pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

It's therefore no surprise for a writer who falsely accused a person of sexual assault can also write badly more banal things.

this week i personally have beef with bands getting demerits for clunky political lyricism if they’re not making the “right” kind of rock music

feeling useless behind this computer rn

DeBoer, as always no matter the topic, is asserting that everyone else on Earth is writing based on some hidden agenda

unperson otm. the brief bits I read from FdB years ago always left me wondering who the hell he was referring to

This review made me think of brad’s comment above… is it a record review, or literary criticism(?)

definitely not a fan of reviews that focus on lyrics above all else, even in genres where they're more of a focus

It's just one paragraph though

I'd say that my overwhelming preference is for music without vocals, but I think lyrics should definitely factor in when evaluating a record like this one. I mean it's not Cocteau Twins

i think lyrics are absolutely fair game but are also an easy target, and i’ve come to think over the years that lyrics do not need to be traditionally “good” writing to be effective or inhabitable

i’m not familiar with the quasi record so i’m just gonna talk about paramore:

paramore lyrics are always v plainspoken and sometimes more ungainly than elegant/eloquent but they often still pierce the heart of their subject matter, e.g. “crave,” a song that captures the difficulty of living in the moment as well as any i’ve heard

“the news” is the track that gets reamed in the pfork review and while i don’t think “every second our collective heart breaks” is like fantastic writing i think the song really effectively portrays what it’s like to be constantly aware of every horrible thing in the world and the feedback loop of helplessness and powerlessness this creates in one’s mind. it is also clearly uh in the lineage of hüsker dü’s “turn on the news” which has one of the most earnest and doofiest lyrics ever and that’s why it’s good

I have more questions about the writer's use of "middle class."

How many lyrics to cite in a review is a fascinating problem many of us love to tangle with. Writing a certain Pitchfork review last week, I thought I exceeded my lyric-citing quota (also: my biography-citing quota, a thread for another day), but I justified it privately with, "Well, it's a singer-songwriter album."

i mean i think also that lyrical analysis is important but uh v few critics have the chops for it

I mean, lyrics are part of most forms of popular music. The song is a literary form as well as a musical one.

A lyric for an English major is like a puppy for a Florida alligator.

Louie Louie, oh no
Me gotta go
Aye-yi-yi-yi, I said
Louie Louie, oh baby
Me gotta go

Lyrics can be literary but they don’t have to be—expecting a rock band to provide answers to modern problems (like the review seems to imply) is kinda ridiculous

the entire radiohead catalog v. surfin bird

Brad otm, lyrics have a different standard by which they should be evaluated, I always say my favourite lyric of all time is simply "everything you think and everything you feel is all right all right all right all right all right" (simple as anything, reads as a message of encouragement on its own when it's being shouted on a dance floor, but check the lyric sheet and it's the tail end of an excoriation against individuals who are apolitical; it's a perfect line)

I was taught that composers oftentimes would go to the poetic masters for the lyrical material and quickly find that Shakespeare, Auden and Yeats are diminished when set to music. Good lyrics work in tandem with music, they will be weakened when it is extracted and printed on a page; good poetry works well on the page or in recitation, they will be weakened when set to music etc.

I didn't think there was anything weird about Nina's Quasi review I thought it was good if a little abbreviated

bernard sumner?!

That is so interesting. I've always thought of Sumner as the greatest writer of calorie-free lyrics

It's just one paragraph though

It’s the entire second half of the review. More to the point, though, is how “underwritten” lyrics lie at the center of the thesis for why it’s not a good record (see even the subhed). Maybe it’s not, but I can’t personally relate to that mode of criticism – knocking songs that “don’t meet the urgency of their subject matter,” etc. it is an album, not a treatise.

I dunno, feels like this is a trap set by critics themselves, who for decades have been heralding popular musicians as the “true poets” of their times. By setting up the expectation of profundity, particularly within certain song and genre forms, critics essentially created the situation wherein the lyrics of those forms are judged as “poetry,” not as a separate (but equally important and profound) part of song and language tradition/continuum.

^^^^^^^

Maybe this is part of why, these days, I try to write about music without lyrics.

I myself think it's maybe a little simpler than that. My observation is that music writers often lack the ability/desire to write critically about the musical material, and fall back on passing arbitrary (oftentimes summary) judgements on the lyrical material as a proxy. Quasi's lyrics might work just fine in other contexts, but in the context of This Album they don't work; let's blame the weak lyrics instead of unpacking why the Rocksichord is perhaps the problem

I dunno, feels like this is a trap set by critics themselves, who for decades have been heralding popular musicians as the “true poets” of their times. By setting up the expectation of profundity, particularly within certain song and genre forms, critics essentially created the situation wherein the lyrics of those forms are judged as “poetry,” not as a separate (but equally important and profound) part of song and language tradition/continuum.

― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table)

Boomers really do have so much to answer for.

I don't require lyrics to be literary or even good, I just ask that they aren't so bad that they are distracting and prevent me from enjoying the song

even the idea of what constitutes "good lyrics" is pretty loaded and as alfred alluded to very skewed towards the "singer songwriter" concept...like I dunno, I would argue very strongly that Bon Scott is a better lyricist than James Taylor but a lot of people wouldn't take that seriously

I'd agree with you, which is to say if I listen to James Taylor (not often but bear with me) I take pleasure from his voice and guitar work first.

fgti, I think your assessment is correct in a lot of ways, too— but it also begs the question: if one can’t write adequately about the non-lyric aspects of the music, even in a non-technical manner, then why is one considered a worthy music critic?

Because good music writing =/= good musical analysis, and vice versa. I look to music writing for "good writing" (obv), and broader, more holistic cultural insights.

when i said that songwriting is a literary as well as a musical art form i meant that in the most literal sense possible. the lyrics are there, and they either work (and elevate the music) and fail (or detract from the music). and what counts as good lyrics is dependent on context, of course.

i definitely agree with fgti's last point, too. critics are writers. they aren't there to actually pass judgment on a piece of music, they can only tell you how they responded to the music personally and how they think it fits into a larger social, cultural, political, philosophical, whatever picture. anything they observe about the music, the lyrics, whatever is there to contribute to this ultimately subjective picture.

I think half the time the problem is that critics don’t sit with the music in question long enough to reach a useful or thoughtful view on whether the lyrics work or not - in circumstances where there are many ways in which lyrics can work, as in function, to support the overall effect of the music. It’s easy - and faster, certainly - to treat the lyrics as a separate thing there on the page to be analysed independently from the music, but I think the result is that writers load lots of their explanations for “why this doesn’t click for me” onto the words, whereas in truth they never got to the point of enjoyment of the songs where the lyrics (considered in isolation from the music) could really make much difference.

that's fair. i'll bet that happens.

Yeah, that sounds OTM. I think my specific issue with the Quasi review is that it doesn't seem to be taking the lyrics on their own terms, but rather critiques them for not being what the writer wishes they were: You can’t help but wish Quasi illustrated their nonsensical dreams with more color, or rubbed their eyes harder to produce a clearer vision of the realities they condemn.

^^^^^ exactly

it’s pretty tempting to use the lyrics to decide if the music is cool or not, if one is concerned about maintaining reputation. They can also be a clue whether the songs grew organically or were punched out under deadline pressure.

(Barney obviously rises above such questions, at least in the 80s)

I think half the time the problem is that critics don’t sit with the music in question long enough to reach a useful or thoughtful view on whether the lyrics work or not

this is definitely otm, and a symptom of the imo outmoded notion of "the scoop." The surprise release phenomenon does not really help, either. I don't blame the writers for this, though.

this is in large part why i'm doing slow roll out on the poll, hoping to encourage people to write a bit about what they listen to on their own time. seems to be working i think?

Good lyrics work in tandem with music, they will be weakened when it is extracted and printed on a page;

Preposterous. If that were true, then that expensive hardback of Paul McCartney's complete lyrics that made its way into stores last x-mas season would be a waste of money!

(Barney obviously rises above such questions, at least in the 80s)

_Good lyrics work in tandem with music, they will be weakened when it is extracted and printed on a page;_

Preposterous. If that were true, then that expensive hardback of Paul McCartney's complete lyrics that made its way into stores last x-mas season would be a waste of money!

Yes table that was the joke :)

I picked that up while doing the xmas shopping. I soon realized what a trifle it was and returned it. You could say I was a temporary voluptuary.

I dunno, feels like this is a trap set by critics themselves, who for decades have been heralding popular musicians as the “true poets” of their times. By setting up the expectation of profundity, particularly within certain song and genre forms, critics essentially created the situation wherein the lyrics of those forms are judged as “poetry,” not as a separate (but equally important and profound) part of song and language tradition/continuum.

― Goose Bigelow, Fowl Gigolo (the table is the table), Tuesday, 14 February 2023 15:21 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I can't find it online, but I remember reading an interview with Randy Newman (from the 80s I think) where he made a similar argument to this, took issue with rock critics idea of what constitute good lyrics, I think he mentioned Prince as someone who wrote brilliant lyrics but whose name wouldn't necessarily come up in a rockcrit list of 'great' lyricists alongside people who do the pseudo-poetry thing (though maybe Prince is more recognised as a lyric writer these days?). He also talks about his own approach of writing lyrics as dialogue for a character

yeah, he mentions it in a book of Bill Flanagan's about U2; Flanagan also asks Aimee Mann if most of the great pp lyricists of the 20th century have been Jewish (Hammerstein, Simon, Cohen, Newman, etc.).

someone very important missing from that list

prince is jewish?

no, but I heard his agent is

Terrific: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yoko-ono-season-of-glass/

I (genuinely) like that they pushed much of the extended “context setting” to the review’s second half. If you only have a casual interest in Ono & Lennon, you can stop reading at “… the only difference was that people were, momentarily, listening.”