Absolutely. I wanted to add him to this thread today - and I’m glad somebody has stepped up to do so. I’ve come to more and more dislike his music as his sneering, cynical, hollier-than-thou attitude now wears increasingly thin. I tried to play his first album with the doo-wop stuff again recently and just had to take it off. So smug. I don’t think all his stuff affects me that way, but it’s becoming hard to stomach him.
He’s just telling a story. The album is called A Night At The Opera - an art form that specialises in over-the-top dramatic-romantic story-telling. It’s an entertainment for those who enjoy it. I’m not a Queen fan and OK - you don’t like it, but I don’t really understand your reaction to the line you quote.
KISS is really bad but I can enjoy some of their music. Zappa's porn lyrics test me. But he also has some interesting lyrics. Foreigner is a band who's lyrics are a struggle for me. Shame because Lou Gramm is a great singer and they could write a pop hook. Coldplays lyrics always sound like they want to sound more important than they are but really he's just singing about how he feels, which isn't very interesting to me. So yeah, bad lyrics can take some of the fun out of music. But I can sometimes still enjoy the music. Rock music is a goofy kind of music so goofy lyrics are just fine with me. Lazy lyrics are not. If a band knows they don't have much to say but they sing about a good time, hey, lets party. Poison I'm talking to you (and listening).
I agree about Sammy. There are a few songs I can stand his lyrics like Dreams, Mine all Mine, but yeah his lyrics have aged poorly as well. Coverdale is pretty bad at times but he's got a great voice and he had such a great band from 77-84 I can get through it. UFO lyrics are middle of the road. Music is so good who cares. They don't bother me in the slightest.
A related annoyance of some current pop music is they come up with a catchy lyric and repeat it into the ground so much that at 10 seconds into the song I like it and by minute 2 of the song I can't listen anymore. Great producers have a way of recognizing this and avoiding it. If you've only got 2 minutes worth of lyrics then they make the song 2 minutes.
Townshend. Of course his first person lyrics are largely written to be performed by someone else and often from the perspective of someone else but even so there is some brutal and regrettable stuff in there. His idea of Everyman is my idea of avoid eye contact and move to the other end of the bar. I still like some of the records and the noise so "troubled by" might be better than "dislike".
I have to be in the right mood for a lot of Zappa's material, and some of it is definitely a bit too over the top/silly to ever listen to, for me anyway. Albums like Hot Rats and The Grand Wazoo are ones I can listen to all day, however.
That's role-playing, doesn't bother me much, it's the "now I've gone and thrown it all away" that grates to me. Breaking news: The other guy's dead. But it's just a song I actually like that part musically and vocally. NOT a fan of the bombast.
That's what the Beatle song Michelle looks like computer translated into Tagalog. Took me a while to figure out what a tresbian was.
tons of hypocrisy invoking the subject of lyrics as to why i don't like a band while digging other bands with the same subject of lyrics
If they wrote it, of course. Somebody writes a song about enjoying punching puppies when nobody is looking and if I think they're serious... yep, that person's a jerk! It's just a matter of degree in how much a jerk. To say words mean nothing is the ultimate evasion and nothing matters; welcome to make up what ever you want land. No thanks. If art can sensitize it can also desensitize and I can easily think of lyrics that are very clearly one or another. The vast middle are not going to be extreme and I think the more lasting works being ones that sensitize in some way, backwards negative things without merit will not last in popularity.
My theory is that rock music lyrics got worse when bands who weren't smart enough to outsource lyric writing to professionals began trying their hands at what is as much a craft as playing a musical instrument. Country radio, too, would be a lot more tolerable if we had a few Richard Meltzers, Gerry Goffins, Bernie Taupins, and Robert Hunters on the payroll. Even the notoriously smug Eagles weren't arrogant enough to pass up a chance to sing Jackson Browne and JD Souther tunes Maybe this is a good time to mention that I'm for hire and my rates are reasonable
That's what I figured, that it was a machine translation of "Michelle" to and from a second language, but aside from the title and "I love you" triplet it didn't seem to match. Wonder if DeepL would do better...
David Coverdale, king of the "ooh lady, you're a mean mistreater but mama I'm a fool for your lovin' all night long" school of classic rock lyrics?
Walked away decades ago. Nasty, mean, and obnoxious. Never was a total fan even back in the day, some great live shows early 70s, Mothers in 74, caught Baby Snakes tour later, really fun for a social music adventure, great as kids partying with scatological hilarity freakouts, but I never listened alone or later , at all.
To be honest, there's always another reason that I dislike an artist or band, but lyrics are important to me. For example, the jump from Ronnie James Dio to Graham Bonnet was just too much for me. Perhaps if Rainbow had never had Dio I might have tolerated it more, but I thought that the lyrics of the Bonnet album (and most of them from the JLT albums) were pretty poor. Unfortunately I'm probably not skewering GB and JLT here as much as Roger Glover - I seem to remember that he was a prominent lyricist during his tenure in Rainbow. However, it's also toe songs themselves that I'm not crazy about - Rainbow not only switched lyrical focus from D&D to general AOR stuff, the music followed suit. So it would have been a turn-off either way, the lyrics just added to the problem for me. I've often though Bryan Adams to be the most cliched lyricist of his generation, but I don't particularly like his predictable hard-rockin' pop sound either. Even as far back as "Fits Ya Good" I thought that he was generic and unremarkable. Compared to his better contemporaries like Tom Petty, he was clearly bottom shelf. I'm not a big Petty fan either but I think he outclassed BY in every way.
