Are Song-Lyrics Poetry ?

[crusoe]

LOVE STREET - The Doors

She lives on Love Street
Lingers long on Love Street
She has a house and garden
I would like to see what happens

She has robes and she has monkeys
Lazy diamond studded flunkies
She has wisdom and knows what to do
She has me and she has you

I see you live on Love Street
There's this store where the creatures meet
I wonder what they do in there
Summer Sunday and a year
I guess I like it fine, so far

[stlukesguild]

This topic has popped up repeatedly. A few years back we discussed the question in some depth here:

http://www.online-literature.com/for...ad.php?t=35162

I'll stick by what I said at that time:

Song lyrics are absolutely poetry.

How good or bad is another question altogether.

Poetry... in written form... relies solely upon the words to create the music and the meaning. This is quite different with the song. With a song (an aria, chanson, lieder, ballad, pop song, etc...) the music and the words combine to create the music and the meaning. If we take a song such as the Beatle's Norwegian Wood, the lyrics in and of themselves are not bad. There is something open-ended and surely more sophisticated than the usual teen age love song... but (if we are speaking of great poetry) we are talking Shelley/Keats/Blake/Yeats here. With the music, however, the song (Norwegian Wood) takes on a greater meaning as the music and the inflections of the singer's voice reinforce the words.

Perhaps the greatest example of this is to be found in the songs of Franz Schubert, long acknowledged as t greatest classical song writer. Schubert famously set a cycle of poems by Wilhelm Müller known as Die Winterreise (the Winter's Journey) to music. The poems on their own are but mediocre examples of German Romantic poetry. They most certainly are not upon the level of Goethe, Schiller, Holderlin, or many others whom he might have set (and did on other occasions). The musical accompaniment, however... the piano and the vocal... reinforce... expand... or even contrast with the actual lyrics making the end result far more profound that the lyrics standing upon their own.

Mahler's great symphonic cycle, Das Lied von der Erde (the Song of the Earth) is built upon a German translation (mediocre at best) by Hans Bethge of Chinese poetry from the Tang Dynasty. Yet the resulting work... especially the closing Der Abschied or "Farewell" is among the most profoundly moving in the whole of orchestral lieder and powerfully conveys the composer's own feelings of the transience of life and his own impending death. Sung by the inimitable Kathleen Ferrier who was dying at the time the resulting work ii almost unbearable:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtV7TSRLs5Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X_Ii0ymVRM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdZR2XEnB5c

The attempt to tear down an art form into separate elements seems wrong-minded to me. Many "librettos" (text) of operas or choral works (masses, Requiems, Stabat Maters, etc...), as well as songs are not the most original... and quite often are rather bad taken solely as a text. By the same token, just because a film works brilliantly in no way means that if we dissect it we will find that each individual element will be found to work brilliantly and stand independent of the whole... that the screen play will stand as great literature, the cinematography as great photography, the musical score as worthy of standing along side Beethoven, etc... The whole in a work of art is not necessarily simply defined as a sum of the parts. Inflated claims for the "poetry" of John Lennon, Robert Plant, Lou Reed, etc... underestimates real poetry as well as it underestimates the the importance of the music in song and the merger of the two in creating the whole.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Separating lyrics and poetry doesn't tear down an art form, though. I don't know why so many people automatically think poetryis better than lyrics, i.e., saying lyrics are "sheer poetry."

[Revolte]

Separating lyrics and poetry doesn't tear down an art form, though. I don't know why so many people automatically think poetryis better than lyrics, i.e., saying lyrics are "sheer poetry."

They probably don't read or write a lot of poetry on there spare time.

I've noticed certain crowds (people who don't or don't seem to read or write a lot) have lower standards as to what constitutes as good writing.

So they could compare lyrics to your usual 4-5 stanza (4 lines per) poem because they roughly look the same.

But in reading you would have to do some rearranging with the lines, words and schemes to make for a bearable read.

With music, it's all in keeping the rhythm. All the instruments work for themselves.

I have tried so many times to take a poem written by myself and use it as lyrics to a song. But most of the time you won't be able to out right transfer. You have to change it's structure to fit the notes.

A song is one complete piece, composed of multiple pieces (in most cases, some songs are just words and a voice). This means they have to work together, otherwise you will destroy the song.

I've been in bands, and played a solo artist for a good seven years now. I'm not the only musician here either, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who writes outside of music. I'm thinking they will agree with me, but I could be wrong.

This is how song writing usually gos (but not all the time), for fun I'll add in an entire band:

Ever member has their tool, their own piece they need to create. Eventually you end up with four or more separate pieces (one for each instrument).

All mashed together it sounds like crap, lyrics included. So you have to restructure, rewrite and recompose every piece to work together. They all blend into one specific piece of art, the song.

Because of this process, each piece loses a little, if not all, of their stand alone quality. Lyrics are part of this, just like the mandolins and snares.

[crusoe]

Please keep it coming. It's very interesting. I'm not sure that I ever read an article in which Reed,Lennon or Plant claimed to be a poet. Some of their followers might have mentioned something like it, though.

SUNDAY MORNING - Velvet Underground

Sunday morning, praise the dawning
It's just a restless feeling by my side
Early dawning, sunday morning
It's just the wasted years so close behind

Watch out, the world's behind you
There's always someone around you who will call
It's nothing at all

Sunday morning and I'm falling
I've got a feeling I don't want to know
Early dawning, sunday morning
It's all the streets you crossed, not so long ago

[Monamy]

I agree. That's actually very informative. And yeah, like Mutatis-Mutandis said, it's just different kinds of implementations for the same Art.

Revolte, you brought a great point here. The sacrifice all instruments must do in order to work together, same goes for lyrics to work with the musical piece. So true, but wouldn't you say that those instruments gained something in return? Something in place of what they sacrificed of their distinctive stand-alone qualities?

Can't we implement that on lyrics as well? That lyrics were poetry to begin with, before being used for the song?

[JCamilo]

Nah, Revolve is confuding the question. Writting for a song is indeed different than writting for reading only, but so is writting for a newspaper and for a scientific thesis, or for an epic and for a haikai or for a drama (nobody questions of Shakespeare is poetry, and indeed his work also needs arrangements to be read as we usually do and was also only intented as to be oral).

And there is enough written poems that were adapted to music without needing a single word change. Vinicius de Moraes poems were turned into music, often without much changes. And there is several song lyrics who are read as poem today without the changes.

Song lyrics are not a song, just part of it. The sameway a script is part of a Play and not all of it and still literature, simple because art can be complex enough to use other art's a part of their construction without losing their identidy.

[Monamy]

Song lyrics are not a song, just part of it. The sameway a script is part of a Play and not all of it and still literature, simple because art can be complex enough to use other art's a part of their construction without losing their identidy.

interesting indeed.

[Alexander III]

Nah, Revolve is confuding the question. Writting for a song is indeed different than writting for reading only, but so is writting for a newspaper and for a scientific thesis, or for an epic and for a haikai or for a drama (nobody questions of Shakespeare is poetry, and indeed his work also needs arrangements to be read as we usually do and was also only intented as to be oral).

And there is enough written poems that were adapted to music without needing a single word change. Vinicius de Moraes poems were turned into music, often without much changes. And there is several song lyrics who are read as poem today without the changes.

Song lyrics are not a song, just part of it. The sameway a script is part of a Play and not all of it and still literature, simple because art can be complex enough to use other art's a part of their construction without losing their identidy.

[Paulclem]

I was listening to Grand Master Flash's The Message recently. The last part is very powerful I feel - and, as it's rap, is in an appropriate oral form. It is bisecting the song form, but the words here are powerful enough too.

A child is born with no state of mind
Blind to the ways of mankind
God is smiling on you but he's frowning too
Because only God knows what you’ll go through
You’ll grow in the ghetto, living second rate
And your eyes will sing a song of deep hate
The places you play and where you stay
Looks like one great big alley way
You'll admire all the number book takers
Thugs, pimps, pushers and the big money makers
Driving big cars, spending twenties and tens
And you wanna grow up to be just like them, huh,
Smugglers, scramblers, burglars, gamblers
Pickpockets, peddlers even panhandlers
You say: “I'm cool, I'm no fool!”
But then you wind up dropping out of high school
Now you're unemployed, all non-void
Walking ‘round like you're Pretty Boy Floyd
Turned stickup kid, look what you’ve done did
Got sent up for a eight year bid
Now your manhood is took and you're a Maytag
Spent the next two years as a undercover fag
Being used and abused to serve like hell
'Til one day you was found hung dead in your cell
It was plain to see that your life was lost
You was cold and your body swung back and forth
But now your eyes sing the sad, sad song
Of how you lived so fast and died so young
[5th Chorus]

(Read more: GRANDMASTER FLASH - THE MESSAGE LYRICS http://www.metrolyrics.com/the-messa...#ixzz21TmNgAVi
Copied from MetroLyrics.com)