Lyrics

[tp4tissue]

Does anyone else despise music lyrics ?

Tp4 is willing to conceed that he'd pay money to watch Firefly On Ice, or The Next Generation Broadway by Picard.

OTHER THAN THAT,  every lyric to practically every song is terrible.  It's a good thing there are foreign languages otherwise general music would be unbearable.

[noisyturtle]

Oh man I always thought I was alone in that. I HATE music with lyrics unless it's rap. It's to the point where if a song comes on and they start singing I turn it off immediately. Instrumentals only. Or lyrics in a language I don't understand works too.

And yeah they are so poorly written in 99% of cases, if you allow your brain to listen to the words you realize how **** every song writer is. I genuinely believe modern pop music is much worse than it used to be, but I cannot prove it's not just my old man bias. But I am almost sure of it.

[suicidal_orange]

I think there's a lot of prychology involved in this, some lyrics speak to me and make music I'd not normally listen to tolerable while if I like the music I often couldn't tell you what the lyrics are about.  On the other side I don't like lyrics I can't understand if they're in English (I listen to metal...) and if I'm trying to concentrate it's either instrumental or foreign language else I get distracted, so some part of my mind must be listening.

[Kavik]

I don't necessarily despise lyrics, but I don't pay attention to them. I don't know the words to most songs, regardless of how many times I've listened to them.

On the other hand, metal music sometimes has really cool and poetic lyrics, but they are not intelligible. Lyrics about kings, curses, demons, or one's internal plight are much more interesting than those about love or drugs or whatever.

I like music in foreign languages that I study because I can understand enough for it to be interesting or I can tune it out.

[Leslieann]

A lot of lyrics are put there just to fill space.

What's been bothering me lately is all the chanting such as hey, ho and yo and such. Not just rap, any genre, The Lumineers built a career on this. The reason it's become trendy is producers realized it creates instant familiarity with listeners. It's manipulative and now that you know it you'll hear it in tons of pop songs and it will drive you nuts like it does me.

[suicidal_orange]

A lot of lyrics are put there just to fill space.

What's been bothering me lately is all the chanting such as hey, ho and yo and such. Not just rap, any genre, The Lumineers built a career on this. The reason it's become trendy is producers realized it creates instant familiarity with listeners. It's manipulative and now that you know it you'll hear it in tons of pop songs and it will drive you nuts like it does me.

The only good thing about most pop music (boy 'bands', girl groups, rap and dance) is that it only consists of two or three sections of 15 seconds or so endlessly repeated and because it's all electronic rather than real instruments they are exactly the same, so much like the drone of a washing machine or similar my mind tunes the noise out and saves me from consciously having to hear it.  Instead of being annoyed throughout the day that the 'no repeat workday' had the same 100(?) songs as every other workday (many of them are good, by radio standards) yesterday I was annoyed that we were listening to junk for the first minute then it had may as well been turned off.  The only song I heard was a 10 second clip of Metallica which was played randomly!

Who'd have thought that crap is popular due to producer manipulation, makes sense though.

[yui]

Oh man I always thought I was alone in that. I HATE music with lyrics unless it's rap. It's to the point where if a song comes on and they start singing I turn it off immediately. Instrumentals only. Or lyrics in a language I don't understand works too.

And yeah they are so poorly written in 99% of cases, if you allow your brain to listen to the words you realize how **** every song writer is. I genuinely believe modern pop music is much worse than it used to be, but I cannot prove it's not just my old man bias. But I am almost sure of it.

well i am 25 and i too believe that modern pop music is going downhill especially with lyrics, so i dunno about old man bias, or i may have one as well. although there have been a few exceptions, to be honest i do find that most pop music from any era is pretty trash for most parts, just getting worse as time goes by.

[Leslieann]

It hasn't really gotten worse, you're just more aware of it. As a kid you assumed adults know wtf they're doing.
Pop has always been full of trash and if that trash didn't sell they'd just line someone's pockets until it did.

The good side is that the dinosaurs of the industry are losing control and it's in our own hands more than ever. You can listen to people and bands who don't have a contract, anywhere, any time. You also can make your own a lot easier and cheaper than ever before.

[yui]

maybe we do not remember the floss and shark dance of previous decades so it is why when we see them we think that it was better before, even though it was not, the bad just faded away.
i did not bring up alternative bands with higher quality music as the subject seemed to be pop music, i am pretty sure we are all aware of that part of the industry but getting that on the radio is an other story (cause some of us still for example only have radio in their cars)

[chyros]

I like both. I have a lot of "normal" music, but I also have absolute tons of film and video game soundtracks, which are almost always lyricless. I generally listen to the latter when I need to write, read or concentrate.

[icrchi]

I don't know why the majority of songs are about sex and breakups. I usually like music without lyrics.

[Findecanor]

I can accept lyrics where the words don't have meaning in themselves alone, but as a means to induce a special feeling or mood in the song. It depends on the genre and the song, but of course there are limitations.

There is a lot of contemporary pop music that sometimes use words most as a filler, to have a sound more than anything. There always has been since the invention of pop music. Those "songs" will not be remembered twenty years from now, just as only the best songs from previous decades are even remembered and listened to today.

By the way, when I'm on the computer, working, I prefer to listen to instrumental music. I can't listen to lyrics, or it will interfere with my reading or writing. I like a good BPM to get my pulse up.

Edit:

I also have absolute tons of film and video game soundtracks, which are almost always lyricless.

Here too. Most recent additions to my music collection have been new versions/remixes of vintage game tunes, from sites such as remix.kwed.org or from retro-musicians directly such as Luke Jansen's. I have also backed a few retro video game music Kickstarters.
The original compositions had often been catchy tunes and a good BPM to fit the pace of the games they had been made for.

[noisyturtle]

I don't know why the majority of songs are about sex and breakups. I usually like music without lyrics.

It does seem like the majority of all songs ever written with lyrics are about being in a relationship. I wonder how asexual people feel about that, I guess nothing.