The Value of Lyrics, Part 2: Words for Music

I can name plenty of examples where great lyrics make for great music, well beyond the two I highlighted in the last post. Even so, it should go without saying that music doesn't need lyrical value to be great, given how much of the classical and jazz canons have no lyrics at all. And I'd go further and say that there can be great songs with lyrics that are adequate, even forgettable and mediocre, because they're cases where the vocals are serving a primarily musical purpose. In the terms I've laid out in the last post, the vocals on those songs, and whatever they may be saying, are used as an "instrument" of melody and rhythm more than as a means to deliver a narrative. They're words for music, rather than music for words.

Most of what we think of as classic pop music fits this description; even the best of its kind is commonly accompanied by pretty standard-issue sentiments of love or (less frequently) freedom or regret or late nights out partying. But those lyrics often work just fine for capturing what the music itself is doing most of the work to communicate. The Shazam's "Some Other Time," for example, is a pretty straightforward, unremarkable lyrical narrative of lost love, filled with the most obvious relevant clichés: it wasn't meant to be except maybe in a dream; the singer wouldn't change a thing; the lover's name is now just another word. Those clichés, though, are supporting a pretty terrific pop melody that uses minor-key chord changes to more effectively strike the same tone of wistfulness and regret. If the lyrics were awkward enough to distract from the music, a la Train, they'd be a problem. But in this case, they're forgettable lyrics that still fit the song well, because they're consistent with, and supportive of, emotions the music more memorably evokes.

The point may come though even more sharply with musicians who openly acknowledge that they make up lyrics to fit their music. Carl Newman of the New Pornographers, for example, has been far from shy in saying that "the song is more important than the lyrics" for him and that lyrics have to "suit the song" regardless of whether it makes sense or even "ruins the narrative." And that attitude is clear in a song like "Sing Me Spanish Techno," which is utter lyrical nonsense from the title on down. But Newman makes a great song out of it because he has a fine sense of how to make his words suit the music.

For one thing, the words are still coherent enough in terms of subject-verb agreement, sentence structure and the like. More important, close listening demonstrates that his word selection carefully supports the musical grammar of the song. The verse grounds its melody in sharp rhythmic accents- grounded in the drums and hard strums on the acoustic guitar, but further enhanced by lyrics with lots of consonance. "Picking the glass off the ground" is meaningless as language, but it puts hard consonants right on the musical accents. By contrast, when the song transitions into a more legato vocal melody at about 1:30, the lyrics start relying more on words like "hills" and "refused," with softer consonants and vowel sounds that sound better extended to whole notes than, say, the hard "a" of "glass." All the nonsense words, in short, are quite effective as musical decisions.

Sigur Ros takes the approach of musical language to its logical conclusion. Jonsi claims he's singing in a made-up language called "Hopelandic," but it's even only a language in the loosest sense; the band's own website has also acknowledged that it's no more than "a form of gibberish vocals that fit to the music." That fit, on a song like "Svefn-G-Englar," follows many of the same fundamental principles as Newman's- long, open vocal sounds to support the legato lines of most of the song, with more consonance and harsher vowel sounds when the song briefly transitions to a more dissonant harmonic structure shortly after 6:00. It's the purest example possible of using the voice as instrument, with no narrative content- or even linguistic meaning- whatsoever.

So, after about a dozen paragraphs of rambling on, I can finally get back to where I started: foreign-language lyrics. (Still here, Allison? Anyone else who managed to stick around, you should go read her blog when you're done here.) Since I'm monolingual beyond some basic Spanglish, there aren't any foreign lyrics that can hold linguistic meaning for me. But they can work just fine as they result in vocals that work well as an instrument. I judge them the same way I would any other instrument: whether it works as a harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic contribution to the arrangement.

Often enough, foreign-language songs pass that test just fine. Nothing in the "Gangnam Style" vocals, for example, seems distracting or out of place in terms of consonance or vowel sounds. But given that other languages are bound to have different cadences, different sounds, different norms of articulation, they probably ARE more vulnerable to failing to meet the expectations for "natural" lyrical sounds I've learned as an English speaker. From the first moment of the Spanish song below, I can't get past a lyrical line that sounds, to me, both cluttered and awkwardly articulated, with lots of pleghmy consonants and hard vowels. For all I know, they're trying to articulate something narratively here that I'd find meaningful if I could interpret it. Or I could well be more acclimated to their vocal sounds if I were a Spanish speaker. In either case, I don't think I'm fit to judge the quality of this music, since it may be best measured against criteria that are outside the realm of my experience. All I can say is that, for that same reason, it's not for me.