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There's a story about the jazz sax player Ben Webster that my music teacher told me. Supposedly he was taking a solo and stopped in the middle of it. When asked what happened later on he said "Sorry, I forgot the lyrics".
6 months into working with my current teacher he told me "ok, well you're not going to like this part, but this is the point where you have to learn and sing all the lyrics to all the tunes we work on". He's in his late 70s and learned the old way, which was you learned the lyrics to all the songs, and improvisation comes from singing them through your instrument (in my case piano). And then you start realizing just how many of the jazz musicians knew all the lyrics to all the standards.
I'm still mainly attracted to the music first, particularly rhythm, but I've gotten a new appreciation for understanding things lyrically as well.
Jazz has a curious duality. Instrumentalists are often told to learn the lyrics so they understand the phrasing of the melody. Conversely, vocalists are often told to listen to instrumentalists performing the same song. So both are trying to approach an ideal performance from opposing starting points.
A "lyrics person" is also a "music person," otherwise they would just be a "poetry person." Something about setting lyrics to music can give an intense power to words that would be merely passable as "plain" poetry.
e.g. here's a verse from "All This Time" by Sting:
> Teachers told us the Romans built this place \ They built a wall and a temple \ And an edge of the empire garrison town \ They lived and they died \ They prayed to their gods \ But the stone gods did not make a sound \ And their empire crumbled till all that was left \ Were the stones the workmen found
> All this time \ The river flowed \ In the falling light \ Of a northern sun
Just reading this does nothing for me. It's certainly not great poetry. But hearing it sung to music for me evokes the feeling of the inevitablity of decay and the simultaneous glory of human achivement and the pathos of human mortality. [0]
I believe the highest achievement in music as an art form occurs when complex, stimulating lyrics are married to equally complex music.
In rock music I think "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" by Genesis achieves that pinnacle. After nearly 50 years the Lamb stands alone in that it blends a weird, complex story line riddled with references and allegories to classical literature with an equally complex score of music that fuse together into a cinematic, theatrical and intellectually stimulating musical experience. Nothing, I mean nothing, in the rock music catalog comes close to what the Lamb achieves: what other album weaves in references to Sondheim's West Side Story, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Keats' Lamia, and Carl Jung? The storyline was almost entirely written by Peter Gabriel, who loves word play, which is peppered throughout the lyrics. Even the title itself is an allegorical word play, as the story line is about a young man Rael who goes on a spiritual journey; in literature a lamb is a symbol of self-sacrifice for redemption.
The Lamb is headphone music to ponder by. It's not party music, it's not to dance to, just as one doesn't read Huxley or Cervantes while on the beach.
I was with you until:
> just as one doesn't read Huxley or Cervantes while on the beach.
Why not? And anyway, which Huxley?
:-)
I think it's an interesting distinction, but I don't think everyone is one or the other. You can be both types, and (sadly) some people are neither.
You can be a lyrics person when you listen to Bob Dylan, and be a music person when you listen to John Coltrane.
Curiously, John Coltrane may have been more of a lyrics person than people are aware of. Several of his instrumental compositions were written to poetry, e.g. his own words to the last part of "A Love Supreme": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kOu61AtFVk or "Alabama" incorporating the cadence of Martin Luther King's eulogy for the victims of the Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing.
I'm definitely neither. Music has always been just background noise for me. I can't sit and listen to anything by itself. It doesn't keep my interest.
I find this fascinating. Has there ever been a song that really spoke to you or not at all? Was your home life musical growing up or no? Does your family have a similar relationship with music that you do? Sorry, it's just really interesting to me and I have so many questions.
There are songs I like, but I would hesitate to use the phrase "spoke to me". I can't parse lyrics from songs without intense focus, and as I said I can't usually focus on songs. Usually songs are just noise to me, and some noises are pleasant and some noises aren't. I tend to like songs that have a funky quality.
I definitely didn't grow up in a musical house. My parents rarely played music, even in the car.
This reminded me of the following story from John Cage:
When I asked Schoenberg to teach me, he said, "You probably can't afford my price." I said, "Don't mention it; I don't have any money." He said, "Will you devote your life to music?" This time I said "Yes." He said he would teach me free of charge. I gave up painting and concentrated on music. After two years it became clear to both of us that I had no feeling for harmony. For Schoenberg, harmony was not just coloristic: it was structural. It was the means one used to distinguish one part of a composition from another. Therefore he said I'd never be able to write music. "Why not?" "You'll come to a wall and won't be able to get through." "Then I'll spend my life knocking my head against that wall."
(I read it in his book Silence, but I grabbed this text from https://www.johncage.org/autobiographical_statement.html)
What's that saying?
Words make you think thoughts, music makes you feel feelings; so songs make you feel thoughts.
That's a very good way of putting it. Songs evoke a very multifaceted sort of experience, I can't think of a better way to put it - they make both sides of the brain fire up. A good song causes me to rationally enjoy its lyricism and have strong feelings over its melody.
Songs are multimedia. Two dissimilar things are wired together. It is an effective way to brainwash people.
Feel thoughts or think feelings?
I'm a music person, when I'm approaching new (to me) music I'm highly focused on how the melodies, harmonies, rhythms, textures, etc. fit into a coherent narrative/whole and the lyrics don't factor in at all, though the voice as an instrument does. I think an interesting type of music perhaps on the border of the "music vs. lyric" line is glossolalia, such as Dead Can Dance, where what the voices are vocalizing is usually gibberish/nonsense chosen strictly for its musical qualities. From that particular artist, I can recommend The Serpent's Egg and Spleen and Ideal as excellent albums.
I’ve always been a music > lyrics person. I often prefer instrumental music, as it gets the singing/lyrics out of the way of the music. Or I’ll listen to music in another language (that I don’t speak/understand), since it literally is just another instrument at that point.
Having said that, I still listen to and enjoy vocal music, but only as another instrument. I enjoy vocals with complex chords and chord progressions.
And it’s not that I ignore/don’t enjoy lyrics. They’re just secondary to music.
I think that’s the reason I don’t enjoy rap — it seems to be on the extreme end of lyrics > music (e.g. other than rhythm, rap has relatively little instrumentation to it, by definition).
A bit of personal realization about popular music here in Colombia was some months ago where a mexican 'norteño' music was being interviewed at a local TV news program, and their singer said something like they were aware colombians pay way too much attention to lyrics (apparently even more than them in Mexico).
Mind you, I'm a music person - never paid much attention to the meaning of lyrics nor sang along, but rather, as some of you already commented, listened to them as another instrument - but it was just when realized how almost all, if not all popular music in here, is made towards the goal of _saying_ something - it's the music that seems to be built around the lyrics and not the other way round. Maybe that could explain how most the music in local popular genres have really simple, repeating structures (_reguetón_/_"urbano"_, _ranchera_, _popular_, _vallenato_) and the dominating figures are solo singers rather than bands.
Of course I'd bet there are more lyrics people than music people in the world, but it struck me that here it's getting to the point that music and lyrics aren't getting hand to hand, but music is just a mere veiled background to lyrics.
> I like a lot of electronic and instrumental genres that have no lyrics. [...] While I love lyrics too as rap is my favourite genre, the music and beat [... is] what makes a song a song, for me.
Funny because a song is that which is sung. Technically you can sing non-lyrically (vocalizations that are not words) and still be singing a song, but that's an edge case.
An instrumental piece is not a song even if you have a music player or database where that word is the field label. They use that word in that place because it's a decent fit enough of the time, but if you look up "song" in a dictionary, the definitions do all involve things like singing, vocals, lyrics, etc. The members of an orchestra don't ask each other what song to play, they talk generally of pieces and specifically of concertos, études, etc. until a guest vocalist appears for a song.
I've tried to describe my preference before as "lyrics lead and the music follows or supports it". "Lead" in the dance partner sense, not the temporal sense.
Pure music without context usually comes across to me as just noise. Context can be many things, not just lyrics, but that is probably the simplest form.
Even in electronica, trivial "vocal hooks" go a long way towards getting the audience to bond with the music.
I'm 90% music and 10% lyrics. It's very rare that the lyrics hit me in any way. Probably 70% of the music I consume is instrumental (soundtracks, classical, electronic, ambient, etc).
I find comical music where the whole point are the lyrics super annoying. I mean stuff like Weird Al Yankovic, Les Luthiers (in Spanish), etc
This describes me as well. With the exception of J-pop/anime music, almost all the music I listen to is classical or soundtracks. I connect deeply with the instrumentation, melodies, harmonies, and rhythms far more than the lyrics, which is why I don't especially enjoy rap and am terrible at karaoke.
I'm similar but also I treat languages I can't understand or movie samples as non-lyric.
I’m definitely a lyrics person. I’m pretty sure my wife is a music person. I sent her the article, and looking forward to what she says. I wonder if it’s related to other information processing preferences (I tend to be more rational than emotional, very logical, etc.) so lyrics are captivating to my mind because they contain more directly actionable information.
I do play many instruments and love to make music, but that doesn’t seem to matter. I can definitely hear a song and then sing it back to you after one or two listens (not all lyrics but at least the chorus and some of the verse)
I'm also a fairly rational person and I like to obsess over sounds and their qualities. I find lyrics to be extra, often predictably sentimental, fluff and its the patterns in the music that makes music. My ex was literally an art student and was very emotional and was 100% wedded to lyrics. So I'm not sure.
> (I tend to be more rational than emotional, very logical, etc.) so lyrics are captivating to my mind because they contain more directly actionable information.
That's exactly why I steer away from lyrical music! The moment I hear lyrics that bore me or give me negative impressions of the songwriter, I lose a lot of interest in the song. Common cliches are the worst, so while I can enjoy pop I can't usually listen to a pop song on repeat the way many others do.
So I listen to almost all "instrumental" music (including totally electronic). However, those artists who do capture me with the strength of their lyrics I tend to obsess over. (R.A.P. Ferreira, known then as Milo, was one such for many years. The newer works don't hit the same; I hesitate to say I've outgrown his ideas but something isn't clicking.)
edit: Now I've read the article and found a lot of the responses resonate with me. Seems the idea of "music person vs lyrics person" wasn't as solid as the author expected at all.
I did some research on this topic, among other musicians, and the result was multimodal. On a scale from 1 to 10, on the importance of lyrics, you had two larger peaks near each end of the scale, and a smaller in the middle / neutral zone.
I myself am more of a "music" type of person. I rarely, very rarely listen to the lyrics. When people ask "but what about the singer then?", well, I listen to the melodies, and the vocal technique itself.
I'm much more into the soundscape. Interesting rhythms, layering, etc.
I'm more of a music person partly because my severe hearing loss makes me strain to focus on lyrics, akin to searching for Waldo on a busy page. Even though I've grown to appreciate and learn the lyrics of songs I enjoy, such as "Master of Puppets" or "Bulls on Parade," rap is challenging for me to follow given its lyrics-first nature and my personal firmware limitations. That said, I enjoy creators on Instagram who point out rap's lyrical and musical creativity.
I can relate to this a lot; even though I don't have any hearing loss, I tend to struggle to process lyrics as "words" in real time to the point that when I look up the lyrics to songs I've listened to my whole life, I'll sometimes be surprised with lines I had never understood before. I first discovered this high school when in Spanish class we'd sometimes be given a sheet of lyrics with some missing words and try to fill them in from listening to the song a couple of times (usually as a non-graded activity that would give a few bonus points on the next test if you got it perfect). I found it virtually impossible despite consistently testing quite high even in the portions of exams where we had to listen to audio and answer questions about it, which made me realize that it had less to do with it being a language I lacked full fluency in and more about the fact that it was singing rather than speaking.
On the other hand, I've learned to play several instruments over the years and have a fairly easy time learning songs by ear, so I suspect that part of the issue is that I find it impossible not to focus on the musical parts of singing rather than the linguistic part; if I'm focused on the pitch, rhythm, and tone of the vocals, it's conceivable that it could explain why it's lot harder for me to recognize individual words. It's occurred to me that the reverse issue could also help explain why I've had to put in effort over the years to build up social skills around non-direct communication; a lot of times when someone says one thing but means another, the intent is conveyed in things like rhythm and tone, and I likely find it harder to pick up on those cues due to my entire focus being devoted to understanding the words themselves being spoken rather than how they're being spoken.
Mostly instrumental music for me, e.g jazz or progressive rock. I'm aware that's a smaller niche, typically only understood by musicians or enthusiasts.
When going on trip with family or friends, of course I won't play any King Crimson or Mahavishnu Orchestra tracks.
Of course if I'm in the mood for singing, playing Beatles tracks is a mostly safe guarantee it can be understood by teenagers and old grand pas/mas.
Both, but the lyrics and music have to be good.
Good book if you’re interested in this and art in general, has a black circle on a gray cover, currently found all over the place:
The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin (producer of Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, etc)
Some good albums with excellent music and lyrics:
Aurora, The Gods We Can Touch
Neil Young, On the Beach
Tori Amos, Scarlet’s Walk
Rage Against The Machine, Rage Against The Machine
Rodriguez, Cold Fact
Wolf Alice, Blue Weekend
Kurt Vile, Bottle It In
Julia Jacklin, Crushing
I would love to see gender split for this. All the lyric ppl i know are women and most of the electronic music is dominated by men.
Weird because I'm a raver and there has been an explosion of women in the scene recently. I think it was dominated by men mainly because it is highly technical and therefore was seen as sth men do better. Also, its certainly easier for women to be a popstar by virtue of pretty privilege, a phenomenon that perhaps pushes more men behind scenes.
For me, most women I know are into electronic music genres and most men I know are into rap. Which is probably the only genre where lyrics are often more important than the music. I'm not sure that's an average experience tho. But I do think the absolute top lovers of electronic music are gay men.
I'm an almost exclusively music person, I'd say 99% of the music I listen to is techno without lyrics or they're inconsequential.
My girlfriend is the complete polar opposite, she mostly listens to these super-sad (to me) indie songs heavily focused on lyrics.
I wonder if there is a gender split on music vs. lyrics.
Music and lyrics have an interesting history because of copyright. There were a lot of historic cases where lyrics were added to instrumental tunes, to collect royalties on them, sometimes without the knowledge of the composer.
Country and folk inspired music and fans of these genres tend to enjoy both.
The Grateful Dead were influenced by all American roots music and had phenomenal lyrics by the poets Robert Hunter and JP Barlow.
I'm so much a music person I enjoy a great deal of music in languages I don't speak :) Vocals and instrumentals working together is the most important part to me.
Fascinating. I've been thinking about this recently.
I'm 100% a music person. My girlfriend seems to be a lyrics person. She doesn't seem to understand why I listen to music that has no words (also, she calls every piece of music a "song", which is all too common, alas). Conversely, I think some of the stuff she listens to is mind-numbingly boring and generic (like Taylor Swift), but apparently the lyrics mean something.
If something can be musically interesting and have great lyrics (like The Beatles), then that's even better. But I'll listen to complete bullshit that is musically good (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Snoop Dogg). But if it's got shit music then it's essentially poetry, and I don't like poetry.
> also, she calls every piece of music a "song"
"piece of music" is a little cumbersome. Given the choice between being correct, and using a word as convenient as "song", I'll probably side with the changing language. Is there any other alternative phrasing? "Piece" sounds ambiguous to me. Am album could be a "piece of music". Or a playlist. Or part of a song. Or just the flute track.
Albums and playlists are not themselves pieces, but collections of pieces. Passage is a generic term for a portion of a song across the time domain, and part is the term for what one performer is contributing among many.
Analogy: "image" is like "piece of music" in that it is a general term that divides into photo, graphic, and more. A photo album is not an image, it is a collection of images (specifically photos). And across art more generally, "piece" could be a unit of music, image, sculpture, or others.
A piece is a unit. Like a SKU. Like a chocolate bar with a barcode on it (piece of music), which arrives in a carton of many bars (album or playlist) and can also be broken along scored subdivisions (verses or movements). Some bars are milk chocolate (song), others are dark chocolate (concerto), and plenty of other varieties as well. Don't clap between movements, only at the end of the piece.
Is "hoover" a genericized trademark used to refer to many other vacuum cleaners because "vacuum cleaner" is more cumbersome to say in casual conversation? Yes. Is it useful to point that out in an analysis of different vacuum cleaners? Yes.
You seem to be analysing words out of context, which is pointless. There is always context. I variously use the words "song", "recording", "piece", "album", "track" etc. depending on what type of music I'm talking about and in which context. "Piece" always works when talking about classical music. "Song" usually works when talking about popular music. "Track" works in most cases when talking about recorded music (apart from classical). But it would make no sense to refer to a song I'm about to play on guitar as a "track". Nor would it make sense to call a solo piece a "song".
My point wasn't really about "correct" terminology, though, but merely that in some people's minds music is songs and anything else (ie. without lyrics, and yes, lyrics, not vocals) is not appreciated.
"Track" covers the whole range.
A technical factoid: A "song" has melody and words. A convenient term for a tune without lyrics is... "tune."
-oid means "like but not actually". Humanoid = like a human but not. Typhoid = like typhus but not. Factoid = like a fact but not (ie. it's not true).
Thank you! I've been feeling like there was something more appropriate for casual vernacular than "piece" and this is perfect.
That's like asking, "Abbott or Costello?"