Do You Identify With Lyrics, And Ifso, How?

(Specifically "I Just Want to Love U" and "Tom Ford")

Did you hear them outside of an English spealing country?

In here the only Jay Z song I've ever heard in a club or a party is Empire State of Mind. Maybe a couple of his collaborations with kanye west. I mean people do know who Jay Z is but they are more aware of him as beyonce's husband than of any of his songs.

Which is apparently his only #1 hit on the US charts as well? Or am I reading it wrong:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay-Z_discography#Singles

I think the situation here in Finland is pretty much the same as what Moka describes. The only rap and country tunes that become big hits are ones with a catchy chorus and/or a dance-friendly beat, few people care about (or even know; generally Finns have a good knowledge of English, but rap slang often goes above their heads) what the vocalists are saying. And "Empire State of Mind" is the only Jay-Z tune I've heard played in a club in here too, if you don't count clubs that specialize in rap.

And ever since the early 00s Finnish rap music has been more popular than American rap... Which only makes sense, since the language the rappers use and the subjects they talk about are more familiar to Finns than those in American rap.

Which is apparently his only #1 hit on the US charts as well? Or am I reading it wrong:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay-Z_discography#Singles

This is true but unreflective of his widespread and long lasting popularity in the US. The only rap artists who have sold more here are Tupac and Eminem.

But my point is I'm not sure in what universe something like the aforementioned "I Just Wanna Love U" doesn't have "a catchy chorus and a dance-friendly beat".

So as not to derail the Pfork thread…

To those among us who heavily skew towards the lyrical side of the admittedly porous words/music divide, do you read poetry at all? If so, how often? And if not, why?

I'm a lyrics person but I don't read poetry all that much, and I prefer lyrics that sound like lyrics to lyrics that sound like poetry that then happened to get set to music. If that makes sense.

Like, during all those debates about whether Dylan deserved his Nobel, I saw a lot of people copy/pasting lyrics to try to prove they were poetry, which seemed really pointless to me - they're not going to have the same impact on the page, and if they do, what's the point of this being a song in the first place?

To those among us who heavily skew towards the lyrical side of the admittedly porous words/music divide, do you read poetry at all? If so, how often? And if not, why?

A question that might interest me is "if so, what kind of poetry?". I'm no literary scholar (and obv don't skew towards the lyrical side of that divide) but I wonder if popular song lyric might be a sort of bastion for 'traditional' poetry in the sense of more strictly metrical rhymed verse. When I do get into song lyrics, what I get from them usually does feel qualitatively and experientially different from what I get out of most modern poetry (but maybe less different from what I get out of Wordsworth?).

Half-baked thoughts

I’ve typed this so many times but lyrics =/= poetry— in fact, historically, “good poetry” suffers when set to music, and composers are generally advised to pick lesser work so as to have something that a musical setting can improve upon. Lyrics can be more oblique, take more time to transpire, can have intention coloured by the musical accompaniment, and (in the recorded medium) are performed; the specific mood created by Megan saying “enh” is something for which there is no equivalent in poetry

Good points; the comparison would seem to be limited. The relationship between music and text is definitely what I want to consider any time I've analysed songs.

I perennially cite Kathleen Hanna singing “everything you think and / everything you feel is alright alright alright alright all riiight” as being “The Best Lyric Ever” just because it’s a perfect example of simple-ish words being elevated by musical context and performance into a powerful sentiment that is unique to songwriting, like “poetry could never” because poetry is a different medium

I used to, haven't much lately but that's more a function of spare time than preference -- that said, a non-trivial amount of poetry was meant to be read aloud

The two poems I do find myself frequently thinking of in the context of rock/pop/etc. are "Dover Beach" and "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock." "Dover Beach" because it shares so many of the preoccupations of 20th century music - I feel like you can draw a line from "Dover Beach" straight through "September 1, 1939" all the way to "Gimme Shelter" and "The Boy in the Bubble" and so on, all these apocalyptic songs about people clinging together as the world outside gets worse and worse. And then Prufrock because it seems in so many ways to be the model for what you can do with stream of consciousness and description and storytelling in rock lyrics - like, I can't imagine "Madame George" or "Desolation Row" existing without Prufrock.

I mean, this is probably obvious, but the title does say "love song"

No

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.