Janszoon

I have to say, I’ve never understood why Dylan’s lyrics get so much praise. I’m not saying they’re bad necessarily, but I’ve never heard anything by him that I thought was very impressive. I’m with you Leonard Cohen though.

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A Night in the Life of the Invisible Man

Time & Place

25 Albums You Should Hear Before the Moon Crashes into the Earth and We All Die

last.fm

Lisnaholic

Yep, Cohen has some great lyrics - very carefully worked out of course. You've probably heard the story about how Bob and Leonard once compared notes about lyric writing: Leonard, sometimes two or three months: Bob, sometimes two or three hours.

Perhaps Dylan's reputation rests on not just what he wrote, but when: he gets bonus points for innovation at various stages of his songwriting life. Some highlights to me:-
Blowin' In The Wind: very effective use of questions and simple images to make us wonder about life, maturity, freedom etc.
Like A Rolling Stone: a jarring outburst of spite of a kind not really heard before afaik
Blood On The Tracks: an album-full of story songs, packed with drama, but with charming little details worked into the fabric of the songs too: "She was thinking about her father, whom she very rarely saw" and a line that Cohen might have liked, "I kissed goodbye to the howling beast on the borderline that separated you from me."


Well, that's just a couple of examples - as you might have seen, I have a whole book-full !

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"Am I enjoying this moment? I know of it and perhaps that is enough." - Sybille Bedford, 1953

Queen Boo

I agree with you for once, I never got the point of judging lyrics entirely on their own without acknowledging the context of the music.

Most songs lyrics are going to be more repetitive and limited in structure compared to what you can do with a poem or a novel, so yeah Bob Dylan's lyrics on their own are not gonna hold up against *enter name of famous poet here because I don't fucking know anything about poetry* but that's missing the point, you're comparing two completely different mediums.

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Synthgirl

Agreed. Lyrical poetry can be great and impactful, but if the cadence of the lyrics doesn't fit in with the music, the music as a whole suffers. And on the other side of the coin, some great songs can have largely meaningless lyrics but they still fit with the style or theme of the song.

Back to the subject of REM, I'm a bit sick of their hits (I could go without ever hearing Shiny Happy People ever again quite frankly) but their whole career has a lot of great songs. Life's Rich Pageant, Green and Murmur are probably my favorite three albums.

Frownland

I too like to confuse delivery with lyrical quality.

EDIT: REM sux

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Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

Lisnaholic

Yep, it's good to be reminded that good lyrics and good poetry-on-the-page are not the same thing. I imagine we all agree that they share this kind of relationship:



Also we might, as Frownland neatly summarises, "confuse delivery with lyrical quality" in the passion of the moment. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has been swept away by Tutti-Frutti-Ohh-Rutti and thought "This is the best poetry I've ever come across!"

(As some of you might have noticed, I've got a fat book of Dylan lyrics which even has a little built-in ribbon bookmark like you get in a prayerbook. It's interesting to me, partly because the lyrics are in Spanish and English, but I wouldn't want anyone to think that I give it the status of the Bible.)

Yep, that's a good song, though ironically, me and my mates always used to think of it as "a bit of a joke", which was often an element in his lyrics. I suppose what I like about SB is the way his lyrics lurch around unpredicatably between surreal, cryptic, simple and childlike, with meaning and nonsense apparently squabbling over who's in charge.
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Frownland is capable of arguing his position better than most of us, so I feel like we have been short-changed on this one :

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"Am I enjoying this moment? I know of it and perhaps that is enough." - Sybille Bedford, 1953