uTopianTurtleTop

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Interesting discussions over at Carl Wilson’s and Ali Marcus’s blogs on the ideal balance of words & music in the ideal song. I have my views on this, but something that seems clear: some time in the late ‘60s, it became possible to write influential, hugely popular songs with bleeaahh lyrics. Led Zeppelin, baby. Everybody who loves them for their lyrics, please raise your hands. But what a Sound! What riffs, what beats, what timbres!

This dovetails with something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. The Beatles are the patron saints of bad lyric writing. Not that they were bad lyric writers, but that they wrote an awful lot of bad lyrics, especially early on -- as far as I can tell, they pretty much invented the “lyrics shmyrics” attitude toward popular-style songwriting. Nobody before them wrote so many songs with words so obviously thrown together so indifferently.

Ask me why.

No, that’s not a request, that’s the name of Exhibit A.

I love you, 'cause you tell me things I want to know.
And it's true that it really only goes to show,
That I know,
That I, I, I, I should never, never, never be blue.

Ahhhh, it doesn’t really make sense. And on the page, you miss all the pre-written melisma, which only makes it harder to parse.

I love you-woo-woo-woo-woo
Cuz you tell me things I want to know
And it’s true-woo-woo-woo-woo

Examples abound.

Whoa, woah, I never realized what a kiss could be
This could only happen to me;
Can't you see, can't you see?
That when I tell you that I love you, oh,
You're gonna say you love me too, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, oh . . .

Really now, can’t you see?

Or:

I, thought that you would realize
That if I ran away from you
Then you would want me to
But I got a big surprise Oh-h Oh-h

I can’t understand . . . why didn’t you realize it?

And the bad lyrics don’t ever completely go away. Take a really sweet, touching, interesting song like Hey Jude, and tell me, what in Orpheus’ name does this mean?

So let it out and let it in, hey, Jude, begin
You're waiting for someone to perform with
And don't you know that it's just you, hey, Jude,
You'll do, the movement you need is on your shoulder

Until the Beatles, these sorts of blandly nonsensical lyrics just didn’t make it onto records. Maybe I’m forgetting something, and if so, please let me know, but, much as I love the Beatles, I really think they have Robert Plant and Bernie Taupin and Prince and hosts of other multi-million-dollar bad lyricists to answer for.