I love reading about music, but I find some music writing frustrating. Too many writers overstate the importance of lyrics, but pay lip service—if that—to the music. Lyrics are important, but they only tell part of the story.
Bad lyrics can ruin a song (although really bad lyrics can make a song—who doesn’t love Kiss’ “Calling Dr. Love?”), and great lyrics are in a league of their own. But usually, lyrics are just something for the singer to say. The listener doesn’t focus on the words—anthemic choruses and catchy phrases being obvious exceptions—the listener absorbs them as part of the overall experience. That experience includes things like the natural tensions and release so integral to music; the grooves and melodies; the mix and production; and how well the music is played. You probably have a favorite song that you sing along to, even though you don’t know most of the words.
Who doesn’t?
That’s how most people listen to music, the words are important in that they contribute to the experience, but they’re not more than that. You can argue about the visceral power of punk poetry, authenticity, storytelling, imagery, and politicking—and many people do—but once words cross that line from poetry to lyrics, you have to consider the whole package. Lyrics aren’t poetry—lyrics are the words to the song—and the whole song is important.
But music writers don’t write like that. Their reviews, essays, and interviews are often hyper-focused on lyrics. They praise mediocre talents and lousy musicians who happen to write quality poetry, but ignore true craftsmen and sometimes entire genres. They usually miss the point, misunderstand the creative process, ascribe significance to things that aren’t important, and ask silly questions in interviews.
My hunch—and it’s just a hunch—is that many music writers don’t know much about music. They listen to a lot of it. They go to a lot of shows. They know a lot of musicians and spend a lot of time thinking, talking, and writing about it. But how much do they really know? If you haven’t killed yourself trying to learn an instrument, or spent hours going deaf in rehearsals, or had your brilliant ideas rejected by your bandmates, or played the 1:00 AM slot on a Monday night to an empty house, or agonized over a mix, or done the myriad other things that go into the learning, mastery, and creation of music—do you really know what you’re talking about?
Probably not.
And that’s why they focus on lyrics. Lyrics are familiar ground—they’re in a writer’s wheelhouse—and the writer sounds intelligent analyzing lyrics, probing for deeper meanings, and theorizing about countercultural statements. But that rarely has anything to do with the statement the artist is making. Chino Moreno, the lead singer and principle lyricist for Deftones recently told me in an interview for Premier Guitar, “Being a singer and the lyricist of a band, the difficult part is trying to communicate what it is I am trying to say. But a lot of times I don’t know what I am trying to say. I really honestly don’t.” That’s why he also plays guitar. “The guitar has always been a way to express emotion without really understanding what you are doing, or trying to do, or trying to say.”
Keith Richards said this about songwriting in his book, Life. “That’s one of the great things about songwriting; it’s not an intellectual experience. One might have to apply the brain here and there, but basically it’s capturing moments.”*
And that makes intuitive sense. Listening isn’t intellectual, it’s emotional—or spiritual, or something transcendent—it’s encountering that captured moment. Overanalyzing lyrics misses the point. Music isn’t designed to be intellectualized. It’s designed to be experienced. The writer’s job is to talk about that experience. You have to focus on the details, too—and sometimes that includes the words—but those details are ultimately secondary to the experience.
Richards also said this about writing lyrics: “We also composed using what we called vowel movement—very important for songwriters. The sounds that work. Many times you don’t know what the word is, but you know the word has got to contain this vowel, this sound. You can write something that’ll look really good on paper, but it doesn’t contain the right sound. You start to build the consonants around the vowels. There’s a place to goo ooh and there’s a place to go daah. And if you get it wrong, it sounds like crap.”* It sounds like crap because the words’ musical function is paramount—their meaning is of lesser importance.
Don’t get me wrong, lyrics aren’t unimportant, they’re just not that important. Even Bob Dylan—who was a great lyricist—wasn’t always so careful with the words he chose. As Mark Richardson noted in his review of Dylan’s The Cutting Edge 1965-1966: The Bootleg Series Volume 12. “One of the things [Dylan] inherited from the Beats was a belief in spontaneous writing and trying to take lyrics more as dictation. Which is not to say he didn’t revise—he did, and often. But it’s always been a mistake to put too much emphasis on the details of these words and what they might ‘mean.’ Sometimes they were selected because a turn of phrase was funny, or because Dylan couldn’t think of a better rhyme, or sometimes simply because that’s what came out. Later on in his writing, he’d have discipline, but this is what he sounded like when he was free.”
But too many writers don’t understand that—instead, they just talk about lyrics (sometimes I wonder if they even bother listening to the music, maybe they just read the lyric sheet?). That’s lazy writing and makes everyone dumber. It emphasizes something that shouldn’t necessarily be emphasized, but worse, it pushes the conversation into dangerous waters. Musicians are experts in music, let them talk about that—they probably have something intelligent to say. Musicians are not experts in social movements, politics, and religion—at least, not usually—and I am not interested in their ill-informed, misguided ramblings. Interviews and reviews shouldn’t be places to reinforce dangerous misconceptions. They should be places to teach about music—to learn about the craft, the artistry, its impact and importance; and to discover new worlds, artists, genres, and experiences.
Teach me something—I’m interested, I want to know more—heck, that’s why I am reading.
*Keith Richards, Life, page 277
*Keith Richards, Life, page 267
Keith Richards, in his memoir, Life, said the following about the fortieth anniversary edition of the Stones’ 1971 release, Exile on Main St.: