«Today’s Lyrics Are Pathetically Bad» Rick Beato

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.

My # 1 criteria for good lyrics is: "Does it impress me on any and/or multiple levels?"

I forgot to mention Billy Bragg in my initial post. I submit the following examples, which all come from the same song ("Accident Waiting To Happen"):

Goodbye and good luck to all the rubbish that you've spoken - Goodbye and good luck to all the promises you've broken - Your life has lost its dignity, its beauty and its passion - You're an accident waiting to happen.

One of these nights you're gonna get caught - It'll give you pregnant pause for thought - You're a dedicated swallower of fascism (KINKS reference)

Time up and time out for all the liberties you've taken - Time up and time out for all the friends that you've forsaken - If you choose to waste away like death is back in fashion - You're an accident waiting to happen.

And my sins are so unoriginal - I have all the self-loathing of a wolf in sheep's clothing - In this carnival of carnivores, Heaven help me.