One day, when I was in college, a friend offhandedly complained about a lyric in David Bowie’s “Fashion.” I was stunned – he was actually parsing the lyrics as if they were sentences. It had never occurred to me to do that. I was well into my 20s before I tried to piece together Dylan’s lyrics in a sequential way; I always just liked the way his words sounded, perched atop the shambling stacks of guitars, keyboards and drums. I still hear lyrics vertically.
Possibly because I’m so easily intoxicated by the potent cocktail of rhythm, harmony, melody and timbre, I don’t tend to hear lyrics in a sequential, narrative way; when I hear music the other part of my brain just shuts down like a kitten seized by the scruff of the neck. I hear words or phrases continuously coinciding and colliding with whatever musical-sonic event is happening at the moment, and the more evocative those collisions, the better the lyrics. (Michael Stipe, Stephen Malkmus and Kurt Cobain have all done it very well.)
So I don’t care about witty, revealing lines or good stories — I simply don’t hear them. It’s one reason I’ve never been able to get into Leonard Cohen and so much of what I call “grown-up music” — music that downplays rhythm and melody in favor of a lot of meaningful words. Maybe “grown-up music” tends not to be as densely musical as most other popular music in order to reduce the intoxicating effect I referred to above, but for me, anyway, it doesn’t work. I just hear volumes of words and nothing synergizing with them.
And I always thought I was kind of a freak on this score, perhaps a mild sort of aphasiac, until last night, when I watched 30 Century Man, the intriguing 2008 documentary about celebrated pop enigma Scott Walker. Buried deep in the DVD extras were out-takes from the filmmaker’s interview with Brian Eno. “Fortunately, I have the talent of filtering out lyrics — I just don’t hear them,” says the great man. ”For me, lyrics in most songs are a way of just getting the voice to do something. I like voices.” My sentiments exactly. Lyrics are just to get the singer psyched to sing.
In fact, listening to the lyrics as narrative is antithetical to the complete experience of music. It’s like reading the newspaper while a Coltrane record is playing. It takes you out of the music.
Funny thing is, I loved Scott Walker’s 2006 album The Drift, even though it is absolutely word-intensive and virtually devoid of the things that most excite me: hooks, riffs, beats. Walker’s voice is riveting all by itself and that helps. But his lyrics are as sensational, in the true sense of the word, as any great riff or cracking-good guitar solo. And, as Eno points out, their effect is just as ineffable.
”In Scott’s songs,” Eno goes on to say, “lyrics actually draw you further and further into the music. They’re so rich and full of ambiguity that they actually withstand listening to again and again — like music does. They don’t spell it out for you, so you haven’t solved the problem in the first two listens…. It’s not to do with telling someone something, it’s making something happen to someone. Which is what you do with music as well. Nobody ever says, ‘I wonder what the music means’ — you either feel it or you don’t. I think the same should be true of lyrics — you shouldn’t have to think that you somehow flip into a different part of your brain when you listen to lyrics.”
Does anybody else hear music this way?
8 Responses to Lyrics, Schmyrics: I’m with Eno
Uh, yeah. Me. While I appreciate a great lyric I don’t really “hear” words in music in the way I hear melodies, phrasing, intonation. Great lyrics (Richard Rodgers, Smokey Robinson, Warren Zevon, Amy Winehouse et al) are a bonus at best; bad lyrics a distraction at worst. Maybe it’s a left brain/right brain issue. (I’m with you on Cohen – and Dylan too.)
Interesting, Barney, because when I’ve mentioned this to friends, they say, “But you’re a *writer*! How can you not hear words?” And you’re in the same boat. It’s true, we make our living by making sure one word is accurately placed after the other, so why is it difficult to hear lyrics as narrative? I think you’re right — it has to do with the phenomenon described above, in which the left side of my brain gets short-circuited by music. Maybe some people are the other way. The ideal would be to hear both, simultaneously; I wonder if that’s possible. If so, color me green with envy.
My friend Art Fein has insisted on many occasions that lyrics don\’t matter at all. When I talk about Leonard Cohen or Randy Newman he goes blank. I walked out on a Todd Rundgren show last week because Todd & Co. were blasting everything so loud the lyrics couldn\’t be heard. . .so I\’m in the other camp I guess.
I walked out on a Todd Rundgren show a few years back but only because it was pants. And I speak as a confirmed Todd-is-Goddist (see “Letter to Todd Rundgren, January 1977″ post).
Re: Michael’s comment above, I’ve come to the conclusion that music ultimately offers RELIEF from left-brain linguistic/semantic cognition… or as someone once put it, “music exists so that we can feel…”
OK, then I’m just going to have to brag here that I saw the Ra tour at Radio City Music Hall. In order to mitigate any feelings of burning jealousy, I will disclose that before the show, my friend and I bought some pot that turned out to be fake.
I’m a confirmed Todd-is-God-ist myself, saw him first in 1971 at The Troubadour. (One of my prized possessions is a photo my cousin took, Todd playing the Clapton “Fool” guitar in Boston.) And I saw the RA tour at Greek Theatre in L.A. I’ve never walked out before on the guy, but this was gawdawful (and most of the set was his most recent album “Arena” which I didn’t like). How’s that for a sidetrack?
All digressions appreciated, Mark! But I did come across something actually relevant to the original topic, so I thought I’d put it here. It’s from a review by the Wall Street Journal’s Jim Fusilli of Robert Hilburn’s book _ Corn Flakes with John Lennon: And Other Tales from a Rock ‘n’ Roll Life_.
“…in “Corn Flakes” Mr. Hilburn tells us, inadvertently, why it’s so difficult for music fans who grew up with his kind of journalism to connect with today’s rich rock scene. There is very little analysis or discussion of music in the book. Mr. Hilburn thinks of songs as words and messages first, and rarely does he attribute the power of a song to the arrangement, the harmonic structure, a deft modulation, a thrilling crescendo, a quiet interlude. I can’t recall a passage in “Corn Flakes” in which he describes a moving instrumental solo or details the interplay among musicians. The great instrumentalists of the era are hardly mentioned unless they happen to be gifted songwriters too. The one reference to Eric Clapton’s abilities is by Ahmet Ertegun. Jimi Hendrix is mentioned five times; his guitar playing, not at all.”
Clearly, Hilburn is in the lyrics camp. I just can’t get with that.
Greil Marcus said it in his Bomp piece a few decades ago: great music and rubbish lyrics makes great rock and roll. Great lyrics and rubbish music makes bad rock and roll.