Kitchen Sink Web Exclusive:
Do Words Matter in Music?

In preparation for the KS5 Louder Than Words feature, "The Loaded Question" (p. 12), I sent the following email to several musicians and music writers. Gathered below are the responses I received, roughly in the order in which I received them, along with my responses. I present them as they were sent to me, with the occasional copyedit, to preserve what passes for voice in email correspondence. Thanks again to everyone who took the time to consider my question. I invite readers to send me their responses, and we'll post them to the site or publish them in the Letters to the Editor section of KS6.

"i'm working on a story for kitchen sink, issue 5, about the relationship between lyrics and music. please take a moment to answer the following question, and explain why you feel the way you do. i am going to gather responses, some of which will appear (attributed) in the story, and some of which will appear on kitchen sink's web site. thanks for your time.

do words matter in music?"

yes they do. I just wrote a series of 2 columns in punk planet about words in songs mattering. It's uncool to care about lyrics. But, yeah it's about sexism in music, in lyrics and secondarily in exclusion of women from things. I can email it you if you want.

Absolutely. Good lyrics can lift a mediocre song up and away from its drab melody, predictable instrumentation, and misguided production values. Likewise, maudlin or cliched words can deflate an otherwise amazing tune. Nothing annoys me more than when songwriters say that they "just sing whatever, once the song's all written." Somebody buy that boy a book of Baudelaire or Ashbery or Plath, and a thesaurus, for cry-eye!

thanks, stefanie. interestingly enough, a few months ago i asked berman about his words, and he said he writes the music first, then just adds the words. he was a little dismissive of them, actually, but i suspect false modesty might have been involved. on the other hand, he's a fine poet, and i think i suggested that his songs sound like poems set to music, so perhaps he was trying to differentiate poetry from lyrics.

it is finally as though that thing of monstrous interest
were happening in the sky
but the sun is setting and prevents you from seeing it

john ashbery is my favorite poet (and plath continues to amaze me). i'm not sure it worked out for malkmus when he really dove into ja's stuff, but i agree that songwriters could learn from ja. he has an imaginative ear, and his ability to communicate complex ideas with simple language is as good as i've encountered.

Berman was being modest, I strongly suspect. He may have also been being a little punk, since his tossed-off lyrics are a universe better than most.

You need the right words with the right melody. The right words make a strong melody stronger. Melody gives the words power, and the words give the melody meaning. The words don't have to be able to stand on their own without the melody, nor should they. The words and melody are in service to each other.

I have two answers to that question, of course they do & not always.

Having been lyricist first before teaching myself to play music I have a great appreciation for how words and music interact in songs. It all really depends on what the artist is trying to communicate; and to what extent they are doing it with their words.

Many genres feature vocals over music, like folk, hip-hop/rap, R&B and of course Vocal music, which could be anything from some of Sinatra's & Bennett's catalog (the less jazzy stuff) to Celine Dion. In these genres the music is basically just a backing to the vocals, so what you are left with is the quality of the singer's voice and the lyrics, so the words play a huge part in the enjoyment of overall song.

For singers of "classics" like Sinatra & Bennett the words were usually written by talented and seasoned song writers, so even if the sentiment is a little sappier than I usually enjoy, the stories told are usually easy to identify with and of a high enough quality that they enhance one's enjoyment of the overall song.

With folk the lyrics play an immense part in the overall appreciation of a song. In my estimation the words of a folk song are more central [to] what the folk artist is trying to convey than any other genre. I don't like "folk music," at least not the American folk music that was made popular in the late 1950s and '60s, but I do appreciate great songwriting, and if a folk song is talking about union organizing, the plight of the poor, sticking it to the man or other topics that I'm interested in it will hold my attention on the basis of the words alone. If they are expressing how beautiful a woman's hair is in the shimming sunshine or talking about farm animals and such, I'm tuning out.

Next to folk, words are most important to the hip-hop genre, to the point that most people recognize the genre by the moniker of "rap," the vocal wing of the hip-hop movement. Many do not know that the terms hip hop and rap are not synonymous. I have to stop myself from getting to deep into explaining the breakdown of the different wings of the overall hip-hop movement, but suffice to say that currently rap is to hip hop as Russia was to the Soviet Union. I can enjoy a hip-hop song with poor vocals, but it is a rare occurrence. With most rap songs (as with most vocal genres) the vocals are very prominent in the mix, so it's easier to understand the words a rap artist is using than, say, a death metal or thrash punk that uses many layered effects on their vocals or delivers them in an extremely rapid manner.

A buddy of mine is musician who is also a rapper, and he has weighed in on this argument with me in the past with his disgust over how many hip-hop albums don't pay enough attention to the production quality of their backing music, to the point that many MCs boast of being able to "rock/fuck up/bust rhymes over any beat," meaning that their vocal prowess is what is central their success and the music is secondary. Many producers would disagree, but their boast does represent the views of a number of rappers.

With the vocals being so prominent, I have been turned off by a number of hip-hop lyrics that if they were buried in the mix as with many underground rock genres, the music itself may have caused me to still enjoy the song. There are too many obvious sexist and homophobic rap lyrics for me to list any particular tracks except for one by A Tribe Called Quest, one of my favorite, and one of the best hip-hop groups of all time; the song in question talks about "a classic example of a date rape" that basically blames the victim but does stop short from saying it is something cool to do. The words to that song kept me from listing to The Low End Theory, their best album, for like a year.

Another song about rape by the French Industrial Metal band Treponem Pal is in some ways more shocking in it's a-moralistic recounting of a rape, but with the distorted quality of the vocals and violence of the music they seem to expressing the details of a disturbing scene without any social commentary, more like seeing pictures of dead soldiers on a battlefield, than sympathy for the victim or a condoning of the crime of rape. If this track had minimalist musical backing, or if it just wasn't good, I'm sure I would have found it less tolerable, much like the whole Mentors catalog.

Lastly, [there's] urban contemporary, which is basically pop R&B and vocal fluff like Celine Dion, [which] depend mostly on the talent of vocalist, but the words are what make the songs resonate with the millions of fans who buy these records, or should I say CDs. Now I appreciate the vocal prowess of many of these artists, but the words coming out of their mouths are usually so trite that I can't bear/bare(sic) to listen to them. As with other vocal genres, the music is secondary to the vocals so it is either too low in the mix or too boring to make up for the sappy love lost, "Baby I'm sorry I slept with your sister," "Don't worry i'll take you back" lyrics. So again, words are incredibility important to these genres.

NOT REALLY

If you have phat beats, a catchy hook and the vocals are buried during the verse you can still have a great pop or dance song with [the] most insipid of lyrics; with speedier rock and rap vocal styles the fact that you can spit lyrics "that" fast is often more the point than the actual words you are saying; often simplistic lyrics can do the trick--if the music carries the mood of the song, the lyrics can just be an accent. With many styles of music, it's more important how the vocals sound than what the artist is saying; so long as the words aren't offensive, they don't take away from the enjoyment of the song.

It should be obvious that a song is at its best when the words, music and production all come together to convey what the artist is trying to communicate, be it the deepest emotional sentiment, the wittiest irony, or that they are really horny.

Overall, if there are words in a song, I think they matter more than not.

Sometimes yeah, but not as much as many think they do.

Certain people I think I listen to more for the words than the music, but I know I don't care if the lyrics are silly if the melody or voice or guitar or drums or whatever moves me. At the same time, words may work in several ways, and subliminally get under your skin.

(Hey, Jeff, I'm gonna stop here. I realize I could write a whole book on this. Ever read Garrett Caples' piece on T. Rex? (very funny take on the same subject... he talks about "telegram sam"---why it isn't "telePHONE sam" etc.... I hope you can get some RAPPER to answer the question....

this question is so loaded, I don't think I can do it justice in a pithy sound-bite....

words are the only thing that matters in music, pretty much. Except for maybe the saxophones, those kinda matter a lot too.

this could easily be reversed... does music matter without words? although i enjoy playing classical music, i don't particularly like listening to it, because responding to the primal instinct to sing along is pretty much impossible. the more gifted lyricists not only encourage you to sing along via their craft, but to listen to the song (or album) multiple times before you manage to pick up on the more subtle and complex turns of phrase. however, lyrics rarely work on their own without the music that shaped them. when do you read a lyric sheet? while you're listening to the album. and you read the lyric sheet so that the listening experience becomes more profound. and there's an absolute value to "simplistic" forms of lyrics as well: that same primal instinct of call and response is served when you're in the bathroom, shouting "gimme gimme shock treatment," or mowing the lawn and chanting, "i'm the king of rock, there is none higher." both of which, in the end, have the same integral value and serve the same impulse to express emotion as "will you take me as i am, strung out on another man?" albeit in more streamlined forms. oh, and i can't sing worth a damn, so i stopped going to shows when my tuneless caterwaul began to cause a five foot ring of space to open up around me.

wish i heard you sing, and saw the ring, kaya. thanks for your thoughtful and eloquent response. you covered most of what's on my mind. just reading the joni m line gave me chills, even with laura logic blasting tunelessly on her sax in my room. does that make it a song line that works on the page, or am i affected by the song and her delivery?

ah, to read the lyric sheet, or to treat it as a word collage. i'm getting to the point where i won't read it unless i'm pretty sure the lyrics are good and it might enrichen the listening experience. i've learned that when i can't make out the words, but the music moves me, i should probably not read the lyrics, and the impulse on the band's part to include lyrics is often in that case misguided (if you feel compelled to obscure the words in the song, go with that). i used to feel like i didn't want to know for sure what the words are, but eventually i discovered that lyric sheets are not definitive (in several senses). pavement's a great example of that, obviously, and i love how they defaced the lyric sheet for slanted&enchanted.

Hi Jeff. Okay, coming from a band with a theme, I would say that lyrics are absolutely important. Not so much for classical music, though, I guess. In Rock, they are everything. The singer and lyrics make or break a band. Plus, if they weren't the band would fire me so fast...

words are everything!! let's take a little band known as the smiths. there's no doubting that johnny marr's guitar work could be called nothing less than genius, but the smiths more than anything were legendary because of morrissey's lyrics. every smiths song was like a little chapter of a bible for me and countless other shy, sensitive, suicidal types. oh morrissey "i can't help quoting you 'cos everything that you say rings true"

you are so excellent, mona. i'm constantly throwing smiths references into ks (look out for a big one on the cover of ks4, which ought to arrive any day now). i even tried to convince editorial to print the morrissey line, 'the more you ignore me, the closer i get' on the spine of ks1 (though it may have been more appropriate for ks3, the stalker issue). thanks for the response.

that was you who did the johnny marr extended rock block and interview on kalx, right?

i'm not sure what happiness means,

to jewish people it does. leonard cohen, bob dylan, lou reed, shel silverstein, beck, but remember, christ "made the word flesh." Thus, AC/DC.

i've come around to dylan. for years i thought his lyrics were not as great as everyone says. i'm still not convinced that they are great poetry, or that they would be anywhere near as strong on the page, without at least the memory of dylan singing them. he is, i've come to understand, an outlandishly good lyricist with a gift for filling his songs with words, to the point where his lines practically explode.

i was able to recognize the poetry in cohen's lyrics right away, when i first heard his songs in college. reed is trickier, because he throws out lines that most vocalists could never get away with (though i suppose that's the case with any writer who really has his or her own thing)--the edge of his humor is often difficult to locate, but you feel it anyway ��/p> --Jeff

I think words matter in music. For me they veer between central (telling the story of a song) and atmospheric (secondary to melody, and meant to create more of a composite impression than convey a point or narrative).

Mostly, though, I think lyrics are married to the music. Different lines of melody, or rhythms, or harmonic modes, beget natural rhyme patterns, as well as alliterative tendencies, and puns, and zeugmas and chiasmas, and so forth. These form the syntax of a song, without influencing the themes themselves: there are a hundred ways to say one thing, and melodies just influence how I'm going to say that thing.

Sometimes a certain line of song needs to be punched out with a particular syllabic emphasis, and then you need all the words to start with (shall we say) K... so, if you're bound to a story, you tell it with K's, and, if you're not, you let K tell itself for eight beats. Other times it is a different rhythm, maybe you need something sibilant or bombinate, and then you speak in S's and Z's, while still keeping to the same general narrative or theme.

And finally, sometimes a particular tune must needs be about a marmoset, or a red barn, and there is nothing you or I can do about it. So I don't mean to imply that it's all cerebral or methodical: for me it's intuitive and there's an idea or feeling, which gets played out lyrically in a composite, mosaical way, and syntax is a part of that.

In a lot of music I like, words are slurred or muttered beyond comprehension, but in those cases they still seem to serve as percussive or textural devices... Like vocables (meaningless, fixed syllabic fragments, such as "la-la-la"), used in European folk music and Native American songs as well as pop and rock and blues, all that. They're chosen for a reason, even if they haven't any denotative meaning (though sometimes they connote certain things--there's a difference in mood, after all, between a howl and a shhhh and whistle), and they serve the songs in their own specific way.

Hmmm...
I'm not very good at explaining myself, but hope there's something in there you can use.

Best,

hey jeff,
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do words matter in music? well sometimes it's all that matters. some writers are so good that the music plays a supporting role, think of dylan's acoustic minimalism in "it's alright ma, I'm only bleeding," or mountain goats blurred and distressed boom box recordings...
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thanks for thinking of me jeff. please email me back if you want more.

take care,

It depends on the artist who is using them. Sometimes, as is often the case with instrumental music or ambient forms of music, words are used as decoders, a way to peek into what the artist thinks his work should represent. Other times, they're used as illustration, another color that blends into the overall sound painting. Of course, rap is usually considered to be completely dependent on words, but in mainstream hip hop words are often used as a spice to make the beat tangible, something that can be digested by appearing to be similar to a song, when in fact the song's strength rests entirely in the beat and how a vocalist reacts to it.

In modern music, words are another sound--besides underground forms of music like indie rock, indie hip hop, folk, etc., words aren't allowed to become more profound than a hook, a catchy chorus, a snappy rejoinder to the beat blaring under it.

Yes. I write songs. Not all songs need to have lyrics. But if you write lyrics, then you are writing poetry. I often need to go to sources like William Blake and Leonard Cohen for inspiration. I need to READ lines in order to WRITE lines. It would be incredibly limiting to only read lyrics from the inside of Led Zep albums. All songwriters are poets. It upsets me when I hear rock music fans express their distaste for poetry. They probably had to suffer through some awful poetry class in community college or something. They should read Actual Air by David Berman.

thanks, bart. i love berman's actual air, and he's one of my favorite lyricists--one of the very few about whom i can unreservedly say, 'he's singing poems, and they make good songs' (cohen is another one in that class).

Jeff,

I haven't been feeling very articulate. Here's a synoptic, listy version of a couple of thoughts.

Songs don't need good words to be good. Every good song with nonsense syllables proves this. However, the rudiments of modern popular melody are founded on the assumption that each will appear as sung with words--that is, words are a *form* which carries melody, and a pretty well-designed one.

So in that way words matter a lot.

That's an important thing to look at. Mostly when people debate words in relation to music, they mean some version of content and form, with the semantic field of language carrying the content. Of course, any good musicologist will argue that the music itself carries at least rhetoric if not content (often in the way it establishes expectation and then satisfies or denies it; see Dave Hickey's essay on The Carpenters for a classic example). But it's rarely noted that words are a form, in songs.

This is relevant even beyond the way words carry melodies. Without words, there would be no reason besides rhythm to weight specific syllables--and so there could be no counterpoint. I think a lot of the pleasure of popular songs resides in the way the rhythm of the music aligns, or doesn't align, with the rhythm of how the words and phrases would be enunciated if they were independent. The rhythm of speech is a ghost which haunts the phrasing of sung lyrics all the time; it is always almost-heard, and we are always hearing the gap between the sung and spoken in language.

Often when we say a singer is a great lyricist, or has "flow," we mean that she sings in sentences which would be shaped and spoken in about that way if she were speaking, or writing on a page. We believe that the ability to preserve speech patterns within the limitations of songform is a great skill.

By the way, that reminds me that I think your question is really culturally problematic. Ask it to a hundred hip-hop fans and see who *doesn't* look at you funny.

When you get to advanced education, you're supposed to get over the form/content divide, and see that they are so hopelessly intertwined that to use the terms is always to misdescribe. I don't believe that, exactly. I think that *every single element* of a song is form, and the content is my pleasure.

thanks, joshua.

not bad for a guy who's not feeling very articulate (*very* must be the operative word). i appreciate that you come around to the construction of the question. i am aware that i am baiting the questionees, though i tried to minimize that by presenting a simple question (which goes along with my intention to not lead the witness). i also recognize the shortcomings of this line of querry. among other problems, by asking such a blunt question, i invite an affirmative answer, even from people who don't feel that "good" lyrics are important to a "good" song. and yes, i understand that the form/content divide is somewhat imaginary. the most intriguing point running through your synopsis is the (re)consideration of content: does the song bring it, or does the listener bring it, or is it evident (and/or present) only in the song as listened to? this reminds me, appropriately enough, of your ideas about the difference between (esoteric) poetry and popular music. pop music gives everything immediately, is not built to last. poetry should at least try for immortality (i know you don't use that word, but i'm obviously extrapolating here), even if the poem comes with a tacit argument that everything must end. so, a forgotten song has no content, or no matter (ie, ceases to matter, and ceases to be corporeal--songs are released and taken in elsewhere, until they pass away from popular awareness; which i suppose ends up being an argument for song as content, and not container).

ok, but there's the rub. who's to say if words matter? what songs are we talking about? there are good songs with nonsense lyrics, or bad lyrics, or no lyrics. there are bad songs with good lyrics. there is rap and hip hop, which are (usually) *made* of words: some are lyrically beautiful and "good" (and/or effective), some are petty and mean and tautological (and sometimes also "good"). is it more appropriate to ask, do words matter in *this* song? what is a song? does rap come in songs? and must a song have a chorus, a melody, a title?

i came up with a simple question because i think about words in music quite a bit, and i know that it's an issue of some sort for just about everyone i know who cares about music. i want to get people going without steering them. i love having this conversation with people (and it always springs from the first question about a song or album, even if it's a flawed question: is it good?), and i liked the idea (still do) of pinning people down and asking them to formulate their opinion based on a simple prompt, rather than a discussion (where there are so many places to hide or distract oneself).

anyway, thanks. i'll let you know how it turns out, and i'll look forward to our next discussion about the matter.

Words don't matter, music matters. Words are just something to keep the audience entertained.

Do song lyrics matter? I'm not sure what "matter" means, but I suppose it goes to whether words can add or subtract from the quality/pleasure/whatever of a song. If words matter, why is Nick Gilder's "Hot Child in the City" a great song? Why do I love Led Zeppelin's "Tangerine," with the more-or-less horrific line "yesterday I saw you kissing tiny flowers"? But if words don't matter, why do people have parties where they dress up as characters from Dylan songs? Why do I smile when I hear Flesh for Lulu's Nick Marsh (c. 1989) sing the line "who could be more stupider than you or me," and play that song more than others on the same record? The unsatisfying answer is "it depends."

I cannot sing along with most of my favorite songs, songs I have heard hundreds of times. I can't recite but a dozen words from Fugazi's Waiting Room EP, one of the most important records in my canon, and one in which the words are supposed to matter.

When I listen to a song, I'm listening to compositions and performances. I listen to melodies, rhythms, and counterpoints. I listen to timbre and tone. A terrific example of this is my experience of Led Zeppelin. I have owned, at one time or another, every album they released. As a musician, I have sat down and played along (to the best of my ability) with dozens of their songs. In particular, I can play almost every note of "The Ocean" on guitar and bass, and even do a passable job of replicating Bonham's peculiar, off-time drumming. As I sit here at my keyboard, however, I cannot recall a word of Robert Plant's lyrics. I can recall the "oohs." I remember the lightness in his voice in the line right before those "oohs," and the blues-flected wails in the outro. I love his voice, but have no idea what he is singing.

It's not that I have become willfully blind to his lyrics, finding them too painful to commit to memory. It's only that they are not what mattered about Led Zeppelin. They sit there, unremarkably--mock-mystical, part-hippie, post-Tolkien. They are vehicles for Plant's Michael Jordan-like vocal talents. Exhibit A for "it's the singer, not the song."

But the song can be paramount. Jonathan Richman's oeuvre is about words, not music. "I'm Straight" is a eerie/funny stalker manifesto, not a catchy ditty. Every line matters, and I want to know them all, rather than run a gloss while singing along.

Sometimes it's the singer and the song. When Neil Young sings about driving to Albuquerque, I know every inflection and every word. The entire package pitches in to convey the loneliness, the will to escape, and the lure of both the road and the banal exotica of the Southwest. The words tell you something, but his world-weary (and unusually confident) singing says even more.

But Jonathan Richman, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, and a few lesser lights (say, Joe Pernice) are the exception. The truth about rock music is that bland, unremarkable lyrics are the norm and are just fine. As long as they don't get in the way, a singer can utter almost anything. If there is a melody and a voice to enjoy, it is enough.