«Today’s Lyrics Are Pathetically Bad» Rick Beato

The Beato cry was about the decreasing lyrical poetics content quality in popular chart...

Not about genres, not about tastes, not about nostalgia...

But it ask too much for people to think about why this phenomenon even exist

Fair enough, allow me to take a stab or two

1. As has been pointed out previously, the zeitgest has moved on (can we say reversed itself). The 60s / 70s were a time of youth, newness, daring and creativity. You were not to trust anyone over 30. Heck, you were not to be over 30.

In the present era risk management reigns supreme, and what's safer than proven sellers?.Hence New Beetle, New Mustang, 80-year-old rockers selling out arenas all decked out in ADA ramps, the Marvel Universe, Mission Impossible 12, McIntosh amps, whatever.

This arc moves in unison with the XXL-sized boomer demographic passing through the boa constrictor of time.

2. What was once culture is now known as entertainment, and Internet has made possible its present, extreme granularity. This is rather a good thing in some ways: without Internet, many of us would have never known many of our favorite musical artists, and with the Internet there is no way that talentless British bands could ever turn the wholesale appropriation of Black folks' music into billion-dollar careers. If the Rolling Stones came up today, they would hustle to book gigs in half-empty taverns.

The downside is that a shared culture and a common language have been lost. Whether you loved the Stones or laughed at them, you knew them. Were you a rocker or a mod? Stones or Beatles? It's probably safe to say there is no equivalent today. Not that we ran out of reasons to fight each other, but that's a different conversation.

@mahgister

That beato character appears to be a bit controversial. Perhaps some folks reacted to him rather than to the questions you posed, which are very good questions indeed.

Thanks a lot for this great post!

 

the zeitgest has moved on

Right! And each zeitgeist reveal and take with it new sensibilities and new realities, then we cannot fault the zeitgeist nor the people born with it...

but we can observe his effects on us...

 

What was once culture is now known as entertainment, ..... The downside is that a shared culture and a common language have been lost.

Thats the problem Beato spoke about without being clear as you are in this post because he only observed one effect , the poverty of the lyrics....

 

Now thanks to your post we see more clearly the problem in our social fabric : the desintegration of the social fabric imposed by many new factors but also the new technology (the internet) .

The poverty of lyrics came with this disintegration of the social fabric and his manufacture by the corporations...

music is only a canary in the mines...

A.I. will do way worse...

I am not a luddite by the way...

Thanks to internet i read all books and science articles i want, which i could never dreamed about young because i did not have enough money...( i had bought 2,500 books at age 29 and i compute that the price was a big deposit on a big house i "lost" in useless studies for some )

Same for the music...

I like my computer...I am not luddite..

But this does not means that the internet is not a problem : we must recreate the social fabric in a conscious way from the bottom up. If not A.I. will finish the destruction of the social threefold fabric : culture/ free education-political participation-economical integration, A.I. will flatten this three dimension of man conscious activities to one dimension of total control under big corporations ( it is already the case in many fields as medecine, agriculture etc no more freedom ).

 

Going back to music and lyrics.

Culture is not about taste but about education.

When education is no more free in all sense of the word free, artistic work lost all meanings, and any product is there to satisfy an animal pleasure instinct, thats all ...

 

Crocodiles had taste. We must know why we love something and why we dont love something else . We must think, we are not crocodiles exhanging about the way to taste cadavers in the river bed or listen to this or that and it must be good then ....

And perhaps if we think we will know how and when and why lyrics are bad or not ...

Bob Dylan  "taste" more Gerard Manly Hopkins than Marvel comics, i bet this is not a question of "taste" precisely.

 

 «For sure i am  elitist in the crowd»-- Groucho Marx 

@mitchagain I agree with a lot of your examples and would add more like Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell  just in the 70s (poet/singers) and say the Raincoats for the late 70s and early 80s and Gang of Four in the 70s. I could go on and on. 

In the 21st Century, I can think of Sufjan Stevens, Molly Rankin, Aimee Mann, James Mercer, Alex G., Angel Olsen, Adrienne Lenker, Madison Cunningham, Kristin Hersh, Trish Keenan (RIP), MIYNT, Courtney Barnett (a real wordsmith), Robert Smith is still at it, Sleater-Kinney and Sadie Dupuis just off the top of my head. I don't listen to rap very much but I don't discount the fact that some rap artists are really writing good stuff. 

There is still probably about the same disproportional amount of bad lyrics to good lyrics. All you have to do is to look at the lists of the top 40 or so songs from each year and most of it is crap. You have to dig deeper to find the gems and there are many more women leading bands, writing songs and playing leads who are writing interesting stuff. 

Throughout history, all art forms (acting - music - painting - writing) and sports go through periods of drought when it comes to someone achieving true and/or transcendent greatness. In those unfortunate times, what tends to happen is that the "very good" will probably get elevated to greatness by default.

Which makes for lively debate; and, this thread has certainly achieved that! So, kudos to all that have participated.

@devinplombier +1 on your post. The idea of culture morphing into entertainment and, truthfully, everything being an iteration of Gaming. It's like Taylor Swift timing her album releases to keep other artists off the charts. Everything seems to be a cult of personality race.