i'm french and in france lyrics are very important sometimes more than music. We are better lyricists than musicians and in fact have you ever dislike an artist because of the lyrics even if you like the music? do you overcome it?
No, but there are plenty of artists I dislike because while their lyrics are great, I don't like the music, so I can't listen to it. On the other hand, I'm perfectly fine with listening to the most banal or stupid lyrics as long as the music is great (that excludes of course anything explicitly racist, homophobic, etc.).
As a heavy metal fan, it comes with the territory. Once you realize that a lot of it is humor or tongue in cheek, the more offensive lyrics are okay, but there are still some I don't care for. On the other hand, I can listen to a breakup song, if I like the feel of the song. I know somebody who will only listen to a song if the lyrical content agrees with her state of mind.
crap lyrics WILL turn me off of a band... on SHF whenever this topic rears its head it seems to me that most native-English speakers (I'm among them) claim that music comes first and lyrics are secondary... I find them of equal importance... so, yeah, bad lyrics are a turn off no matter how good the music...
I'm exactly the same: I'm looking for both. The only thing I'd add is that I'm not pretentious when it comes to lyrics, and so I do enjoy lighter stuff (it doesn't all need to be Dylan and Cohen). But it's got to be well crafted, as a minimum. And if I find a lyric cringe-inducing, it kills the song for me. No matter how strong it might be melodically.
Compared to Zep and Sabbath, Deep Purple’s lyrics always came as tossed off( though Kiss can make Gillan sound like he has a Phd) and most extreme metal lyrics going for shock come off as unpleasant and comedic and there is a boatload of misogynistic ones that are a no go
I was listening to Rainbow's Down To Earth album a while back and it struck me how disgustingly misogynistic the lyrics to All Night Long Are - to the extent that I couldn't enjoy the song, which has never been one of my favourites in any case. In fact, the whole album seemed to be an exercise in conscious dumbing down as far as the lyrics were concerned - like Roger Glover (who wrote most, if not all of them) had used it as an exercise to write stuff that was deliberately stupid and borderline offensive. What can get me more than 'bad' lyrics, though, is wordless verses or choruses - the Small Faces' All Or Nothing and the Beatles' Hey, Jude are both spoiled for me for that reason.
very much my view... lyrics needn't be pretentious to work... they just need to capture what the song is going for... while nobody would compare Eddie Cochran's Summertime Blues to Lightfoot's Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the former works on its own terms, framing teen zeitgeist perfectly without dumbing things down... actually, they're very clever lyrics in my book...
Which brings the question why so many native speakers rate ABBA? Their lyrics aren't offensive but very basic and crude.
I'm not one of them... I find their lyrics trite, if not downright silly... (their accents are also a huge turn-off for me; and I lived in Sweden for years)...
Lyrics are staggeringly important to me. The lyrics don't have to make sense, but they can't be stupid. A series of non sequiturs where the lines don't relate to the rest of the song can work as a word collage (I'm thinking of much of Nirvana and Faith No More's lyrics) as part of the artists style. It's when the words are just dumb I check out. I'd like Def Leppard a lot, lot, lot, lot more, if the words didn't sound like my cat had written them to a rushed deadline. This lyric doesn't mean anything, and not only that, you can't even pretend it means anything, it's just nonsense and grafitti - vocal punctuation - that makes the song a lesser beast. "Love is like a bomb, baby, c’mon get it on Livin’ like a lover with a radar phone Lookin’ like a tramp, like a video vamp Demolition woman, can I be your man?" "Gotta write a song where the words rhyme Gotta record the vocal at half past nine Doesn't matter if the words don't mean a thing You can be my queen, worship my king" etc.
this stirred a long dormant memory... in the late '70s I was an elementary school kid in Massachusetts... our music teacher taught us some songs to sing for a school assembly so she handed out some Xerox copies... one of which was ABBA's Fernando and the other the Band's The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down... even at ten-years-old I was struck by how puerile the former was in contrast to the depth and poignancy of the latter, which told a tale that I knew I couldn't quite grasp at that age (not even realizing it was a Canadian penning a narrative of the Civil War-era South)...
I don't pay any attention to lyrics these days, as long as they fit the music and aren't clunky it's fine Can't even remember song or album titles, let alone the lyrics
Sure. The lyrics are 50% of the package when it comes to a song written with lyrics. If I dislike or am not crazy about what the song has to say and how it says it, I'm not going to wind up liking it very much. That said, I don't usually find much that's really so distasteful to me that I dislike it. I might not strongly like it or prefer it or choose to listen to it, but rarely is it something I can't possibly listen to. "I'll Supply the Love" by Toto would be an example of a song whose lyrics make the piece unlistenable to me. But, you know, "Surfin' Bird," I'm fine with that lyric.
Dragon singing a song about wanting to have sex with an underage girl made me dislike them even more than I did before. And there are probably other similar examples I could give of lyrics that turned be away from an artist if I thought about it more.
I love T-Rex. Most of the lyrics are pretty goofy and I'm fine with that. However, I find that I struggle with the Zinc Alloy And The Hidden Riders of Tomorrow album because the lyrics have gone cringy in the goof. The album title itself tells you what I mean. A tad too indulgent. As for artists that I wholly dislike because of lyrics, I can't think of any right now but I've a suspicion that they may exist. They'd have to be really bad lyrics though as I tend not to listen much to lyrics anyway. A bad lyric may be something I'd feel more than hear, letting the ole subconscious do the criticism.
I make an exceptional for Bolan/T Rex. He made nonsense lyrics an artform! And it's all innocent, all good vibes and fun.
Yeah, I'd rather listen to nonsense lyrics than something that bludgeons me with earnestness like say The Living Years by Mike & The Mechanics. The lyric for that might be great but the marriage of music and lyric just comes off as embarrassing.
There are artists I dislike for their lyrics. There are some artists that just have a few songs I dislike for the lyrics, but I let it slide to some degree. If I find the lyrics particularly objectionable, the music doesn't really matter.
For me, generally, music comes first. Not being a native English speaker, I can easily ignore some of the lyrics of bands like Yes, which I often can't relate to, so to speak.
