Lyrics: How important are they to you?

[treeduck]

Do seemingly meaningless lyrics put you off otherwise exciting music. Do lyrics have to mean something to do for vocal music to work?

[Kudzu]

It depends for me. I usually prefer good, meaningful, poetic lyrics, but I can still listen to Paul McCartney even when his lyrics are just a bunch of random nonsense and I can tolerate a few lyrical shortcomings here and there. But lyrics are important, IMO - if you're going to sing, you should be singing something instead of nothing.

[Moonraker]

Depends on the band for me. If the music catches me, then the lyrics usually dont matter much. A lot of the time lyrics just dont make any sense at all, but that can be the best thing for a lot of the music. Though lyrics are really really bad (take most emo bands coming out today, a lot of them just sound like spoiled little rich kids whining because their gf doesnt love them anymore), it can dissuade me from liking them.

[PuppetKing2112]

It really depends on the band...not everbody has to be Dylan/Morrissey/Peart-level lyricists for me to like them - There's a place for the AC/DC's of the world...When Radiohead was working on Kid A, Thom Yorke was having major writers block and so he came up with lyrics by throwing a bunch of his discarded lines into a top hat and picking them out at random. Kid A is one of my favorite albums of all time.

 

And sometimes it's not what the words are, but how they are delivered. A good example of this is U2. I am going to get flamed for this probably, but I think Bono has to be one of the worst lyricists in rock history, but his voice and delivery are so powerful it doesn't even matter. Could anybody but Bono pull off lines like "She wears my love like a see-through dress" and "Have you come here to play Jesus/to the lepers in your head" without embarrassing themselves completly?

[JohnnyBlaze]

Right on Puppet. Dylan and Peart are at the top as far as great lyrics go in my opinion.

 

But listening to Phish, I throw the idea of meaningful lyrics out the window (most of the time). Their words seem merely for fun and just fit in well with their style.

[Slime]

I'm totally into complex/just plain great sounding musicianship, but I do feel robbed if I'm singing along to a whole bunch of nothing.

 

Peart, Dylan, Waters and other great lyricists make music worth listening to.

[PuppetKing2112]

Sometimes it doesn't matter though. People like Neil Peart and Bob Dylan usually write top-drawer lyrics, so if they don't (Dog Years, Face Up, Nobody's Hero, Dylan's born-again Christian era stuff), then I am going to be disappointed and not like the song as much.

 

But if I'm listening to something like AC/DC or Van Halen, I just want to rock out and I'm not going to worry if there are any deep messages in the lyrics.

[JohnnyBlaze]

QUOTE (PuppetKing2112 @ Sep 12 2006, 10:13 AM)

Sometimes it doesn't matter though. People like Neil Peart and Bob Dylan usually write top-drawer lyrics, so if they don't (Dog Years, Face Up, Nobody's Hero, Dylan's born-again Christian era stuff), then I am going to be disappointed and not like the song as much.

I'll deal with the lyrical content of "Dog Years" if it means I'll get a gem like "The Pass". That's much better than a group that never has good lyrics.