bernard sumner?!

"True Faith" has some personal profundities but I'm the last person to judge the 'good-ness' of lyrics tbh

When Bernard Sumner said "Love is found in the east and the west/but when love is at home, it's the best," I FELT that.

Well, then at best you can say that you can't separate what you consider poor writing from the song's sublimity, which means that better lyrics may cause it to collapse.

I would agree with this, and think it's really what makes new order unique.

I love NO as much as the next guy, but that feels like some serious rationalizing there. Unless you're Andrew WK or Icona Pop, your song would probably be improved by better lyrics.

"Regret" starts out promising, then he hits the chorus and that first couplet just saps all his lyrical momentum: "I would like a place I could call my own / Have a conversation on the telephone."
I do imagine him writing his lyrics in the spirit of that (awesome) Steve Albini quote, like "yep, that'll do"

it really is something a friend and I used to discuss all night in the mid-eighties though - there's a flatness of aspect in sumner's lyrics that seems so designed. like he's so genuinely uninterested in writing well that it becomes part of the aesthetic

the great thing is that all of them write lyrics that are as flat and pat as Barney's, so "fuck it, let him do the work" was as good an approach as any

At the risk of me being Mr. Fucking Obvious, we do have to remember that when Sumner started performing with this group of people in general, he wasn't providing the words. This is as close to an accidental role as can be imagined.

And yet I agree that there is something guileless and sincere in the crapness of the lyrics which draws you into sharing the emotion - NO make me cry quite often in ways that bands with "better" lyrics don't. It's like talking it over with a friend who you know wants to empathise but can't express it in poetic ways, rather that standing in awe of a great artist.

Tbh this is the kind of lyrical gormlessness Noel Gallagher got a lot of grief for; way worse than Sumner at any point

hm could it have anything to do with LG’s evident stupidity and immense, overweening ego, I wonder

LG /= NG

In high school listening to Sumner sing, "Oh, you've got green eyes/Oh, you've got blue eyes" after a couple years appreciating Natalie Merchant's pearly profundities was a revelation. I needed to hear the two extremes to find an alternative, I guess.

"Regret" starts out promising, then he hits the chorus and that first couplet just saps all his lyrical momentum:

but you love "Regret" anyway, no?

xxp LG delivered the lines tho

LG’s stupidity meant he was able to sell NG’s lines convincingly; he couldn’t tell they were terrible, just that they had the cadence of real lyrics

"Regret" starts out promising, then he hits the chorus and that first couplet just saps all his lyrical momentum: "I would like a place I could call my own / Have a conversation on the telephone."

Interesting. I hated "Regret" - it was top 10 in Canada and it sucked all the air out of the room every time it came on the radio in 1993. I never thought of lyrics as the problem, though. I actually find that couplet memorable and somewhat evocative in and of itself. (I generally agree with xzanfar about Sumner's voice.) For clunky lyrics in a song I can actually enjoy, I always think of "And I'm not the kind that likes to tell you/Just what you want me to/You're not the kind that needs to tell me/About the birds and the bees" from "Age of Consent". (I like the tune and backing musical track despite the lyrics. I don't think this can be rationalized into some argument for why the bad lyrics are essential to the composition.)

Maybe it’s because Barney expresses some quite complex emotions despite the plodding word choices. e.g. “Temptation”, “Your Silent Face”, “True Faith”, “Run”, even “Waiting for the Sirens’ Call”. Or maybe the lyrics shed their banality when you’re singing along to such great music.

Here comes love
It's like honey
You can't buy it with money

"As it Was When It Was" has great lyrics. Although I must confess when I first heard the line "I always thought....we'd get along like a house on fire" it bothered me because it seemed like the kind of banal thing that someone would drop into everyday conversation as opposed to a more inventive phrase that a genuine "writer" or "poet" might use. After a few listens however, I had a complete volte face as I saw its normality as a sign of strength - Bernard was "everybloke" while simultaneously being part of an amazing band with a fantastic if tragic legacy, signed to a fascinating and absurd record label!

There is a thread here somewhere, I will try to search & link to it, where I posed the question "why so we expect more of indie lyricists than those of other musical genres?" and Nick Dastoor responded with "because they are our fwiends" and I think he may have hit the nail on the head...there is that familiarity and closeness - many posters are or have been in bands and I guess there is maybe occasionally that completely understandable twinge of jealousy when you're sitting writing astounding rhyming couplets in your student garret and lugging your equipment up and down fire escapes of toilet venues to gross indifference only to see *this guy* succeed with *that*...until perhaps you realise that *that* was possibly what made him so good in the first case.

How could I fail to give her
When she cried such a lot?

when a seemingly random shitpost becomes one of the best threads going

So don't tell me about politics
Or all the problems of our economics
When you can't look after what you can't own
You scream and shout all day long

The awkwardness of his lyrics is what I love about them.

When you can't look after what you can't own

^^ see this is the kind of accidental truth over which Sumner occasionally stumles

A lot of posts are basically saying the same thing, that despite his lyrics being objectively ‘bad’ - clunky reaching for rhymes, a reliance on cliches and banalities, ill thought out analogies (I mean yes you can buy honey with money) - they are actually ‘good’ because they demonstrate a guileless authenticity, or maybe a kind of ‘fuck-off’ to a rockist idea of what lyrics should be. And that among the dross he occasionally comes up with a good line (which he does; he’s written hundreds of lyrics by now so it’d be surprising if he literally never came up with something insightful or a good image).

This line of reasoning only really works because of the immense goodwill that already exists towards Sumner and NO in general - you can only like the lyrics because you already like the band, it’s not like you’re ever going to be turned onto the band because of Sumner’s lyrics. And we’re not going to use this same argument for other bands with notoriously pisspoor lyrics, like Oasis for example, because it's hard to work up any sympathy for someone like Noel Gallagher.

Sumner has also admitted himself that when NO started he tried writing like Ian Curtis whom he saw as a brilliant lyricist and found he was crap at it and so stopped trying and wrote what the hell he liked. So that explains at least in part why Movement is such a flawed album in many ways and Summer's vocals are so understated whereas on the stronger follow-up Power, Corruption & Lies he sounds a lot more self-assured as he's delivering lines like "Everybody makes mistakes...Even me" and "You caught me at a bad time so why don't you piss off".

Power Corruption & Lies for me is their best album, and I think it's because it's pretty much at that halfway point between Sumner trying to be Curtis and him finding a new way forward. Lyrically, Curtis is still a presence in a song like Your Silent Face (which I think has great lyrics)

yes, agree with all of that

PC&L also has some of Sumner's worst lyrics, in "Leave Me Alone" for instance they don't seem to be written by a native speaker of English ("we live always underground", "take me away everyone when it hurts thou"), and yet the sentiment in "you get these words wrong / every time" and "for these last few days / leave me alone" resonates nonetheless.

His best lyrics are on Technique - those to "Run" and "Dream Attack" are functional and just poetic enough.

I love everything about Leave Me Alone

Your Silent Face is my favorite ever New Order song, eclipsing even Temptation

I've frequently seen NO described as "greater than the sum of their parts" (that might include this forum somewhere), which seems to me like a polite way of saying "the words are so silly, why doth i love them so". I generally enjoy every bit of NO. The only truly cringe set of lyrics for me is "Jetstream" ("J-E-T / You are so good for me!"). "Ceremony" is my fave and I'm sure many others'... is this the only instance of an NO song with Ian Curtis lyrics? As different as they are as lyricists, the song fits fine in any mix of NO songs (they've sure issued enough of those).

co-sign for Your Silent Face - prob my favourite lyric too, "We asked you what you'd seen / You said you didn't care," so boring on the page, so magical and eerie in the song. I've often thought it was about Ian, which I guess is a crashingly obvious surmise to make.

that slightly out of tune melodica always pierces my heart

I think part of the reason I love Your Silent Face so much was that, in addition to the perfection of the song, their performance of it at Zellerbach in Berkeley in the 80s with Sumner playing the melodica was one of the most amazing musical experiences of my life

I feel so low, I feel so humble

Sometimes in life we take a tumble

You can almost see him flicking through the rhyming dictionary...

If I had to pick a least favourite NO track it would probably be 60 MPH - why sixty exactly? It's almost as though he originally wrote it as eighty or ninety and then had second thoughts or was warned - that's breaking the speed limit, can't condone that! - much as Stephen Hague convinced him to alter the "they're all taking drugs with me" line in True Faith.

Don't much like the "have the devil round for tea" bit either. Hooky's good on that one though, just about makes it bearable. Of course the video's very bearable (arf!)

"Ceremony" is my fave and I'm sure many others'... is this the only instance of an NO song with Ian Curtis lyrics?

maffew12: that and "In a Lonely Place", its b-side which they have played live occasionally.

Zelda Zonk OTM:

This line of reasoning only really works because of the immense goodwill that already exists towards Sumner and NO in general - you can only like the lyrics because you already like the band, it’s not like you’re ever going to be turned onto the band because of Sumner’s lyrics. And we’re not going to use this same argument for other bands with notoriously pisspoor lyrics, like Oasis for example, because it's hard to work up any sympathy for someone like Noel Gallagher.

Also, there's a whole thread of examples in this:

Or maybe the lyrics shed their banality when you’re singing along to such great music.
― an incoherent crustacean (MatthewK),

Sumner has also admitted himself that when NO started he tried writing like Ian Curtis whom he saw as a brilliant lyricist and found he was crap at it and so stopped trying and wrote what the hell he liked. So that explains at least in part why Movement is such a flawed album in many ways and Summer's vocals are so understated whereas on the stronger follow-up Power, Corruption & Lies he sounds a lot more self-assured as he's delivering lines like "Everybody makes mistakes...Even me" and "You caught me at a bad time so why don't you piss off".

― Grandpont Genie

We should note that the rest of the band contributed to the lyrics early in NO's career.

"Everyone Everywhere" works well for me as a portrait of a failed marriage. On paper, the lyrics aren't fantastic, but Sumner really sells them.

Great thread.
Yeah it's a bit of a chicken/egg conundrum. Perhaps, we're just being lenient with Barney's lyrics because of the music and everything this band represents. OTOH I love the mystery and elation that emerge from the combination of certain words and music.
I mean "Nothing in this world can touch the music that I heard when I woke up this morning" doesn't really shine on paper, but the feeling expressed is just so vivid.
As noted upthread, Republic is perhaps his peak as a lyricist. "Special" is great, no caveats needed.

It isn't what it used to be
I wake up every night
on the stairs
waiting for the dawn to come

anyone ever try New Order at karaoke?

I find this whole thread bizarre tbh, I can count the number of memorable Sumner lines (ie, lyrics that actually registered with me/that I can recall off the top of my head) on one hand - the lyrics always felt like an inconsequential afterthought of no real significance. Absolutely baffled that anyone would rate them at all, much less as the "greatest of the rock era" ahead of idk Dylan, M.E. Smith, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, or so many others

You saw my follow-up, right?

there were several afaict but I am not convinced!

but then Joy Division/NO were never huge totems for me, idk. I like them both fine and get their importance/impact but never had a massive personal investment in them as others appear to.

his cousin gordon is alot better!

^^^ a little black spot on the thread today

unique in his own write

I don't know
If we could get lost in a city this size if we wanted to
And I don't know
If I could survive without seeing you

^^ from "Some Distant Memory," a song I adore.

when I first heard new order, I thought that there were two vocalists, a deep voiced guy who goes “a heaven a gateway a hope” and a wobbly guy going “up down turn around!”

Barney talking through a sock puppet

He somehow manages to achieve beauty while writing lines like "You've caught me at a bad time/So why don't you piss off"

I can't think of anyone else who can pull this off like he can, although I am sure there are others.

Best lyricist of the rock era, with winsome voice an added bonus.

― Your sweetie-pie-coo-coo I love ya (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, December 30, 2018

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday to Barney and also to . . . Michael Stipe???!!

Happy birthday, boo!

I feel fine and I feel good.

That's the danger of believing books
And all the lies of those thieves and crooks
We sing intellectual songs of love
From a stolen pen to a velvet glove

I can't believe there's any controversy about Bernard Sumner's unambiguously bad lyrics. There are some decent lines at the very beginning, where I suspect NO were simply completing songs half-written by Ian Curtis. By Republic, Sumner's lyrics had improved significantly—"Special" is the only song with cringeworthy lines ("I wake up every night on the stairs, waiting for the dawn to come").

But in the mid- to late-80s he just had so many stinkers:

"You waste your time, like my money / it ain't so funny, but it's true (Don't waste my money, baby)"

"It's called love, and it cuts your life like a broken knife"

"From my home I traveled far / I drove in my stolen car / When it broke down, I kissed the ground / 'Cause I don't kiss when you're around"

"I'd tell the world and save my soul / But rain falls down and I feel cold / A cold that sleeps within my heart / It tears the Earth and Sun apart"

New Order is one of my favorite bands of all time, but they are also responsible for some of the worst, most vapid lyrics I can think of.

I can't believe there's any controversy about Bernard Sumner's unambiguously bad lyrics.

^^ fixed

you CAN buy honey with money though

Well not in the society in which that song takes place, which makes you think. Has climate change made bees extinct?

Every “bad” lyric quoted in 3x5 post made me smile with fond recognition and I associate all of them with actual human emotions that I have experienced. Are they great poetry? Of course not, but they are surely effective pop lyrics. From a certain angle they might epitomise a certain passionate inarticulacy very reminiscent of my own teens and 20s (surely New Order are a band for teenagers at heart).

Anyway I am sure all of these points have been made above. But I am also sure that all those songs would
actually be made worse with more careful or worthy lyrics.

sumner's inane lyrics are very endearing and only rarely are they actual clunkers

Every “bad” lyric quoted in 3x5 post made me smile with fond recognition and I associate all of them with actual human emotions that I have experienced.

otm

sumner's best lyric is probably "regret" but his funniest (though co-written with tennant) is "getting away with it"

I'm partial to the chorus of "Everyone Everywhere," whose arrangement impresses me; the thing is mixed to perfection.

I remember hearing an interview with Electronic where Bernard summarized the theme of Get The Message as "stop spending all me money, bitch". and that was when I realized that I had probably been projecting way too much depth into his lyrics.

3x5 OTM.

The lyric to Every Little Counts is better than all English poetry from the 19th century

I think the idea behind New Order is pure formalism - fantasti engineering in the right context. The lack of commitment can work beautifully, but where I'm at feels clinical about four songs in and I have to put something else on.

New Order is the best argument against using lyrics in critic reviews to signify mediocrity imo. There's something so pure about the combo of the music and those words and Sumner's voice. I never have noticed the words negatively because I find so much of what they accomplish to be truly moving.

I remember hearing an interview with Electronic where Bernard summarized the theme of Get The Message as "stop spending all me money, bitch". and that was when I realized that I had probably been projecting way too much depth into his lyrics.

3x5 OTM.

well, yeah, we should listen to artists describing their own material