously brought in weren't actually good things i.e. vast clunking streams of literary allusion which 35 years on sound like a drughead data-dump. I don't listen to Dylan for the lyrics but I think some of his lyrics are brilliant, FWIW).

I think what has to be challenged is not the importance of lyrics but the relative importance attributed to each criterion for judging their worth, and on an even more finely tuned level the prejudices which inform the use of those criteria.

Like, on one level I'm sceptical of the argument that lyrics should "say something" because I don't think they should necessarily. At the same time, even when there's a time and a place for asking whether a song "says something", I get pissed off by the fact that that the "something" that most critics seem to look for are not the somethings I want to hear about (the trials and trevails of the beat generation in particular), while songs which I consider to be "saying something" (eg. So Solid Crew's "They Don't Know") are ignored or dismissed out of hand. There generally needs to be a greater acknowledgement of the multiplicity of purposes and audiences for lyrics.

Tom: the distinction you draw between written lyrics and performed lyrics has been important to my own conception of music since I first read it (was it in something you wrote about Harriet Wheeler, perhaps?), but it would be giving the pro-lyrics team too many free points to pretend that they always see the distinction too.

i could give fuck all about most of what goes on in undie hiphop. which i should, by all accounts, because in many ways undie hiphop seems to mirror my beloved post-punk (Or Thats What People Like To Tell Me.) the "density and dizzying structure" (to quote myself) of early hiphop was nothing more than a way to cold rock a party. which was what was so anathema to the (white) rockcrit (even the lester bangs noiseboyz contingent who could appreciate the "poetry" in the troggs, et al. it was also just plain old shock of the new, of course.) the "golden age" of hiphop gave those guys something to get their critical teeth into, even if it was no more or less above the bad-high school poetry level of most pop lyrics. suddenly hiphop has meaning! huzzah! (bollocks, actually, as all know.) mainstream hiphop has no Meaning now, but it's just as much strings of stupid, funny, crazy words to cold rock a party (i.e. Ludacris, which Tim rightfully brings up.) undie hiphop also has no meaning, but the sheer scale of that density, the byzantine structures, the use of 3 sylable words, and the lack of talk about "dirty rubbers", etc. gives the rockists SOMETHING to grab on to (i.e. my blog partner...har har.) this...hopefully...is something that's changing as a new generation of critics (reynolds, jones...us!) worms their way into the musiccrit woodwork. hopefully.

I love "well ain't that poster love?/Ain't that close to love?" I love the way "Young Americans" goes from being this Springsteen wannabe "boy meets girl, boy fucks girl" scenario to this crazed speel about race, class, Watergate, penis size, you name it.

He had tons of great lines.

I agree with most of what was said above, esp. by Tom and Tim. I think that capital-M Meaning cut out more meaning than it added, but this wasn't Dylan's fault, who did everything possible to demolish such dichotomies and to put as much as he could into his songs.

Of course the nonsense in early hip-hop was meaningful, even at the level of "watch how I nonchalantly hit you with a cascade of syllables" (in other words watch how I maintain my grace under pressure). But most early hip-hop lyrics weren't nonsense at all. "Hotel, motel, Holiday Inn." "Me and Superman had a fight/So I hit 'em in the head with some kryptonite." Means something to me. So does "Throw your hands in the air/And wave 'em like you just don't care," which would have been something powerful in the burned-out South Bronx of the 1970s, wouldn't it? Not to mention "If I had a baby, I might go broke/And believe me to a nigga that ain't no joke" (Spoonie Gee, 1980). Not to mention Melle Mel's "Found hung dead in your cell" rap, which he first did in 1980's great "Supperrappin'" before resurrecting it a couple years later in the rather clunky "The Message."

every once in a while i just barely get into an argument with some friends over dylan being a better 'songwriter' (what that means remains unclear) than leonard cohen. the argument doesn't get very far because i don't really know cohen's records at all (heard some of the classix) and because we're not even entering into it on the same terms.

but: whenever i hear a leonard cohen song it just sounds like someone being MEANINGFUL, which can never win in a comparison to dylan for me because it presumes that the opposite of that, in dylan's best songs, is either LESS MEANINGFUL, or just like trite or something. it hardly matters WHO the contender is supposed to be; if they're a MEANINGFUL SONGWRITER the point has been missed.

one way for me to complicate my position here would surely be to download some fucking leonard cohen, which i am doing right now. (curiously his classic hitz aren't around on the interweb stealer at the moment.) but. a question. suppose you yourself are in such an argument. how do you come to speak on similar terms about what's good and right etc. about the opposite of BEING MEANINGFUL?