LYRICS, SCHMYRICS! I'M WITH BRIAN ENO

    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 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; that 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, just out on DVD.
    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?

Comments

[Eric Grubbs]

Thom Yorke could sing his grocery list, and I'd probably not notice. No matter who the vocalist is, the vocal tone is what I've always been affected by. Not to slight the lyrics or lyricist, but that's just me.

[Kristy]

I'm exactly the opposite -- lyrics are supremely important to me, and I have to be forcibly directed to pay attention to the rhythm line, so I guess I'm just treble/melody-oriented. But lyrics on their own don't interest me -- it's the way they crash together with melody. Like, I think Dylan's lyrics are incredible, but do they resonate as pure poetry on the page? I don't think so, because they were created for a melody and move in response to it.

I think this is just a roundabout way of restating your point, Michael. The two are inseparable, but I'm tuning in to the other end from you.

[Lise]

I guess this is why opera works for so many people. The meaning of the words seem to just take the voice from one place to another. But then someone like Leonard Cohen. Is it the voice or is it the poetry? Hard for me to decide with Leonard, if I would be able to say that his lyrics are less important than his voice.

[santiago]

(I'm late, sorry for that)

Here's what Sterling Morrison says about it :)
"If you’re going to rock music to learn something verbally rather than physically or viscerally, then you’re in a sad shape, baby"