Post a controversial music opinion

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Something that really stuck with me from school is that it's really hard, as a composer, to set "good poetry" to music. Text that succeeds on the page is harder to marry to music. My teacher advised us, when looking for text to set, to not approach our favourite poems, but to seek out ones that felt unfinished, like they "could use some help" or whatever. Teacher said "this is why people don't set Shakespeare sonnets to music" and "this is why songs with Auden as the text never really work so well"

"This is why Elton John is often awkward" -- yet works much of the time.

I don't know, I listen to Leonard Cohen for the music and singing, the lyrics are there and they're good but if they weren't good it wouldn't make much difference to me.

for the most part the "do lyrics matter" conversation is v dull to me, and has been rehashed here thousands of times. the answer is always: depends on the band

Yeah this is pretty otm

I argue that lyrics always matter (because a lyric that doesn't work will ruin any song always), but that lyric-quality has its own metric that is unrelated to poetry or any other text. i.e. one of the best lyrics of all time is Devo's "yeah yeah yeah yeah yeahyeahyeahyeahyeahyeahyeahyeah" in "Uncontrollable Urge"

Here's my controversial music opinion: People who dislike prime Stevie Wonder deserve harsh criticism.

I remember being excoriated once for saying I dared to dislike "Lovely Day" because of its interminable outro, despite being an enormous fan of Bill Withers, otherwise. You can harshly criticize me all you want. Stevie Wonder's music is still corny and unlistenable

fgti - good post, buy I would argue that I think the examples you cite are all good music! particularly because they allow the lyrics to breathe

though as w those examples that takes a pretty high level above merely good lyrics to pull off

I suppose there's no way you can post without being an asshat.

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, March 1, 2022 8:52 AM

???????

not sure if you're intentionally trying to provoke or what — i was chuckling at brad's near dismissal of the most prominent (very much problematic and imo indefensible) aspect of the band. if it works for brad, great! but as someone who can't stand jim morrison, i'm not allowed to find humor in that? literally nothing more to my comment.

The Doors are far more enjoyable to listen to than Pink Floyd

― joygoat, Tuesday, March 1, 2022 9:51 AM

doing the controp thread correctly right there.

finally: lyrics in pop/rock are stupid for the most part and i would do just fine without them or with wordless vocals in their place. that said, sometimes they're are good. not very often though.

they're are = they're very

lyric-quality has its own metric that is unrelated to poetry or any other text.

I remember Simon Frith's "Why Do Songs Have Words?" being p good. (And again, I'm usually a Fred guy all the way myself.)

I'm not mad at ya FGTI. Just bemused.

I agree with Brad re: The Doors, except that I still cannot find myself enjoying to listen to them, me

I always thought it really interesting/weird that Nico (Paffgen) adored Jim Morrison so much, like thought of him as the greatest of all time, like she could hear something about his lyrics that I can't/don't.

At least one guy who writes about Great American Songbook stuff and lyricists in particular, seems to often discuss the relationship of those lyrics to light verse as opposed to poetry proper.
http://vintagebandstand.blogspot.com/2013/01/interview-with-philip-furia-author-of.html.
Dylan at his best or most typical does a kind of Baudelaire meets Maverick Stanzas Mashup which works great for him when it works, for others not quite so much.

Maybe Rimbaud more that Baudelaire, but I, um, took some poetic license because I liked the way the latter scanned better.

lyrics in pop/rock are stupid for the most part and i would do just fine without them or with wordless vocals in their place. that said, sometimes they're are good. not very often though

Agree with this. Well, I don't know if they're stupid or not really, I rarely hear them.

See also: Do Words Belong in Music?

I'm not mad at ya FGTI. Just bemused.

It's fine. I feel like "disliking Stevie Wonder's music" is so weird to people. I think it's so weird that people like him so much, if even at all. But I get the response and I'm not that surprised. I was dating somebody who told me in passing that they didn't like Prince, and I kinda blinked and realized that the relationship wasn't working

I was going to strongly rebut FGTI's comment about Shakespeare until I realized all the things I liked were really settings from plays rather than sonnets

its ok that people dont like prince it just means they arent cool, sexy or horny.

I gave up long ago the idea that my partner would (or should) generally like the same music/movies as I do. In fact, I'd rather keep my tastes to myself thanks.

idk if that's controversial, but def otm to me

it makes the moments where tastes converge more special

nah overlap is good

So long as my boyfriend has tastes

Where it becomes potentially controversial is where I say it's possible to get married to a guy that likes contemporary pop country.

I don't care if he dismisses Edith Wharton or Jazmine Sullivan, but I wouldn't date a guy who doesn't know them, nor would I bother with a guy whose curiosity is thimble-wide.

idk what the perfect amount of overlap is but it is significantly higher than 0%

Where it becomes potentially controversial is where I say it's possible to get married to a guy that likes contemporary pop country.

― Max Hamburgers (Eric H.), Tuesday, March 1, 2022 2:24 PM (

I'd marry you even if you had no taste for Miranda Lambert.

The joy of sharing a life with someone where your common ground is yacht rock, Motown and pre-fusion jazz.

I'd marry you even if you had no taste for Miranda Lambert.

Remind me to tell you about the time I looked into the heart of an Art Tatum.

i like being with someone who has a more normal/healthy relationship with music than i do, it encourages me to try different things, think about different things

bad music, bad lyrics - obv the worst

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

Neutral Milk Hotel has plenty of support

lol

Remind me to tell you about the time I looked into the heart of an Art Tatum.

― Max Hamburgers (Eric H.),

I'd marry you if it turned out you had no Roxy at all!

my wife has a very different cultural background than me and one of my favorite things is being able to get her take on things i take for granted as she experiences them with fresh eyes & very little baggage, its led to 100x more interesting conversations than relationships w/people who had the exact same record collection as me.

xpost - where are you registered?

My wife and I used to have a lot of overlap in our musical tastes, but lately very much not; and as someone who has a hard time being told (by someone whose opinion I highly value) that my taste sucks, it is a source of recent unhappiness for me. So, I guess as a contrary pov, alignment of taste w/a partner is better than misalignment in my experience.

oh yeah that feels a lot different in terms of being more adversarial, i meant more likes and enjoys music (her) vs is about to read glyn john's autobiography (me)

My ex-bf was a big fan of chart pop generally, but one day I came home and he was dusting the place while listening to Concord Sonata of his own accord and I got heart-eyes

Current bf has zero overlap in terms of music taste but we both tolerate each other's preferences. I think an overlap in video media preference (TV, movies, video games) is more important than books and movies, me.

I was going to strongly rebut FGTI's comment about Shakespeare until I realized all the things I liked were really settings from plays rather than sonnets

I still wanna hear! What's a good setting of Shakespeare? I look to Britten and Barber's settings of Auden when I wanna hear settings-of-awesome-poetry that don't work so great to my ears

goon, that's so true. None of my bro friends follow my contemporary tastes at all, but we bond over movies and books.

my wife has very specific tastes and it has become a bit of a game for me to figure out what music that i like she'll be able to enjoy too.

she digs electronic, latin, and classical music, all areas that i was much less familiar with before we started our relationship. i still have my rock and hip-hop lol, and we can still find some things to share in those genres (was the song on the oc? then she probably knows and loves it. did the rap or r&b song come out when we were in middle school? boom.)

luckily she doesn't shit on my tastes, just accepts that we like different things (if anything, i'm the hostile one lol, but i'm working on it)

Going back to the “bad music, good lyrics”: as a non-english speaker I am more interested in hip hop/rap than folk/country because beatmakers and producers are as important to the genre as the lyrics. There are plenty of singer/songwriters whose work I just can’t get into because the sound is rarely compelling and I can easily get into mediocre rappers if the beats are good.

FGTI: Vaughn Williams, Three Shakespeare Songs (Full Fathom Five in particular)

also: Mantyjarvi, "Double, Double Toil and Trouble"

I think I was a bigger fan of the Cocteau Twins when I thought most of their lyrics were just nonsense.

they aren't?

so insensitive to all the frou-frou foxes that perished in the midsummer fires

it's like you don't care at all about those who suffer from sugar hiccups

Heaven or Las Vegas, diddy bom da bom da bom ba doo wah

I lick ya boom-boom down

My wife and I used to have a lot of overlap in our musical tastes, but lately very much not; and as someone who has a hard time being told (by someone whose opinion I highly value) that my taste sucks, it is a source of recent unhappiness for me. So, I guess as a contrary pov, alignment of taste w/a partner is better than misalignment in my experience.

― Not Dork Yet (alternate toke) (morrisp), Tuesday, 1 March 2022 19:43 (fifty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Oh dear. What sort of 'very much not' are we talking?

Well, to be clear, she's usually very tolerant and cool with me going to concerts, listening to what I listen to, etc... we just happened to have an uncomfortable (for me) conversation a few months back that she's probably forgotten about, but I haven't quite gotten over (she can be very frank, and I can be sensitive, blah blah).