Lyrics Aren’t Poetry, They’re Art

Nope.

Many nopes.

Perhaps all of my nopes, in fact.

While I agreed with a lot of what you said Izzy, there was one point that stuck out like a saw thumb being lacerated by a bayonet held by a cackling sociopath in an otherwise bland and silent airport terminal: ‘Who gets to decide which song lyrics are poems and which aren’t?’

The reason I’m throwing all my nopes at this question is that it suggests that lyrics and poetry aren’t just different things (which they are) but that there is a relationship of importance, or even artistic validity, between them; essentially, your question implies that most lyrics are lyrics, but the best lyrics are poetry, which has all kinds of elitist cultural connotations I will now rage against, like soldiers gone to war and lost along the journey, against the dying of the light.

First up no art form is intrinsically ‘better’ than another; a crap poem isn’t better than an awesome rap because one is written by eighteenth-Century men with fluffy collars and greatcoats, and the other can be written by such strange creatures as ‘women’. And, by extension, there isn’t a progression from lyrics to poetry, where the best examples of the former can be accepted into the ranks of the latter like a graduate student being swept into doing a Master’s degree at the uni they just graduated from, and pulled across the ‘them-and-us’ divide between professors and students to torment new first-years with their own fiendishly incomprehensible lectures.

Also, this suggests that these forms of art are in some way exclusive, that poetry and lyrics can never cross over into each other’s forms of art, an idea I clunkily, although validaly, disproved at the end of the second stanza by mixing a Dylan Thomas refrain with a line from Canadian rapper Classified. This is my bigger concern with dividing things that are fundamentally similar – in this case forms of expression with words – into ‘lyrics’ and ‘poetry’, because they serve identical functions.

So sorry if that felt a bit ranty, I totally agree with basically the rest of your post Izzy – that one line just triggered the reactionary ‘no, lyrics are totally a valid form of art!’ bit of my brain that flares up whenever I hear anyone dismiss the artistic quality of Rise Against or a John Green novel.

Scarlet O’Conor vs. Sylvia Plath

Rhavine, in your post you mentioned something which really struck me: Lyrics! Song lyrics are poems in their own right, of course and I totally agree, I’ve always felt this way but when you have ‘artists’ such as Nicki Minaj (wow, she seems to be the go-to symbol of the world’s lack of meritocracy here on ZPD) churning out lyrics like “Oh my gosh, look at her butt” and
“I said, “Where my fat ass big bitches in the club?”
Fuck those skinny bitches,
Fuck those skinny bitches in the club
I wanna see all the big fat ass bitches in the motherfucking club, fuck you if you skinny bitches.”

I really struggle to see the poetry in that.

Of course, some people will turn around and say that some song lyrics are poems and others aren’t, a great example of this is in the works of Akala. I had the privilege of attending a conference at the Institute of Education recently, where Akala had us engage in an exercise. This exercise entailed of his putting a line of either a hip hop song lyric or line from a Shakespeare play on the screen and asking us to tell him whether the line was written by a hip hop artist or Shakespeare.
To be honest with you, it proved rather a difficult task.

Since then, I’ve been reading into the background and origins of hip hop as part of a sociopolitical movement and the stigma it carries today.  For some reason, a lot of people – namely privileged white people – consider hip hop and rap to be a pile of shit that has no artistic value, I myself am not a hip hop fan (there are exceptions, when I was 11 my whole life revolved around JME and then I discovered Paramore and it all changed) but I can appreciate good lyrics or poetry when I hear it.

So, my point is this:
Who gets to decide which song lyrics are poems and which aren’t?
Where do we draw the line and what are the criteria?

AN: The title is a reference to a character in the TV show Nashville, she writes poems and then uses them as lyrics, and I’m sure we all know who Sylvia Plath is

Engaging With Music

Because I’m doing (by which I mean ‘ignoring in favour of seeing friends and running for a position on the Dodgeball Team Committee) a degree at the moment, I’ve not got oodles of time for a post, but there was one thing I picked up on in your post Izzy, your engagement with books. You said that you hadn’t engaged with another art form as intensely as books and, while I’d agree that books are probably my number one in terms of engagement, music is pretty high on the list.

It’s an obvious point to make, but one worth making nonetheless, that music combines both lyrical and verbal ideas, and musical ones; there’s the obvious point that bands include guitarists as well as a singer, but even the words of a song themselves are designed to be performed in a public place moreso than even the most bold, musical lines of poetry. And while this has kinda shot the music industry in the foot – because it’s easier to make something catchy than make something meaningful, and both approaches to music sell records so we’ve suddenly got a whole load of catchy crap on radios and in clubs – there are a load of bands and songs that are meaningful, that will be listed in the remainder of this post, because I’m too busy at the moment to even come up with my own post structure, let alone topic.

Anything by Rise Against

My friends who aren’t Rise Against fans are probably sick of hearing this, but this obnoxious punk band aren’t just the best group I’ve heard musically, but might be responsible for more life-changing quotes than every ‘literary’ text I’ve ever read in my life: ‘I found God in the sound of your factories burning down’ inverts the typical American capitalist interpretation of God, as condoning the freedom to better oneself at the detriment of things like the environment; ‘Would God bless our murder of the innocent? / Would God bless our war based on oil? / Would God bless our money-hungry Government? / Would God bless our ineffective court systems? / God bless the sweatshops we run, / God bless America!’ is an even more explicit two fingers to the illogical divine justification of US economic and political actions over the last generation or so; ‘From the coffins full of kindergarteners, / Is this what you call free?’ attacks lax gun laws; and there’s my personal favourite, ‘How we survive is what makes us who we are’. Ironically, I can’t put into words my awesome appreciation for this band.

Classified

A Canadian rapper who manages to not be racist, sexist (apart from one line that he now sings differently in live performances) or homophobic (apart from one line from a song he no longer performs live); it’s those examples of growth and personal improvement over time that make him such a good guy to me. He also makes puns, out of light-hearted topics as well as suicide – ‘I’ll be blunt, we all thought about suicide once / But I guess I’m not selfish enough and didn’t make the cut’ – showing a courage and skill in attacking and defusing taboo topics with comedy.

Flobots

A mix of rap and punk; the repeated line ‘I can end the planet in a Holocaust’ at the end of their popular Handlebars is a combination of the meaningful and the stunningly repetitive, that really sticks with you as the song fades out.

The Bloodhound Gang

But not every meaningful song has to be serious! This comedy rap-rock group include such masterpieces as The Bad Touch, a song consisting entirely of creepy yet superbly eloquent pickup lines, and The Ballad Of Chasey Lane, a song about a prostitute, and the immortal repeated line ‘Mom and Dad, this is Chasey Lane / Chasey, meet my Mom and Dad / Now show us them titties! / Show us them titties! (etc.)’, which is honestly how I intend to introduce every friend I make to my parents in the future.

And I’d finish this off with some judgement about the music industry itself and music’s relation to poetry, but I can’t think of anything. Sorry Rhavine, I don’t know if I’ve given you much to work with here