Good music with bad lyrics VS. Bad music with good lyrics
 

I was at work today listening to some music and the sound was incredible but the lyrics just didn't do the trick for me. I was listening to Minus the Bear's new album OMNI, a band that I really like for their musical compositions, but their lyrics are sub-par most of the time in my opinion.

So I wanted to hear your opinion of these two subjects

wow my topic title is messed up. its supposed to say "good music w/ bad lyrics, good lyrics with bad music" oops

:stupid:

Fixed. Let me know if that works for you.

yep yep thanks for doing that for me!

Is this a question of choosing between the two? If it is, my choice would always be good music with bad lyrics. Music is more important to me than lyrics and it has its own language that speaks more directly to the feelings than words. Besides, I can always ignore the lyrics, but I can't ignore bad music even if it's accompanied by some good words. And I'm not even sure if I would be able to appreciate the words when the music cheapens them. It is so easy for words to lose their meaning. Anyway, in that case I would rather read poems.

My collection is probably littered with "good music with bad lyrics" because I barely pay attention to vocals. I imagine just about everything Les Claypool has composed can go into that category, but I'm hardly an expert on the subject...

As a lyricist, I really enjoy a good lyric, hence why my favorite artists are Otep and Devin Townsend. Although a good riff can easily override bad lyrics

Good music can redeem bad lyrics (see: a lot of prog) but if the music is terrible I don't care what the lyrics are saying.

What you said.

I agree the lyrics in that album are a disappointment. I think the balance of music to lyrics was fine in their previous albums, but with this one it just seems to need to grow up a bit in the lyrical department.

Yes! This! Every word. :)

Agreed. Though sometimes this can work in reverse too. There are some songs that have such stupid lyrics that it starts to effect my enjoyment of the music. I'm perfectly fine with the good music + passable lyrics equation though.

That's how I feel.

As for prog, it's probably a good thing I don't understand Italian, German or Spanish as the lyrics could very well be laughable and ruin the music for me. Unless they're passable and not anything too cringe-worthy...but I mean if they were really god-awful.

Yeah it's served me well as an industrial/EBM fan all these years. :laughing:

I'm sure you can relate.

Yeah, though truthfully I never paid much attention to any of those lyrics. But now that I think about it, yeah. :laughing: Hell, generally speaking, a lot of the stuff I listen to and enjoy has stupid/silly/nonsense lyrics. I'm not a lyrics guy, I just like what sounds good. Some of those artists/bands just happen to have great lyrics once in a while and I appreciate that, but it's not what I look for.

In terms of prog. I think there's some good lyricists in there. Roger Waters, Ian Anderson, Peter Gabriel, Richard Palmer-James, Peter Hammill. Peter Sinfield's stuff for early KC has some great fantastical imagery but some of the stuff he wrote for ELP was pretty horrendous, I can't believe he actually wrote the lyrics for Love Beach.

Jon Anderson's lyrics get criticized a lot, I think people just hate his lyrics because they don't really understand them which is actually why I like them, it gives Yes songs a great mysterous quality like it's another language and I think these songs would lose their ethereal quality if they were specifically about something. It may be cosmic debris but it works for the music. Jon has written some pretty bad lyrics but only when he makes the mistake of being straightforward (see: Don't Kill the Whale).

Other bands, primarly the canterbury bands, like anything Robert Wyatt and Richard Sinclair has been involved with, they didn't even pretend that their lyrics meant anything, their lyrics are just a bunch of random goofiness.

Greg Lake is the worst prog lyricist I can think of at the moment, which is a shame because he's a very talented and passionate singer.