Do You Identify With Lyrics, And Ifso, How?

Beginning to feel something of a sociopath as realizing I dont identify/align with narrator or subject at all.

I guess when I listen to lyrics I tend to identify with the narrator/the person singing the song, but more at the level of imaging myself performing that role, rather than actually being the person, if that makes sense? Most of the music I listen to is not performed in a very 'naturalistic' way, so it's more like watching a movie, and imaging myself as an actor playing one of the roles in the film, rather than imagining actually being the character they are playing? I'm not explaining this very well

I identify with Dusty Springfield, even though she was a lesbian woman and I'm a nominally het although now mostly ace man. I don't even know where to begin picking that apart.

Some songs I can relate to, and others I can't. That doesn't stop me from singing them. I mean...I guess this thread is not geared towards my 'type'.

It's like when Reggie from Black Kids sings "you are the girl that i've been dreaming of ever since I was a little girl". Then he sings, "I'm biting my tongue, two, he's kissin' on you". I don't read too deeply into mixing genders and the gender of the singer and stuff. It's not an 'art form' (?) I'm all that interested in.

I guess when I listen to lyrics I tend to identify with the narrator/the person singing the song, but more at the level of imaging myself performing that role, rather than actually being the person, if that makes sense? Most of the music I listen to is not performed in a very 'naturalistic' way, so it's more like watching a movie, and imaging myself as an actor playing one of the roles in the film, rather than imagining actually being the character they are playing? I'm not explaining this very well

― soref, Wednesday, February 5, 2014 8:32 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this def makes sense to me

madonna "die another day" always played that role to me, so many times i imagine myself in my own music video when listening to it on headphones

i identify a lot with Yonce when i'm singing along/listening

in fact pretty much any kind of music that i like to sing to (sing in my head maybe) i am identifying with the theoretical singer on some level, and this is true of some stuff in languages i don't understand too

I do think of myself as a bad bitch, fwiw

I identify with the singer qua singer, the subject, the object, or sometimes just like the story w/o being particularly able to identify w/it. If the the song is catchy enough, I may just ignore the lyrics and go with something else. I contain multitudes (though perhaps rather manageable ones).

reminds me of the chris rock bit on women enjoying indefensible lyrics: "he ain't talking about me"

i too think of myself as a bad bitch and encourage everyone to

Like, what do sr8 dudes feel when listening to Beyonce? Do they identify with her, that's an interesting question to me.

I don't identify w/ Beyonce at all fwiw, but only because she's insanely rich.

I think there's a bit in one of Bill Drummond's books where he talks about his love of these 50s/60s female singers whose songs are all about weakness, and abject desperation and feeling out of control of your feelings and life, and angsts a bit as to whether it's sexist of him appreciate this music. I don't remember if he talks about whether he identifies with the singers, but I love a lot of this same music and definitely identify with the singer/narrator when listening to it.

Beyonce is singing about the trials within relationships, about having children, about your public sense of yourself, about doubt...it's pretty fucken easy to relate ime

something with female singers singing about relationships tho is also like watching myself in a mirror, a sense of critiquing myself or my past thru the song as well as sharing its emotions, Joni is another great example of this, sometimes i can be her narrative voice and the nob-head she's laughing at at the same time

I don't think I identify with most lyrics at all in this sense. Lyrics interest me more in how they come together with the music to express an idea or a feeling, the appreciation of which doesn't really require identification with the specific dramatic personae as much as with the nuance of feeling depicted in the song. The Hegelian thing about surrender to musical communication rings true for me, roughly, but this doesn't mean identifying with characters in the song but rather with the song as a whole.

I don't know if this makes sense of the distinction for anyone else though.

That kind of makes sense to me, except I would say I'm focused on the emotions evoked, which are overwhelmingly dictated by the music more than the lyrics, in my case, at least most of the time. And sometimes the song, for me, just isn't "about" what the lyrical content says it's about. I may identify with some of the lyrics (probably from the point of view of the persona "speaking") if they support my emotional sense of the song, but am also pretty capable of just pushing them aside if they don't.

the future is giving me hints and the past is mocking me in code through lyrics. the rest of you are all just figments of my imagination

On one level, the interplay of gender and sexuality and relating to romantic lyrics regardless of the gender/orientation of singer and listener is really interesting and worth talking about.

I far prefer identifying with the protagonist or pursuer in a love song, and really have to stretch to imagine myself being the "beloved" of a love song no matter what the genders, because it's just not an experience I've had much. I've always been weirdly drawn to songs where women sing about other women, though, but it doesn't have to be necessarily sexual. (In fact, probably one of the biggest stumbling blocks to ever identifying as a lesbian, even before the whole "shagging dudes" thing, was that lesbian music was pretty universally terrible. Like, seriously, if you have the choice of going to a lesbian bar playing all Ani and Tracey or a gay bar where they're playing house and Hi-NRG and I Feel Love, come on, what kind of choice is that?) But this might just be because I feel like most women write female characters a great deal more convincingly than most men ever do, cliche cliche etc. But many of the female writers whose work I relate to best have also talked about feeling conflicted about their own gender - I was recently reading Kristin Hersh's autobiography, and got to the chapter where she talked about not feeling like a girl at all, but more like a mixed up girl/boy creature who was both and neither, and I was just "Oh god, another one. Am I just drawn to them?" But oddly many of the woman to woman songs I've related to the most are singing about sisters - I don't even have a blood sister. But actual sisters are far far complicated and complex relationships than the whole "~Sisterhood~" thing that gets much abused in some circles.

The Bill Drummond thing is interesting, and I appreciate that he interrogates the sexism of this (Oh Bill, I L U!) but I think that feeling out of control and longing-for-surrender is something inherent in the ecstasy of pop music, rather than a female-coded thing. Weakness and abject desperation in the face of romantic feelings or rejection... hmmm, this is a trope in music and lyrical poetry of many genders throughout time. I would only worry if someone were only drawn to it in female artists, and ignored the male artists that mined the same vein? With Drummond, I doubt that's the case.

I am not going to get into the semantics of "bad bitches" yet again on another thread. The word is highly gendered and codes differently in the mouths of women and gay men vs straight men. There's a difference between identifying and co-opting sometimes, and I don't know that it's really possible for anyone to experience the power of a highly charged word (like bitch) either positively or negatively, when they themselves have never been on the receiving end of it in its original sense.

I don't think I identify with most lyrics at all in this sense. Lyrics interest me more in how they come together with the music to express an idea or a feeling, the appreciation of which doesn't really require identification with the specific dramatic personae as much as with the nuance of feeling depicted in the song. The Hegelian thing about surrender to musical communication rings true for me, roughly, but this doesn't mean identifying with characters in the song but rather with the song as a whole.

This is really interesting to me, and I'd like to read more like this. Like, it's the entire situation depicted in the song which you are appreciating, rather than any specific character embedded within that situation? Or have I got that completely wrong?

Argh argh argh, I need to dig out this quote (from Hersh again) about lyrics, which I absolutely love:

Songs... don't commit to linear time - they whiz around *all* your memories, collecting them into a goofy pile that somehow seems less goofy because it's set to music. Songs're weird; they tell the future and they tell the past, but they can't seem to tell the difference.

Love that bolded bit, that always described the best lyrics to me.

Great thread.

It's rare for me to identify with purely lyrics qua lyrics; when I do identify, it's with more like empathy at the emotion that's being inspired in me, which may be, and often is, more to do with musical factors - melody, harmony - but not always. Obviously they're symbiotic; take the same words and sing them differently and I may care for them a lot of not at all.

Seldom like third-person commentaries - mid-90s Blur, Kinks, etc - though sometimes I can appreciate the craft or observation of politics (Common People - though that's about the narrator's emotion, and empathy with it, maybe).

Often it's a bit of projection; when Mark Hollis sings "versed in Christ should strength desert me", I don't identify specifically (as an atheist not versed in Christ), but I can understand the emotion being expressed. It's about projection and empathy with emotions I've not felt, or fear, or remember but vaguely. And that's as much about his he sings if as what is sung. Wtf does "motorcycle emptiness" 'mean' literally? I dunno, but that voice and that melody makes it resonate as a (near abstract) phrase with me on an emotional level.

Weird phone typos.

i identify w/regulate by warren g

from another thread:

For years I read fiction and poetry with the expectation that “connections” with the material were besides the point. I’d empathize with characters and scenarios and study the prose rhythms and mimic them in my own work but that’s it. When I told a friend I was reading George Eliot and h/she would say “Ugh, no, I can’t relate,” I’d recoil. I’d think “What does that have to do with anything? Can’t you use your imagination and enter this complicated mid 19th century rural world?”

When I accepted my sexuality I realized these responses were in part stunted. For some novels and poems my neutrality stemmed from my inability to point at a heterosexual romance and “relate” to it. To some extent I still do it and as some of you know I’m still loath to consider intentions as a valid way to judge work, but I’m aware. For a gay Hispanic man in his thirties the act of reading demands a constant negotiation among contrary impulses, animal curiosity about the way literature is assembled, and awareness of privilege. I still have a lot to learn.

Lyrics are both more and less complicated. "Less" because thanks to my graduate degree from the Bernard Sumner School of Verse Writing I trust a vocalist's timbre (at the very least) and an eye for the arresting image regardless of logic, "more" because I admire many songwriters precisely because their lyrics serve the music and are beautiful in their own right.

"Relating" to them is another matter entirely.

as soon as i began writing songs, i also began identifying with the writer of any song i heard. we used to have lengthy discussions in my band about whether the drums should be mixed from the drummer's perspective (snare and hat on the left, floor tom on the right) or the audience perspective (i.e. the reverse). our drummer would fight for the former; the rest of us would want the latter. in the end, who really cares?, but that was basically the drummer wanting to identify with himself. i identify with writers and with singers, who, if they're not the same person, often are the writer's avatar. i like to insert myself in any song as i like as writer and performer, which is to say, i don't think i'm identifying with the lyric so much as i'm identifying with the creation of the lyric. but also the music. it's hard-to-impossible for me to separate lyric and music. what i like about lyrics tends to be less what they say and more how they use the language and grammar of music to say it.

the "identification" for me is part fantasy, but also part studying from within. it makes no difference if the singer is male or female, young or old, or singing in my language. i have been madonna, i have been patrick leonard, i have been neil young, i have been miranda lambert, i have been sky ferreira, i have been max martin. it makes all the difference in the world, though, if i like the song. if i don't, the fantasy goes cold, fast.

I

go back and forth between identifying with subject and object depending on circumstances I will would describe

except I can find no pattern to it, Nico version of I'll keep it with mine has been both, same for Summertime

normally I identify with the subject; if I identify with the object it's actively uncomfortable (sung *at* is probably closer to the feeling), and if a song switches from subject to object for whatever reason it's enough to make me never be able to hear it again. (right up there with "it reminds me of an ex" and "I reviewed it and I am embarrassed about the review")

there's no easy, single answer here. more often than not, i look at lyrics as crafted things existing outside the author. they inevitably express an authorial sensibility, but that sensibility isn't necessarily expressed in a direct manner. it doesn't matter to me whether or not stephen merritt really hates the california girls (or whether thurston moore really wants to kill them). i'm more interested in what's revealed by the artistic choices, what the artist thinks is funny, valuable, contemptible or whatever.

another way to put this is to say that i relate not to the characters and situations depicted in songs - or even to their implied narrators - but to the authorial mindset behind them. i suppose this comes very close to BB's I don't identify with either singer or subject, I just listen to them as little stories or vignettes, but i wanted to place emphasis on the extent to which (authorial) identification is still important.

but that's just a rule of thumb. the more precisely and poignantly a lyric seems to express or portray something relatable, the more i DO get sucked into the foreground story. whether it's killer mike or belle & sebastian, i'm not immune to identification with the story told (subject or object, it depends).

the subject/object distinction seems irresolvable to me. shel silverstein's "the ballad of lucy jordan" devastates me (at least when sung by marianne faithfull) because i so strongly identify with the object, the "she". the POV voice matters only when i notice how lucy's story is being framed and to what end, and i'm usually too caught up in the surface color to notice such things.

when i listen to liz phair's exile in guyville, otoh, i'm much more likely to identify with the voice, the protagonist, the unnamed "i". though she tells the tale, i suppose she's also ultimately the albums's object, the character most prominently portrayed. whatever the case, i can just as easily relate to teller as tale, and deciding where to place that emphasis is a big part of songwriting, imo.

on further reflection (well, re-reflection, I've written about this before) it's more complicated. for instance "call your girlfriend" is unlistenable because I identify with the girlfriend

speaking of subject/object and liz phair, i have to mention "rocket boy" as an example of how foggy the intersection gets. the song is ostensibly about its object, the titular boy, but spends at least as much word-time on self-portraiture, the "i" lens through which he's viewed. the song KILLS ME, but i'm not sure i relate to either. i relate to the music, the colossal yearning and sadness expressed in the sounds and chord changes, something that might just as well exist if it were about anteaters or even instrumental. feelings are hard to take apart.

i realize that this is a lyrics thread, so i overstepped myself with that "or even instrumental". the lyrics are important. the songs hangs on "now you're just my rocket" and the chorus' "when are you gonna land", and the hook is clearly subjective, the narrator's desire. still, the music is doing 90% of the work. it's what makes the lyrics mean something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkQ2tQ4aY2E&feature=player_embedded

i relate to the music, the colossal yearning and sadness expressed in the sounds and chord changes, something that might just as well exist if it were about anteaters or even instrumental. feelings are hard to take apart.

This. OTM.

Alfred, I'm really really glad that you reposted that, because I do remember you talking about all that from the last time we had this discussion (though I couldn't for the life of me remember what thread it was on, and where.) But that post and your observations in it have stayed with me and resonated over time.

Katherine, you make really good points. And I love that you brought up the example of that song, because it's so complicated (and I kinda like how uncomfortable it makes me feel) because I think it's intentional(?) not knowing if you are supposed to relate to the "you" in the song or the "girlfriend." I have at some point been every person in that situation and can relate to all three points of view, but it's still the pain of having been the "girlfriend" too often that both makes it difficult to listen to, but gives the song its emotional kick.

fact checking cuz, you actually bring up an interesting point. Like how, when you cover a song, and have to portray it from the inside, how that can change your relation to lyrics. (Mostly because when I've covered songs, I don't usually want to duplicate the exact scenario and emotions and "OMG, this is exactly the emotions I want to portray!" as shift and change the emotions or mood or slant slightly or overtly, and thus change the meaning of the lyrics.

I selected some other option

a) I listen to lyrics, for me they can be the most important part of the song, and they have to be good if the record is gonna get more than a couple listens. Cannot understand people who do not listen to lyrics. That is like saying "I watch films but don't pay attention to the dialogue". For most of my life I couldn't enjoy instrumental "rock" music, because I felt no lyrics was a cop-out. (Still can't enjoy post-rock.)

b) Unintelligible lyrics are awesome. I love when I can only make out a snatch of something here or there and the rest is obscured. That is a good sound for rock music.

c) I don't ever identify with "narrator" or "you" and I never have. The singer is singing about somebody else and I derive aesthetic enjoyment from them describing their experience. Who I am does not factor into that appreciation. I don't like the "Bow down bitches" line in "***Flawless" but that's because I don't think the pop star/monarch metaphor is very interesting.

Great thread idea. I went with I don't identify with either singer or subject, I just listen to them as little stories or vignettes but more in line with Branwell's "poetical/literary/good combination of words" clarifier.

I definitely mean "narrator" rather than "author".

I think I actually do find myself identifying (or wanting to identify) with the author a lot of the time, in that lyrics often get me thinking about why they chose to express these sentiments/ideas in this particular way, that sort of thing just interests me.

I don't ever identify with "narrator" or "you" and I never have.

I have wasted my life writing songs that address flamboyant goon tie included exclusively :(

Just cuz I can't feel you doesn't mean I don't care for you

I hope one of you writes that one down.

in my version of the song using that line it's sung by the Frankenstein monster and it's the saddest song of all time

I identify with lyrics that make me feel some type of way

Some lyrics demand identification to be enjoyed: when Katy Perry sings "you held me down, but I got up", the pleasure comes from imagining yourself as the one challenging her adversaries; nobody who enjoys that lyric is identifying with the person holding her down. Except maybe whiney

I listened to instrumental music or music with unintelligible lyrics so I could multitask and read at the same time. I would listen to New Order repeatedly, not really being able to articulate why they were my favourite band, but every time I heard them I noticed more and more things in Bernard’s lyrics, even if I couldn’t understand them.

Then I would listen to Joy Division because of the New Order connection, but it was only later I would appreciate Ian Curtis in his own right. They would’t be the sort of lyrics that I would have consciously decided to seek out.

Then I’d listen to A Certain ration bcos of the factory connection. I couldn’t really tell you anything about their lyrics. And so it went on, one band would lead to another, getting into something new every month or so, and another band would be shuffled into rotation. I am going somewhere with this, I promise!

So now I do a lot of my listening on shuffle and somebody like John Grant will come on, who I’ve got on my iPod because it was produced by one of GusGus, and suddenly a lyric that I’d never paid much attention resonates with me so hard that I have to go back and relisten to it again and again and suddenly I’m playing the John Grant album on a loop and singing along to the songs in my head.

I find that when I’m singing something that for the duration I become the singer - not the same person, but that the song is mine, I wrote it, and even if actual details about what they are singing about doesn’t relate exactly to me it’s coded - almost like the lyrics are saying one thing, but because I’m the song I know they actually mean something different, something I didn’t know how to express any other way.

*A Certain Ratio, oops

I think, as a teenager, I used to force myself to think I related to lyrics more than I really did. For years I pretty much just listened to Jens Lekman and it's quite easy when yr a 15 old to pretend that you're a super romantic, misunderstood spurned man, and that his lyrics really really chimed with how I saw the world. in reality I was a frustrated boy who spent most of his time hating life and wanking. So I think I grew out of that kind of identification. I listen to house/techno far more than anything else these days so lyrics don't figure into the equation so much. Which doesn't mean that I don't care about them any more, just that I'm less focused on them.

I was thinking the other morning about why I love Heartland so much; I don't think we're meant to identify with them a huge amount (though if their writer wants to dispute that then I'm open to discussion)but you, or at least I, find yourself (/myself) becoming the characters somewhat...not sure what I'm getting at here other than pointing out that singing "The stony hiss of cockatrice has cast us into serfdom/I close my eyes and spur Imelda down the mountainside, for a liberated Spectrum!" is a really fun thing to do in the shower.

as far as the subject/object thing goes, i want to mention leonard cohen's "suzanne". going on the text alone, it's hard to argue convincingly that the song is more about "her" (titular suzy), than the "you" to whom the narrator addresses himself (and i'm saying "him" for only the most obvious reasons). after all, the lyrics conclude with "and you know that you can trust her / for she's touched your perfect body with her mind." this said as though "you" were ultimately the subject. but that's wrong, the song is wrong, leonard's wrong.

as far as my own emotional identification is concerned, suzanne is the only character onscreen. i see her, of course, from the song's narrative vantage and understand that she only exists (relative to me) from that vantage. nevertheless, its she to whom my heart clings. i don't care about the narrator's lovestruck woes, don't care how that narrator relates to cohen as author. i see only suzanne, and frankly wish everyone else would excuse themselves from view.

which only means that it's a good song, ftr

interesting thread, thanks BB. kind of timely for me because i feel like my whole relationship with lyrics has changed as i've gotten older, or maybe it hasn't changed and instead i've just clarified it a little more. for while i thought i was squarely in the "i don't give a shit about lyrics" camp, just hearing voice as sound without any relationship to the words, but now for me that's just not the case. it could be the type of music i used to mostly listen to when i felt that way - mostly jazz & experimental music, and the change could've been sparked over the past 5 years as i've just kind of really deepened a connection to more lyrically-based music, singer-songwriters, country music, folk music.

i probably vote the first option, that i usually identify with the singer/narrator. really fascinating to read the gendered/racialized aspects people are talking about. i'll freely admit that singers/lyricists i most strongly identify with are certainly masculine - bill callahan, dylan, neil young, townes van zandt, leonard cohen, kris kristofferson, george jones. callahan especially really changed how i relate to words and lyrics and how they're sung. there's joni mitchell too who has been a huge presence in my life recently and i do identify with her.

w/ the exception of callahan none of these voices are hyper-masculine, though, even callahan hasn't really had the super-deep male baritone until the past 8 years or so. i rarely identify w/ hyper-masculine voices whether they are coming from a machismo kind of place or are something super-deep like johhny cash. i listen to a lot of cash but it's more of an admiration and appreciation rather than identification.

pitchfork get's shat on here all the time obviously (by myself too), but i really enjoyed this piece from a couple years ago about gender and musical identification - http://pitchfork.com/features/resonant-frequency/8789-you-masculine-you/, the writer talks about grimes and bill callahan and his relationship to each of them as affected by gender. it's kind of rambling piece but there were some things that spoke to me in it.

at the age of 40 I still fundamentally do not get what "identifying with something" means. Do people really imagine they are characters in songs or films for that matter?

their band could be my life

Thanks, all, for your thoughtful answers (to my question – I'm mostly ignoring the thread's kick-off).

I didn't meant to suggest that lyrics and poetry are made of the exact same stuff. As soon as you set words to music, they are transformed by it (and this goes both ways, of course); they are no longer 'just words'. That said, grafting them onto a purely verbal medium (in an album review, for instance) remains a perennial possibility – lyrics can be quoted without being sung, and some lend themselves quite well to pixels or paper. So while I tend to think of lyrics in terms of consubstantiality (words and music, forever and ever), there's an underlying flightiness and a fragility to this encounter that, in many cases, makes it all too easy to divorce one element from the other, ushering us back to square one.

The musicality of poetry is an even thornier affair… Eliot, who not uncoincidentally wrote The Four Quartets and an essay titled 'The Music of Poetry', had a fine ear, especially in his earlier works (although you could argue that the perceived clunkiness of some of his later poems was deliberate – prosaic phrasing as a means of approximating high modernist dissonance). At the most fundamental level, the musicality of poetry also happens to be what makes poetry, well, poetic (pace less common strains meant for the eyes), hearkening back to the Orphic/Sapphic model: a noticeable emphasis on the phonetic potential of language and the invention of structures that override or at the very least play with conventional discourse. At its best (in my estimation, at least) poetry appears to supply its own music, which ties into fgti's comment about lesser works being more pliable from the composer/musician's perspective: the lacunae call for a semblance of completion.

I don't really know where I'm going with this…

Oh, and funny you should mention 'Dover Beach', Lily. Samuel Barber made a setting of it – it was one of his very first compositions, if memory serves.