can song lyrics be considered poerty/prose?

[JBI]

Meh, how good a song is, how good the lyrics aren't always the same thing - and even really good lyrics, and really good poetry make it into song form occasionally - this famous poem, http://my.iciba.com/blog-3284714-198759.html , ultimately becomes this famous pop song - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz8-FzYxP3w - the rules between poetry and music are so mixed up. The song is nothing like the poem in context - the singer bends the words - first by making the speaker a woman, which changes much of the meaning, and secondly by emphasizing - the 900 year gap between the respective artist's ages also changes how the setting of the poem communicates.

Even something like Thomas Wyatt's verses written in Octaves were originally set to music (I found that out by asking a professor why the scansion on them was so wacky) - how does that effect the metrics of the poetry then, now that we no longer have the music? Are they better for it now, or worse?

Ultimately, I don't see a connection between good lyrics and good music - it's just that sometimes they go hand in hand, by some fluke.

[mono]

Meh, how good a song is, how good the lyrics aren't always the same thing - and even really good lyrics, and really good poetry make it into song form occasionally - this famous poem, http://my.iciba.com/blog-3284714-198759.html , ultimately becomes this famous pop song - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz8-FzYxP3w - the rules between poetry and music are so mixed up. The song is nothing like the poem in context - the singer bends the words - first by making the speaker a woman, which changes much of the meaning, and secondly by emphasizing - the 900 year gap between the respective artist's ages also changes how the setting of the poem communicates.

Even something like Thomas Wyatt's verses written in Octaves were originally set to music (I found that out by asking a professor why the scansion on them was so wacky) - how does that effect the metrics of the poetry then, now that we no longer have the music? Are they better for it now, or worse?

Ultimately, I don't see a connection between good lyrics and good music - it's just that sometimes they go hand in hand, by some fluke.

Agreed, and I did not intend on sounding otherwise in my previous message, but thanks for clarifying and for posting the links. Good music and good lyrics, indeed, do not always come together, as there almost always must seem at least one special feature of a song; Led Zeppelin found a fantastic balance between often writing poetic lyrics by Robert Plant (such as in "Ten Years Gone"), intricate guitar work by Jimmy Page (the guitar solo of "Since I've Been Lovin' You" speaks for itself), stunning organ/Moog and piano work by John Paul Jones (like in "No Quarter"), and the often extended and amazing drum solos of John Bonham performed live on "Dazed and Confused." Good music seems required in writing a good song, poetic lyrics optional, and some musicians, again, not to mention names, have neither, in my opinion. One, however, can compensate for another; The Beatles, especially, in their very early days, wrote ear-catching, up-beat tunes, but their lyrics sounded, for the most part, simple, flirtatious, and playful, perhaps explaining their earlier audience majority of screaming and raving young women; as they grew, much more poetic lyrics emerged, such as those from "Strawberry Fields Forever" or "Let It Be," creating a balance between their music talents in addition, not to say their lyrics ever seemed entirely bad - they only evolved and improved.

[sixsmith]

I'm dubious as to lyrics as 'poetry' and i tend to keep them in separate camps. Even Dylan, who is obviously a very clever and 'poetic' lyricist, doesn't have any lyrics that stand alone as particularly good poetry. But here, i'm comparing Dylan, Cohen, Waits et al to my favourite poets. I think if we are going to say Dylan is a poet he has to pay his dues.

It's no coincidence that great lyrics are written by great songwriters. I can think of very few lyrics that aren't made significantly greater by the song that accompanies them.

[JBI]

I'm dubious as to lyrics as 'poetry' and i tend to keep them in separate camps. Even Dylan, who is obviously a very clever and 'poetic' lyricist, doesn't have any lyrics that stand alone as particularly good poetry. But here, i'm comparing Dylan, Cohen, Waits et al too my favourite poets. I think if we are going to say Dylan is a poet he has to pay his dues.

Its no coincidence that great lyrics are written by great songwriters. I can think of very few lyrics that aren't made significantly greater by the song that accompanies them.

Your dismissal of Dylan is generally disagreed upon - he has made the major anthologies for his song lyrics, including the Norton, of, I believe, both poetry and American poetry. To suggest nobody thinks them good is really an assumption - his lyrics have been praised, and have been studied like poetry - I don't think you can really justify your argument that they aren't poetry.


Are they as good as Keats or whomever though? Well, I don't play the value game, I'll leave that for you guys to decide.

[stlukesguild]

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 we are talking Shelley/Keats/Blake/Yeats here. With the music, however, the song 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.

The attempt to tear down an art form into separate elements seems wrong-minded to me. 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 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.

[stlukesguild]

Ultimately, I don't see a connection between good lyrics and good music - it's just that sometimes they go hand in hand, by some fluke.

In the case of a composer using a poet's words it seems to be hit or miss... depending upon the taste of the poet. Schubert, for example, seems to have been attracted to Romantic German poetry... the work of contemporaries or near contemporaries. Sometimes his choices were good (Goethe)... other times they were mediocre. The French song writers such as Debussy, Faure, Hahn, Chausson, Ravel, etc... don't seem to have been much more consistent in choosing the best poets: Verlaine, Baudelaire, Valery one minute... then some mediocre imitator the next. Still... in neither instance does the merit of the poem guarantee the merit of the song... for better or worse. 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 in almost unbearable:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LE48...=TL&playnext=1

[JBI]

Hmm, St Lukes, what do you make of the Hesse and Eichendorff that Strauss set for the Four Last Songs?

[Jozanny]

I'm dubious as to lyrics as 'poetry' and i tend to keep them in separate camps. Even Dylan, who is obviously a very clever and 'poetic' lyricist, doesn't have any lyrics that stand alone as particularly good poetry. But here, i'm comparing Dylan, Cohen, Waits et al to my favourite poets. I think if we are going to say Dylan is a poet he has to pay his dues.

It's no coincidence that great lyrics are written by great songwriters. I can think of very few lyrics that aren't made significantly greater by the song that accompanies them.

sixsmith,

This is one of the rare times we disagree. Sure, commercial lyrics to pop music can seem to amount to nothing, but some of Bernie Taupin's lyrics for Elton John carry more weight than 50 poems I could copy from 50 ezines and really make Logos mad at me. Captain Fantastic is the greatest soft rock album of the 70's, period, hands down, I don't want to hear one word about The Stones or The Who. I know the album like the back of my hand, and it is a work of art, of homoerotic subversion bar none. (I like the subversion involved in homoerotic subtexts more than I actually care about same sex love; it seems to create its own radicalized challenge, and breaks convention in interesting ways, which is why I am sorry to see the closet opening for good in the West, but this is another topic and the moderators probably wouldn't be thrilled with me if I created it). Anyway, there is such a thing as lyric poetry. I don't write it much, as I prefer the traditional modern contortions of narrative and imagery, but I have to agree with luke and JBI. Lyricism, when handled with care, can have as much power as Dante's Comedia, or Donne, etc.

As to Dylan, like Elton, his later material is crap, but some of his lyric verse is taught, and has layers that make it worth teaching.

[sixsmith]

sixsmith,

This is one of the rare times we disagree. Sure, commercial lyrics to pop music can seem to amount to nothing, but some of Bernie Taupin's lyrics for Elton John carry more weight than 50 poems I could copy from 50 ezines and really make Logos mad at me. Captain Fantastic is the greatest soft rock album of the 70's, period, hands down, I don't want to hear one word about The Stones or The Who. I know the album like the back of my hand, and it is a work of art, of homoerotic subversion bar none. (I like the subversion involved in homoerotic subtexts more than I actually care about same sex love; it seems to create its own radicalized challenge, and breaks convention in interesting ways, which is why I am sorry to see the closet opening for good in the West, but this is another topic and the moderators probably wouldn't be thrilled with me if I created it). Anyway, there is such a thing as lyric poetry. I don't write it much, as I prefer the traditional modern contortions of narrative and imagery, but I have to agree with luke and JBI. Lyricism, when handled with care, can have as much power as Dante's Comedia, or Donne, etc.

As to Dylan, like Elton, his later material is crap, but some of his lyric verse is taught, and has layers that make it worth teaching.

Without wanting to be defeatist in the context of this discussion, it's possible i am being a little narrow minded here. That is due in part to my, shall we say 'organic' education in poetry, and something of a reactionary attitude to the great many singer-songwriters who try to wear their literary influences on their very inadequate sleeves.

So perhaps i'm just not reading Dylan 'the poet' properly, or perhaps i'm reading him with blinkers. I should point out that as a perennially frustrated songwriter (and possible member of the aforementioned class), I number Dylan and several others amongst my artistic idols. I've just always had reservations as to how his lyrics stack up as poetry; as a form that, as St Lukes says, relies on words to to create the music and meaning. But i'll revisit these reservations.

As for 'Captain Fantastic', i won't dispute you on its merits. Unfortunately, it only serves to sharpen the very steep decline which followed.

[JCamilo]

I think an overall house favorite gives the answer in those lines (Which are not exactly the words, because I did not read Borges in english): Poems remember that once they are music. Not exactly what he wanted to say, but if they remember, it means we have something different now, an artifice to create the aesthetic emotion that music created. We would be silly do deny the exchanges and ties between then (just like we can get a musical film, lets say An American in Paris, and split the movie, the dancing, the singing and even the script and analyse it... which would be forgeting that each part was meant to support the other and yeah, people do walk by the street, see Leslie Caron and start to dance) but we would be also silly to not point that Music does not need the status to be considered literature - it is an old artform and quite powerful already on its own.
It is good to have a good poet that is also a musician or vice versa. However read or listen to bossa nova and Vinicius de Morais - can see this.

[drakemortuare13]

I guess one could say that songs are considered as poetry. Lyrical poetry at least, seeing as they contain several of tyhe same elements such as rhyme, rhythm, and so on.

[stlukesguild]

Hmm, St Lukes, what do you make of the Hesse and Eichendorff that Strauss set for the Four Last Songs?

Of course I may be biased in that Strauss' Last Four Songs are among my absolute favorite works. Obviously Eichendorff and Hesse are both major German poets. I stupidly didn't pick up the copy of the Complete Poems of Hermann Hesse that I came across a good number of years back. The introduction to the book was written by Thomas Mann who stated that his friend and peer was sometimes underrated as a novelist... perhaps in comparison with Mann's own work... but that his abilities as a lyrical poet were unquestionable. Most of the poems were quite brief and lyrical... and not overly challenging for my rudimentary German... that is even less than rudimentary now.

The poems strike me as simple, lyrical pieces chosen as they suggest the passing of the seasons and how that alludes to the transience of life. There is surely a certain musicality to the original German lyrics... but I'd need to live with them a while... or read them in context to a larger body of the work to develop a greater feel for them. Obviously, reading poetry in another language without a deep knowledge of that language... its history, uses, literature etc... demands that the work be read with good notes that will draw attention to certain allusions or precedents for a certain turn of phrase etc... although perhaps no such critical commentary will lead us to as deep of an understanding of the poems as Strauss' music.

[Jozanny]

IPoems remember that once they are music.

I am going to borrow this sentence from you, although I will not be returning it, most likely.

Sixsmith isn't altogether wrong though. Popular music is sort of a pap smear unto itself, slurped with regret when we're forced to drink condensed milk.

I don't listen to commercial radio anymore. My ex-fiance, who makes Falstaff as Anthony Hopkins seem credible, thinks Michael Jackson was a genius. I think Michael Jackson was manufactured, to borrow from our resident anti-Mozart fellow.

But I conveniently remembered my academic training and thought a definition of lyric poetry would be useful:

"Lyric Poetry consists of a poem, such as a sonnet or an ode, that expresses the thoughts and feelings of the poet. The term lyric is now commonly referred to as the words to a song. Lyric poetry does not tell a story which portrays characters and actions. The lyric poet addresses the reader directly, portraying his or her own feeling, state of mind, and perceptions."

http://www.types-of-poetry.org.uk/31-lyric-poetry.htm

It ain't the same as song lyrics, and I knew that before I interjected myself into this debate, but the wall between lyric and stanza really isn't hard and fast. American record labels can certainly make it feel that way, however.

[vallugi]

Cheers!
Valikie
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[Drkshadow03]

I remeber in WRT compostion 101 one of the assignments was to select song selects and write an interpretation (my first year of college), I also remember in my American poety class as a last day fun activitiy we got to bring in one song for everyone to listen to with printed out lyrics and we read it as "poetry." I think vocal music has poetic qualities, but like JCamillo I think of it as its own thing. The song I selected for both assignments was NOFX's The Decline:

NOFX
The Decline (1999)
The Decline

Where are all the stupid people from?
And how'd they get to be so dumb?
Bred on purple mountain range
Feed amber waves of grains
To lesser human beings, zero feelings

Blame it on
Human nature, mans destiny (mans destiny)
Blame it on the greediocracy (greediocracy)
Fear of God
The fear of change
The fear of truth

Add the Bill of Rights, subtract the wrongs
There's no answers
Memorize and sing star spangled songs
When the questions
Aren't ever asked
Is anybody learning from the past?
We're living in united stagnation

Father what have I done?
I took that 22
A gift to me from you
To bed with me each night
Kept it clean
Polished it well
Cherished every cartridge, every shell

Down, by the creek, under brush, under dirt
There's a carcass of my second kill
Down, by the park, under stone, under pine
There's a carcass of my brother William
Brother where, have you gone to?
I swear, I never thought I could
I see so many times
They told me to shoot straight
Don't pull the trigger, squeeze
That will insure a kill
A kill is what you want
A kill is why we breed

The Christians love their guns
The church and NRA
Pray for their salvations
Prey on the lower faiths

The story book's been read
And every line believed
Curriculum's been set
Logic is a threat
Reason searched and seized

Jerry spent some time in Michigan
A twenty year vacation, after all he had a dime
A dime is worth a lot more in Detroit
A dime in California, a twenty dollar fine

Jerry only stayed a couple months
It's hard to enjoy yourself while bleeding out the ***
Asphyxiation is simple and fast
It beats seventeen fun years of being someones *****

Don't think (Stay)
Drink your wine (Home)
Watch the fire burn (Be)
His problems not mine (Safe)
Just be that model citizen

I wish I had a schilling
(For each senseless killing)
For every senseless killing
I'd buy a government
America's for sale
And you can get a good deal on it
(A good deal on it)
And make a healthy profit
Or maybe, tear it apart
Start with assumption
That a million people are smart
Smarter than one

Serotonin's gone
She gave up, drifted away
Sara fled, thought process gone
She left her answering machine on
The greeting left spoken sincere
Messages no one will ever hear

Ten thousand messages a day
A million more transmissions lay
Victims of the laissez faire
Ten thousand voices, a hundred guns
A hundred decibels turns to one
One bullet, one empty head
Now with Serotonin gone

The man who used to speak
Performs a cute routine
Feel a little patronized
Don't feel bad
They found a way inside your head
And you feel a bit misled
It's not that they don't care, yeah

The television's put a thought inside your head
Llike a Barry Manilow, jingle
I'd like, to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony
A symphonic blank stare, yeah
It doesn't make you care (make you care)
Not designed to make you care (make you care)
They're betting you won't care (you won't...)

Place a wager on your greed
A wager on your pride
Why try to beat them when, a million others tried?

We are the whore
Intellectually spayed
We are the queer
Dysfunctionally raised

One more pill to kill the pain
One more pill to kill the pain
One more pill to kill the pain
Living through conformity

One more prayer to keep me safe
One more prayer to keep us warm
One more prayer to keep us safe
There's gonna be a better place

Lost the battle, lost the war
Lost the things worth living for
Lost the will to win the fight
One more pill to kill the pain

Na na na na na
La na na na na
Na na na na na
Na na na na na

The going get tough, the tough get debt
Don't pay attention, pay the rent
Next of kins pay for your sins
A little faith should keep us safe

Save us
The human, existence
Is failing, resistance
Essential, the future
Written off, the odds are
Astronomically against us
Only moron and genius
Would fight a losing battle
Against the super ego
When giving in is so damn comforting

And so we go, on with our lives
We know the truth, but prefer lies
Lies are simple, simple is bliss
Why go against tradition when we can
Admit defeat, live in decline
Be the victim of our own design
The status quo, built on suspect
Why would anyone stick out their neck?

Fellow members
Club "We've Got Ours"
I'd like to introduce you to our host
He's got his, and I've got mine
Meet the decline

We are the queer
We are the whore
Ammunition
In the class war
We are worker
We love our queen
We sacrifice
We're soilent green

We are the queer
We are the whore
Ammunition
In the class war