"But I can't understand the words!"

Intelligible answers

I get this a lot too. I used to be big into Industrial Dance stuff and the "vocalists" in that particular genre seem to have a thing for distortion - probably because it sounded cool, and they couldn't sing (cf. Al Jourgenson's vocals on With Sympathy). My typical response is that I don't really listen to the lyrics.

On the other hand, when the lyrics are intelligible and intelligent, it makes good music that much better and bad music that much more tolerable.

I see what you're getting at and I would agree that it is a rather unweildy critical weapon in some cases, but isn't it justified sometimes? A song does not = a song = a song, so I could never assume a uniformly critical approach to all. I must evaluate each as it's own entity - applying whatever criteria my perceptions have informed me should apply in a particular case. This leaves room for my perceptions to be wrong - but what else do I have to go on? A set of rules? I don't like that idea very much. If I am getting the sense that the lyrics were meant to be heard, and are in fact key to the 'success' of the song, am I not fairly identifying a flaw if my appreciation of them was impeded by their style of delivery? It all depends on my perception of the artists intent, which may or may not be accurate, but that is irrelevant to me and my enjoyment of same.
Suppose for a moment that I'm watching a film, and it's horribly scratched up, blurry, poor sound quaity, or even no sound at all, etc. etc. If this is the latest Hollywood blockbuster reduced to such an unviewable mess, well I certainly expected something else and I'm pissed off right? I don't accept the product 'as is' in this case. I complain about not being able to hear and see clearly. But say that I'm not expecting to see Arnold Scwartzenegger or Brad Pitt. Say I'm in a small theatre watching Metropolis. Am I going to bitch because of it's quality? The lack of sound? Of course not. I'm going to evaluate this movie on completely different terms because it is simply not the same creature, despite the fact that both are what we call films. Perhaps this is a poor analogy, I don't know, but that's generally why I feel blanket dismissal of any particular line of criticism is not valid.

Or in other words, I find it equally as limiting to say that the lyrics "should never matter to anyone" or "I don't ever care about/listen to the lyrics" than it is to say the opposite.

'blanket dismissal of any particular line of criticism is not valid'

Unless the line of criticism depends entirely on assuming knowledge of arrtist's intention.

Well, like I already said - all a person has is their perceptions when we're talking about evaluating personal enjoyment. I mean, what's the important thing here? That I be right, or that I feel right? The way I see it, being right is moot.

i found a most amusing website once that had transcribed the lyrics to all the tracks on Loveless, with colour coding to indicate how sure they were that they had the words right :-)

"Don't you think that words in a sung lyric just might carry meaning in a much different way than they do in poetry, philosophical texts, ordinary conversation, a newspaper or a shopping list? And what the hell makes you think words are the primary vehicle of meaning here, anyway?"

i encountered amused mockery when i announced at ILE-meet last - not exactly for the first time - that despite being a "professional" rock critic lo! these many decades i know the complete words to NO songs and don't really understand how to adjust my head to start paying attention to em, much. Or that it matters, much.

Yes I hear and remember individual lines/couplets of consequence and significance, sometimes: such as M.Jackson's terrific "I am the damned I am the dead I am the agony inside a dying head". Since song logic != mathematical logic I contend this is all you need.

I think this is what a lot of people do tho - you hear a song and some lyric in the song grabs you. If you like the lyric enough you try to hear the context.

I never moan about not being able to make out the words unless [band X] claim their words are damn important and then produce music where they're inaudible.

I really don't care about the lyrics much. I notice on this and other music boards that whenever someone doesn't like something it's convenient for them to take shots at the lyrics as a justification for calling X band "horrible." I feel that people use lyrics as an excuse for making unjustified authoritative statements about music.

Lyrics = part of music, so using them to criticise a song = fine BUT only if you're taking into account the performance aspect I think.

Ignoring lyrics is like ignoring, say, the harmonic structure of a piece of music. You can do it. Sometimes you have to do it - if you know 0 about harmonic structure, or if the lyrics are in a foreign language. But it's nothing to boast about.

I wish lou reed's vocals were more inaudible.

Actually harmonic structure = good comparison. Harmonic structure in most popsongs = a readymade and not of direct expressive consequence, except as generic found material (this = an r. meltzer insight btw, and he's korrekt also and therewith undermines most academic discush of harmonic "non-development", even susan mclary); well ditto words, very often. They come in by-the- yard chunks, for disco or nu-metal or dolequeue punk or R&B even when they think they don't. You just put it back of the attention queue until it muscles its way to the front.

But all this is saying surely is that it's the unusual rather than the usual parts of a song that we recognise, comment on and criticise?

usual = hazy thang.

yeah except that i don't recognise words

It depends. The main thing I ask of lyrics is that they not ruin the song for me. Anything else is a bonus, but I do appreciate lyrics that contain well-done turns of phrase or whatever. ("well-done turns of phrase or whatever," yeah) I think that specific lines can matter, but not any more than, say, a particular sound in the song.

I don't think there's anything wrong with caring about lyrics, though; I just don't think it's going to give a person a good handle on most pop music with English lyrics since, say, the 1940's. I remember that I would sometimes play songs I liked for my mother and she would assume that I was "relating to" the words, when it was generally other things that mattered more. She seemed to listen in a way that put a lot of weight on the words.

I once saw the Ramones being interviewed on the Tom Snyder show, and they said: "We don't sing words, we sings sounds." But the words do matter. It's just that they don't usually matter enough that they can stand alone as poetry. They are given a lot of their life by the way they are delivered, by what surrounds them, and so forth.

I don't agree that the listener needs some sort of explicit knowledge of something like harmonic structure in order to notice it. That just doesn't give people enough credit. All it does is perhaps limit their means of articulating thoughts on what they hear. Admitted, a technical approach might increase your enjoyment of a song, but on the other hand, it might do the opposite. Greatness (whatever that is) can be heard by any ear, and appreciation surely does not directly equate with comprehension.
Now I'm a bit stymied here. Isn't it this other viewpoint here that is making just as many assumptions as the one criticized in the first post? Isn't it possible that there are entire swathes of songs out there that exist primarily as vehicles for the lyrics? Why this assumtion that they are secondary or that meaning carried in music must be so different from other media? Who says that the lyric driven song must be evaluated stricly as 'music' at all? It's not necessarily a pure media. Media can mix. Back to that film analogy - consider that the lyrically important song might be some sort of equivalent to the movie musical, a hybrid not meant to be critiqued strictly as either, and you might see what I mean. If you don't evaluate the whole, you may be missing the point.

Does anyone on this list listen to Bob Dylan for the music? Or Woody Guthrie? Or Tom Lehrer? Or Ice-T? Sometimes the music is just a vehicle for the words, sometimes music & lyrics complement one another, and sometimes the lyrics just don't matter.

Does anyone on this list listen to Bob Dylan for the music?

For the music and the way the voice sounds, primarily, yeah. Occasionally for the lyrics, mostly on "Blood On The Tracks", but he's way overpraised as a lyricist and way underpraised as pretty much everything else.

Isn't that a bit like reading Playboy for the articles? Sure, some of those articles are really good but...

Yeah it is, I suppose, cos the airbrush/silicone playboy bunny look does nothing for me, and stretching the analogy too far I could say that Dylan-the-lyricist also turns me off with his un-natural-ness (at least the more celebrated stuff - his simpler lyrics are often excellent). Whereas Dylan is an amazing singer and the way his bands have sounded is often astonishing.

Actually no let's stretch it even further - "Blood On The Tracks" is a great record lyrically (where it is) because of the way the 'poetic' poses run up against the moments of plainly-expressed, lived-through pain (eg Idiot Wind - the fantastically paranoid first verse then the nonsense about ceremonies and I Ching then "I can't even touch the books you've read" etc.). So if 60s Dylan is Playboy, this is 'Readers' Wives' - the occasional clumsy attempts to look porno adding to both the voyeuristic interest and the resulting discomfort.

Fair enough. But the question then is, wouldn't it seem foolish to dimiss the opinion of someone who was critiquing the photos just because you only find value in the articles?

Posted that before your last post Tom. I'm not sure I understand that last sentence?

I'm not dismissing anyone's opinion, Static - Nick came along implying that everybody who listened to Dylan did so for the lyrics and I said, well no. I'm not then saying "People who listen to Dylan for the lyrics are idiots".

Playboy also is a magazine and hence has adverts for its contents on the cover, and those adverts tend to emphasise the pictures - so you're explicitly expected to find the pictures interesting. Whereas Dylan records have no such instruction to find the lyrics more interesting than the music - theyve usually just got a picture of Bob on them or an awful drawing or something. A lot of critical consensus has built up around Dylan's value residing in his lyrics but there's nothing in the records themselves to point you in that direction.

My last sentence - the appeal of amateur/readers wives style porn is basically voyeuristic: you are seeing ordinary people expose themselves. I'm making a fanciful parallel between this and the more confessional songwriting Dylan seems to be going for on BOTT. But the other thing about 'amateur' porn is that most of the poses struck and scenarios enacted seem to be lifted from professional porn: and the equivalent in the analogy is the way Dylan flits between a simple, confessional mode and the highly imagistic songwriting he'd got famous for.

No, I suppose you didn't. But it does seem to be implied in the original question and some subsequent comments, which I assumed you were in agreement with. My apologies.

The more I think about this, the more ambivalent I am becoming about it. No, I see nothing wrong with music being a vehicle to communicate the meaning of the lyrics. Ironically, Arabic music is traditionally very lyric-driven, and is evaluated it part by a singer's ability to bring the words to life; however, I enjoy it, not understanding Arabic. There are two contradictory things that commonly get said about Oum Kalthoum in relation to this: that it is not possible to understand her without understanding Arabic, and that she is able to communicate the meaning of the words she is singing even to someone who doesn't understand Arabic.

And yet, somehow it seems a waste of music's ability to express or hint at things which cannot be verbalized, to yoke it in this way to words.

How do I listen to Dylan? Undebiably, the words are fairly important to me, but a great deal depends on his delivery. I like "Tangled up in Blue" at least as much for its overall rhythms as I do for the particular word portrait it creates. When Dylan sings, "And revolution in the air," the way he sings it is all important. In fact, sometimes Dylan's stories get in the way for me, since I really don't relate to many of them, and I somehow feel I am supposed to be nodding my head and saying, "yes, that's how it is."

Belated reaction to dave q, who wrote: "See, personally I prefer vocalists who mangle the syllables into indistinguishable gristle and gravel, I don't like singers who e-nun-ci-ate, but I seem to be in a minority of one!" This seems a little disingenuous. You must realize that you will find plenty of other posters on this site who will share your preference. In fact, I would guess the majority of regular posters would, though I could be off base.

I think that there was a reaction against analysing or thinking about lyrics a good few years ago, based - quite rightly - on an irritation with the way a lot of rock critics talked about little other than lyrical content and (even worse) its supposed relation to the artist's life.

I think that reaction was totally healthy, but it's a mindset which has led to a certain inflexibility - a disdain for lyrics, a feeling that the music has to come first. Ironically this is simply replicating in mirror-form the pose of the irritating textual critics, because it assumes the separability of words and music and delivery, which I for one simply don't 'feel' as a listener. Now some listeners - eg Ned - obviously do feel this, and I guess at the opposite end of the scale Robert Hilburn or whoever really 'feels' that the lyrics are the urgent and key thing.

I really do recommend a book called "The Message", edited by one Stephen Trousse, on the unpromising subject of pop and poetry - his essay in it is a bold and very interesting attempt to find a way to bring lyrics back into good music criticism.

I'd also recommend reading the Pinefox's article on Rosemary Squires for an example of writing which is centered on the lyric as performance, not as text.

In my case, as Tom notes, it's very much something I do feel and, I should clarify, felt well before the split he outlines first got crystalized. So I'm not trying to get intentionally and cynically up the nose of those who feel differently -- I really *do* listen to music that way.

I would go to rock shows as a kid and my mom's first question when I got back home was always "what did they sing about?" I thought this had to be the dumbest question ever. I went for 1) gurlz 2) beer 3) music (sometimes 2 and 3 switched places). The lyrics never seemed like much of a priority for the bands I saw so why should they be a priority for me?

If the Ramones really did just sing syllables, though, their singing wouldn't have amounted to much (insert joke here). Singers need lyrics so that their voices communicate something to us. The inflection and effort they give is tied, in some way, to what they think it is they're singing about. The great joy of rock vocals is the feeling that this person is striving to make themselves heard above the bloody racket they're creating. It's analagous to theater, where the actors are striving to have their way and be heard amidst the chaos of the plot. It's the STRIVING that creates the thrill for me, whether or not I can understand exactly what they're saying. Without lyrics that are at least meaningful for the singer, this doesn't happen. There are a lot of singers of course who make no effort to be heard above the fray, who really do just want their vocals to be part of the mix (Stereolab comes to mind). These do not thrill me.