how important are lyrics to your listening experience?

voted 2 b/c it probably "matters" to me for every 2 out of 10 artists i could randomly cherry-pick from my shelves

it's really hard to put a number on this, but i'll say...6. lyrics definitely enrich my experience with a song if they're really good and detract from it if they're really bad, but if they're neither i tend to put sound first.

i voted 7. although now thinking about it, i think lyrics were more important to me when i was a young depressive who listened to nothing but Red House Painters. They are important now, just not as much i guess. Nowadays I tend to get caught up in more of the little "moments" in songs than the lyrics. I change my vote to 5.

depends on the artist. where it's important -- e.g., iron & wine, springsteen, the hold steady, ghostface -- it's very important.

lyrics definitely enrich my experience with a song if they're really good and detract from it if they're really bad, but if they're neither i tend to put sound first.

agree completely; but

<---- i guess i put sound here

and lyrics waaaaaaaaay over here ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------->

I love non-anglophone songs, because then I cannot understand the lyrics.

pretty important, and they've gotten more so. i can like a song without caring about the lyrics or knowing what they are, but in order for me to love a song, i have to connect to the lyrics on some level.

good lyrics vs. bad lyrics is more complex b/c an arrangement or delivery can make bad (or generic/lazy) lyrics pretty amazing. but bad lyrics that don't have that, once i become aware of them it's tough to ignore. and there are plenty of songs with lyricism that i admire that i don't necessarily love.

Voted 10, but different lyrics are important in different ways depending on the artist. For example, I might enjoy something like Daniel, Esq.'s examples for its literary wordplay and depth of meaning and shit. But even if I'm listening to like, Kesha or Lady Gaga or something, it gets under my skin when one of their lyrics doesn't sound "right" to me.

For me, lyrics are more important negatively than positively. They can put me off a song easily (e.g., massive amounts of hip hop), but they are rarely a major reason I like a song. So that makes it complicated, but I'm going to say 2.

x-post:

I love non-anglophone songs, because then I cannot understand the lyrics.

I suspect that's the case with me too (though I'd still love to know Spanish and Arabic, and every other language).

Then I would have to listen to the Cocteau Twins or something.

I voted 8, they don't have to be poetry, but if they sound bad, I'm turning it off.

if they sound bad, I'm turning it off

YES-- i'm much more about tone, pace, mood, rhythm, overall effect of delivery than the words being said

3 - you can say pretty much anything as long as there's something about the sound/vibe/production i really like but if there is nothing grabbing me about the latter i'll probably notice and be annoyed by the lyrics more (hence me not voting 0)

x-post

Lyrics ≠ vocals.

Voted 2 -- though it's generous to say that 20% of lyricists have anything worthwhile to say to me about their lives, my life, or life in general.

x-post

Lyrics ≠ vocals.

my point exactly-- lyrics not so important... vocals, very important

I only really notice lyrics when they're really good or really bad. For the most part, I'm pretty much indifferent to them.

when i love the music and the sound and the groove, i just sort of assume i'm gonna love the lyrics too, and 95 percent of the time i eventually discover i'm right. i have no idea what number that translates to.

10, though I love plenty of instrumental artists.

a lot of the time, good or resonant lyrics push a song from "like" to "love" for me

I think I'm going to go for 5, as it completely depends on the act - sometimes they can be the best thing in the world and tower over everything else, sometimes all that matters is that there's a human voice, sometimes it doesn't matter if there's anything at all, sometimes they can ruin an otherwise wonderful song. It's sort of like asking how important synths are to my musical enjoyment - they're a part of the music, sometimes they are crazy important, sometimes they are not.

i said 4. usually lyrics don't mean much to me because the lyrics of most songs -- even good ones! -- don't say much.

it's kind of an extra risk for a performer (if they care about my approval at all ha) that if they try to make the words themselves important then they had better make them good too.

Almost always the music.Jackpot if good lyrics/ music obv.

I'm a bit dense but some lyrics just baffle me.Some of the 'greats' are just a nonsensical bunch of words.

It's a three

Read a fucking book if it's so important

The 'feel' of the vocals is more important to me. Like another instrument fwiw

voted 4 but this is pretty accurate for me: "lyrics definitely enrich my experience with a song if they're really good and detract from it if they're really bad, but if they're neither i tend to put sound first."

I wonder if underrated aerosmith is reading this thread and gritting his teeth.

i think aerosmith's lyrics are sufficiently & consistently so awesome that he's the exception to the rule for me-- lyrics so awesome that they quite often enhance my fondness for the whole (though again, it's also about delivery & voice... if dude sounded like the fucking guy from the national i'd tune out quicker than you can say "overrated best new music i smdh at")

lol i said "so awesome" twice ;_;

lyrics definitely enrich my experience with a song if they're really good and detract from it if they're really bad, but if they're neither i tend to put sound first.

this is pretty close to my view. and i don't even think that my idea of "really good" lyrics is the same as most other people. like, is a song like "born to run" supposed to be an example of "really good" lyrics? because i'm not into that at all, and the same with pretty much any song that tells a story with characters. whereas, i think kurt vile's lyrics are good because occasionally a phrase will rise from the murk - I can't go on like this/With a clenching fist/But nicotine is even in my dreams - and i can marinate on that for a while without having to worry about how it fits into the larger story of frankie working long shifts at the bar and driving down the highway on a cold night with no moon thinking about his past with some hooker and baby he was born to run or whatever.

anyway, in other words i'm not into songs with a plot, and i'm grandpa simpson yelling at a cloud because i realize that only constitutes maybe 1% of what people consider to be "good lyrics". voted 5.

when i love the music and the sound and the groove, i just sort of assume i'm gonna love the lyrics too, and 95 percent of the time i eventually discover i'm right. i have no idea what number that translates to.

^^^ this

Alfred you seem like one of the more lyrics-centered people on here, i'd put your number pretty high if you're trying to figure out how to vote

really? my impression is that alfred isn't as concerned about the lyrics.

#@whatdoiknownothingthat'swhat

emil.y OTM

My favorite lyricist is Bernard Sumner.

there you are.

9

even in "stupid" pop music, it's very important. I wouldn't like blues, country, soul, disco, rap, Madonna, Lady Gaga, "Teenage Dream" half as much if they didn't have the right lyrical touch.

As I've gotten older my writing concentrates on the voice: tonality, timbre, affect.

3

ugh lyrics

I'm the world's WORST lyric decipherer. I just cannot make them out due to years of rock 'n' roll and club DJing destroying my ears. So by necessity I'm going with 2 here.

And right, beyond a Tom T. Hall or whoever, music first. A Puerto Rican friend played me a terrible song by a band called Azúcar Moreno. Total Eurovision boilerplate crap. She claimed I hated the song because I don't know Spanish.

Her: "But it's a positive song about lesbians and the right to love!"

Me: "The lyrics would have to be about something like reconciling Foucault's political life with his supposedly apolitical writing in order to even begin justifying music this crappy!"

zing

"positive song about lesbians and the right to love"

"reconciling Foucault's political life with his supposedly apolitical writing"

same thing?

I voted 2; if the question had been "vocals" I might have voted a 5 or a 6. Most of the time, with most of the music I listen to, I don't notice the lyrics. I'm more likely to notice lyrics that annoy me than that impress me, generally, and lyrics that I do like are generally abstracted, impressionistic. I think is is a big part of the reason why I've got barely any interest in hip hop these days.

xpost No, that would be the right of death and power over life.

i voted five, not because i think lyrics are only moderately important, but because that's the midpoint and thus the only reasonable answer. i mean, some music depends hugely on its lyrics, other music not at all. and though i don't generally think of myself as a "lyrics guy," i'd absolutely hate a lot of my favorite music if the lyrics were miserable or offensive. like if nick drake were singing the praises of white power, i wouldn't go around saying, "but the music underneath it is so beautiful."

yeah this is def about lyrics as lyrics and not as vocals.

interesting post from the lex - I keep remembering this one factoid my college english professor told me about nabokov, how he hated people who tried to 'identify' and 'connect' with novels - nabokov was of the view that we should try to admire pieces of art from how well they're put together, not by how much we connect with them.

Voted 8. Lyrics are important to me, ideally they have to communicate something. But OTOH if a song has a good tune I can put up with a lot of lyrical nonsense - 'Telegram Sam' being an example.

my favorite bands are (usually) my bloody valentine and boards of canada. so mostly nonessential. i'd much rather have a 2minute session consisting of an excellent hook than a boring song with lyrics that reveal the meaning of life, i guess?

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

the problem with "scale of 1 to 10" polls is that I can't even begin to interpret these results in any meaningful way, even if I had a calculator and broke down the average or something.

like if the poll had 4 or 5 options that were sentences like "lyrics are very important" or "i don't care about lyrics at all" then maybe we'd have at least something

do u want me to draw you a diaphragm

http://i.imgur.com/3hLiJ.png

  0 ########### (11%)
  1 #### (4%)
  2 ############### (15%)
  3 ############# (13%)
  4 ######## (8%)
  5 ######## (8%)
  6 ##### (5%)
  7 ###### (6%)
  8 ############### (15%)
  9 ###### (6%)
 10 ### (3%)

dayo beat me to the nerd out

mean was 4.5
median was 4

OK. any thoughts or theories on what those numbers mean?

the mean is 4.5, as stated above

some ppl care abt lyrics
some ppl don't

xp

5 ppl care about lyrics so much that they want to marry them

Damn, wish I'd seen this poll - I totally would've voted 2 and broken that 1st-place tie.

this is actually a pretty interesting result I think

wdve voted 6 or 7 because of what good lyrics can do

wd be more interesting with some cross-correlation on what people's most listened-to musics are

amongst other things. for example I think I voted quite low cos I listen to more non-vocal music than not, but good lyrics are great within the right context, but then again what I call good lyrics are broader than what a bunch of people wd call good lyrics?

"clever" lyrics are so often reprehensible

kind of depends on what they're being clever about

aerosmith otm, these results are really interesting!

points to two really distinctly different kinds of listeners, but i'd love to see this poll done with a much bigger sample

I voted 8 iirc even though prob 50% of what i listen to is non-vocal. good lyrics can really make or break a band for me.

e.g. the last eluvium album, the first one to include vocals, i thought they were so - just not worth my time, really - that regardless of how good the music was i didn't listen to it more than once.

... on the other hand, it could be some kind of number-theory thing where the answer a given question really clusters into a binary? so instead of a real range btw 1 - 10 you basically have "sorta important" and "pretty important"? idk. like it could have been "how important is dessert to your dinner" and the outcome would have been the same

kind of depends on what they're being clever about

I wasn't thinking of subject matter so much as strained poetry. I love some pretentiousness as much as the next person but there's nothing more painful than failed portentousness imo

that is what I meant, too

Here's a new thread I made to satisfy my itch: how would you rate good vocals in comparison to good lyrics?

probably a million of these threads but i'll always pick a dayo if i see one.

i'm not sure if i'm a "lyrics" listener at this point but i certainly pay way more attention to them than i used to. the primary way i hear vocals, still, is the for the basic pitch/melody, and timbre, and not for the lyrical content. but as i get older i do find myself caring a lot more about lyrics. they're gaining in prominence, and that's probably a good thing.

anyway, a weird marker/milestone of this development happened today while listening to Built to Spill's There's Nothing Wrong With Love, an album i have heard hundreds of times, but not in the last 5 years or so. Fling is not one of my favorites, i always kind of forget it, but never have i noticed that it goes

Since my fling with you, time went from
Popping off three times a day to popping off three times a week
And it takes me a long time
To come to the memory of us

somehow that sailed right past me a thousand times and hit me like a sack of bricks to the face this time around, lol

For people who lyrics are pretty important to, how does that compare to your interest in knowing or deciphering the lyrics? Most people I ask who place any kind of importance on lyricism as a craft seem pretty blasé about knowing what the lyrics actually are, save having to sing a song in a karaoke situation.

The lyrics to "Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow" are perfect for "Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow"; if "Like a Rolling Stone" had "Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow"'s lyrics, that's a bad trade. The lyrics to both songs are very important to what makes them great.

If I think a writer is good enough, then I care a whole lot. I've been buying Japanese albums for their lyric sheets.

For me it would be:

Hip-hop: 8
Singer-songwriter, folk: 5
All other music with singing: 1

Very rare for me to (positively) take notice of lyrics. As a young listener I searched for meaning in REM, Elvis Costello, Joni Mitchell. Most rock and pop music lyrics are inane and at best add texture to melody.

My favorite lyricist is Bernard Sumner.

― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, January 28, 2011 12:37 PM

I think I'd rank it the same as Soundslike

For people who lyrics are pretty important to, how does that compare to your interest in knowing or deciphering the lyrics?

As a lyrics person, I'll listen as closely as I can, but if a lyric can't be deciphered then that becomes part of the lyrical content of the song for me, more than the actual words would if I looked them up. And I tend to think that if the lyric is indecipherable it's supposed to stay that way. Like, I love classic-era Rolling Stones in part because I think their lyrics were really strong there for a while, but there is absolutely no profit in looking up the lyrics of "Tumbling Dice" that Jagger is deliberately slurring.

my answer to this question is, "it depends," or in other words, "you got to roll me"

you got to roll me --> good lyric, worth hearing
women think I'm tasty but they're always tryna waste me --> not superior to what it actually sounds like, which is "eeemathinkapesent, ammatrynawesant"

i like your exile hypothesis, i'm going to keep on making weird strained animal sounds to the half of it i can't make out.

My favorite lyric and pronunciation on this album is on "Casino Boogie": "open for bidness"

xp maybe for just that song the test is, are there back up singers? then the lyrics are understandable and worth knowing.

judge and jury walk out handnhaaand

"slit throat, star flyer" (what i hear) is objectively better than "slip rope, stunt flyer" (the lyrics according to google)

Punk songs, I always wanna know the words. Unless it's Agnostic Front. Some of my favorite lyrics are punk lyrics.

Pop songs too, though I care less if they're dumb. I will, however, not listen to any song that has a cringeworthy metaphor comparing love to a drug.

Hip-hop I almost always seek out the right lyrics because I'm quite often not perfect at understanding some of the lingo. Totally got clowned here once for thinking "baguettes in my rolls" meant Ma$e had bread in his Rolls Royce.

Metal, look. If it's melodic metal, I care about the lyrics if the band isn't a bunch of dumbfucks, but most thrash lyrics are

"We thrash a lot
Thrash to the left
Thrash to the right
Thrash all day
Thrash all night
Thrash on your mama
Thrash with a llama"

So like...I wanna know em so I can sing along but not to infer deeper meaning. Black and death metal, where I basically can only make them out if I read them, I often don't put in the effort, unless it's something creative like a Lord Worm lyric or is about ancient Sumerian demons or something. I don't know a single word of a Suffocation song for instance.

Oh and reading English lyrics from non-native English speaking bands like early Sarcofago and Sodom is entertaining.

I do think it's less fun now that literally you can just go on Genius at the click of a button. I miss pausing and rewinding tapes to learn the words

judge and jury walk out handnhaaand

― he/him hoo-hah (map),

second best line imo

keef on the major seventh

Totally got clowned here once for thinking "baguettes in my rolls" meant Ma$e had bread in his Rolls Royce.

Clearly this means that he has french bread in his bread rolls - he is rich enough to enjoy the luxurious lifestyle of double carbs.

For me i do think it’s related to what the artist is actually intending to do with the lyrics. like if the lyricist is not meaning to give too much of a fuck, I pay attn and grade the creation/performance that way. If the artist clearly is trying to convey real shit and the song is built around it, I mirror with my attn and appreciation is much stricter.

this feels like a very unsatisfactory answer, as if I’m only a responder. i’d say i’m a 6 as my core attention rating, i like very effective or well-constructed lyrics a lot.

i generally appreciate instrumental music more the older i get. and taking up guitar has slightly increased that a little.

slightly a little, not slightly like, a lot.

hard for me to write about this without getting tautological

I wonder if Weird Al has any non-English speaking fans (he probably has lots!) but I wonder what they get out of it.

Doesn’t much of the western/first world speak English as a second language? They may miss some puns but I’m sure if you’re Swedish you’re still getting the parodies.

I'm still stuck on parsing Danish/Norwegian gummy bear theme distinctions to be able to properly appreciate a Swedish Weird Al
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRKQ9LamEVY

“Zero point zero”