Who are the great lyricists of today?

...I also happen to think quite highly of my own lyrics. The New Yorker called me "intelligent," so it's official, bitch!

It's Mangum, but I agree.

Gimme a fucking break. Show me an intelligent recent Thom Yorke lyric that doesn't become a deconstructed cliché like "We're all accidents waiting to happen."

and who gives a shit about lyrics anyway?

Anyway, the answer is so obvious: Bernard Sumner.

Stuff like "I've Made Enough Friends" from Secaucus, and "Ex-Girl Collection" from Meadowlands, are both about 100x more sophisticated than your typical rock or indie lyrics.

Which is also a little scary for me personally, because this is likely going to be the first single off our first album.

This question is from having heard recent bands like Art Brut (omg, how self conscious!), the Killers (wooooaaaahhh) and Kaiser Chefs (not the kind of thing that I like) who, whilst the music is nothing to shout about, manage to force in the most teeth-grindingly bad records I've ever heard.

I hate to be a hark-backer but I'm sure mainstream rock and pop had better to offer in the way of lyrics before the noughties. Even, say Blur or Nirvana at least had something going on in there, be it about mullatos and country houses - but at least it was SOMETHING.

your favorite current lyricist

Name a better lyricist than Mark E Smith

your favorite current lyricist

gretchen wilson's stuff is good plainspoken pop country songwriting, too, not sure if it's gretchen or someone else writing the words, but someone's writing 'em.

for old fogeys who are still around, i think the go-betweens are still writing amazing pop songs.

for young fogeys who should be bigger than they are, nyc popsters schwervon, who tend to write about food and other domestic necessities, are pretty great with their words.

The f/k/a alt country boys:
Jeff Tweedy
Jay Farrar
Rhett Miller

The f/k/a alt country girls:
Lucinda Williams
Cheri Knight (stunning, but almost 9 years since the last record)
Neko Case
Kim Richey

Hyper-verbal lit-rockers:
Miller (see above)
John Samson (Weakerthans)
Colin Meloy (Decemberists)
Aimee Mann
The guy from Okkervil River

I wanna be Cole Porter:
Stephin Merritt
Nellie MacKay

Neo-soul:
Jill Scott

Hip-hop:
Jay-Z
Black Thought (Roots)

New Dylans:
Conor Oberst (not everything, but his best is pretty frickin good)

Hors de categorie:
Jo Lloyd (Stretch Princess)
Elizabeth Elmore (The Reputation, Sarge)

Not meant to be exclusive . . . I've never really listened to Silver Jews, etc.

And even songs like "Fell in Love with a Girl" and "Hotel Yorba" tend to have really deft little lyrical devices that are difficult to notice since the song structures are so simple/elemental.

The unexpected use of the phrase "it bears repeating" in "Fell in Love with a Girl" is one of my favorite lyrical mini-moments of the last several years.

Since Isbell joined up at Decoration Day, they may be the most talented band out there right now.

("You're Pretty Good Lookin - FOR A GIRL" is a great, hilarious, line.)

Red hair with a curl
Mellow roll for the flavor
And the eyes for peeping
Can't keep away from the girl
These two sides of my brain
Need to have a meeting
Can't think of anything to do
My left brain knows that
All love is fleeting
She's just looking for something new
And I said it once before
But it bears repeating

Ah a ah a ah ah ah
Ah a ah a ah ah ah

Can't think of anything to do
My left brain knows that
All love is fleeting
She's just looking for something new
And I said it once before
But it bears repeating

Fell in love with a girl
Fell in love once and almost completely
She's in love with the world
But sometimes these feelings
Can be so misleading
She turns and says "Are you alright?"
I said "I must be fine cause my heart's still beating
"Come and kiss me by the riverside,
"Bobby says it's fine he don't consider it cheating now"

Ah a ah a ah ah ah
Ah a ah a ah ah ah

Can't think of anything to do
My left brain knows that
All love is fleeting
She's just looking for something new
And I said it once before
But it bears repeating

(**all in about 2:15**)

Yeah, that's fine. I wasn't meaning to imply that postmodernism was the first instance in history where efficacy was more significant than depth and virtuosity.

But why is this topic relevant to this thread, given that dog latin wants us talking about lyrics in popular music, which, whether or not they achieve the classical virtues (whatever those are), rarely make the claim of even attempting those virtues? ("Depth" and "virtuosity" are just regular old virtues, or defects, rather than specifically classical ones.)

Pet pet
Don't you get het het
Don't get het up
Don't get het up pet

Drink the deep blue blank
You hunk of woman
Or return to
Your favorite clinic
Like a good cynic

Nervous on drugs
Lie on the lino
Whine like a wino

Just another beach scenario
Spoiled by a sack of potatoes

Pet pet
Don't get het het
Don't get het up pet
Don't get het up pet

And if a model of lyrical greatness as, say, Leonard Cohen, Caetano Veloso, etc., remains in people's minds, I don't know to what extent it's relevant with regard to postmodern music

Frank, you are right about Courtney Love, at her best. She's very lucid and wickedly funny.

Jay-Z is genius. Just the sound of the language the way he uses it amazes me, and he gets away with a truly epic level of arrogance by being incredibly witty about it, always.

Re: Finn, Green. I agree with Momus. Maybe I won't like the Adam Green album but it sounds like he is taking risks. I don't see how Finn is, and that's not interesting to me.

Oh, I really don't think that's true at all. This whole "nothing has ever changed throughout history" idea can be ludicrously overstated. What would Aristotle make of the lyrics (excellent in their way) to Martin Creed's songs for his band Owada? Aristotle, without having a chance to read up on postmodernism and contemporary art, would be completely flummoxed and think we were all totally insane.

New things do happen! Postmodernism isn't one of them though, it's just a catch-all describing some very old reading methods. And maybe writing methods, not sure about that.

for example, it was the Greeks who pointed this out by telling the same stories over & over again, and the whole polis understood that telling the story (say) of the Trojan Women meant one thing in peacetime & quite another in war. But it wasn't the Greeks who "discovered" this radical fact. It is, in fact, radical in a real sense: it's right there at the root. We knew that we could tell the same story twice to different effect when we lived in the trees. Postmodernism longs to feel special, so it attributes this radix librorum to its own cleverness.

"As an artistic movement, it is the umbrella term for those movements that followed "modernism". Modernism, as an artistic movement, refers to those schools (impressionist, expressionist, surrealist, cubist, etc.) prominent from about 1880 to about 1940. Postmodernism is, therefore, essential post-WW II art, especially post-60s art. Postmodernism, as a philosophical movement, is usually associated with the "post-structuralists" of French philosophy - the generation that came to prominence in the late 60s and early 70s..." etc

As for best lyricst, I'm honestly not sure. There is no lyricist I like that could be objectively be called "the best." With rock, it's all entertainment value to me.

So: Charlie Patton? Leadbelly? Louis Prima? Elvis Presley? the Beatles? Led Zeppelin? (or maybe not, since I'm not at all sure what you mean by "decontextualized.")

James this is kinda my point! Art has been doing the "postmodernism" mambo since we emerged from our caves; postmodernism is a critical school that found a way to describe an inherent tendency in art. So, any writer whose sense of genre is in constant play is a postmodernist: hence Sterne, Nashe, Chaucer, Rabelais, Petronius, Sophocles, Plautus, et al

Yeah, before the 60s artists were seizing on other forms of music, and I would suggest this anticipated post-modernism. But since the 60s, pastiche has become more and more common, arriving at its apex recently. I would say the Clash drawing on black Caribbean music is very much a post-modern phenomenon, even if, sure these kind of appropriations happened during the build-up to the 1960s. And, of course, many of the artists you named are very much a part of the "post modern" era.

By "decontextualized," I mean music completely reappropriated, completely removed from its origins, cultural, geographic, political, or otherwise, and generally through technology. White dub, for example, or a country westerm song from Faith No More. Pastiche and parody is the name of the game.

Like e.g. if we're conflating postmodernism with post-structuralism and deconstruction (which it appears we are) then someone like De Man would say that pre-modern texts actually deconstruct themselves, whereas Derrida says no, deconstruction doesn't exist until he invented it. In this debate Banana is like De Man, saying that a lot of stuff was postmodern before we could call it that; Momus is like Derrida, saying that these things aren't actually postmodern until situated within the historical category of postmodernism (ie. art in postmodernity).

Tim you have made me very happy since De Man is my favorite of the whole lot (rather obviously I guess!)

thought I got love for Derrida too, as he invented breakdancing

Always was. (Buchanan and Goodman to thread.)

Basically, I get the idea what you call "post-modernism" (pastiche and parody and etc) most pop music fans have generally tended to call "pop music."

(Also, maybe I'm wrong, but wasn't there plenty of Black Caribbean music in England for the Clash to draw on? Yes, I think there was. So how that makes them any different from Elvis - who may or may not have heard all the genres he eventually wound up incorporating back in Tupelo -- is kind of beyond me.)

Puke.

Yeah, I agree that postmodernism and pop music are basically contiguous. In fact, my personal (and arbitrary) start point for pomo is 1956, which many also count as the start point for pop music as we know it today. However (and perhaps we should be talking about this on another thread) I think pop music has been more obviously postmodern than rock music. It's one of the biggest ironies around that when popular music wants to be taken seriously it invokes the buzzwords of a dead art movement rather than a living one. For instance, prog's claims to high art were based on the Romantic ideology of the genius artist, and on templates taken from 19th century classical music. Rock continues, to this day, to work with the Romantic ideology (authenticity, Coleridge-like drug transcendence, espousing political causes Lord Byron-style, etc etc) whereas pop continues to embody postmodern ideas (no depth, no high-low distinctions, etc). Contrary to what most critics believe, this makes rock, by virtue of its very claim to seriousness, much more kitsch than pop. In terms of my thoughts about Adam Green, I think it's terribly funny that people think Green is kitsch and Coldplay aren't.

I don't think stylistic use necessarily means postmodernism. Were there not, in fact, a lot of examples of modernism involving inspiration from "ethnic" or "primitive" art? Non-Eurocentric art was even perceived AS modernism (as with, say, tropicalismo).

I believe that the distinction with postmodernism is that the art is more about style itself. The goal is accuracy and embodiment of style. Text is only relevant to the extent that it also signifies style.

The Clash had a lot to say. I don't think theirs was just a postmodern evocation of reggae. Compare this with seriously postmodern groups whose only message is STYLE STYLE STYLE and references to pre-existing artworks, as with the Rapture or Acid Mothers Temple.

Thanks Momus. I am thinking now about your post on Adam Green. Why is it better for things to work in an art gallery, though? What is it about an art gallery?

Those critics you cite sound more like Victorians to me.

jus' playin :)