Is an Instrumental, a "Song"?

When it comes to music, I consider a song a song whether there are vocals or not. However, in my music collection I do divide my music into "Instrumentals" and "Vocals" via a custom tag called "Instrumental" (which is either "Yes" or "No") so I can just listen to instrumentals if I choose.

As far as dividing them, if a song features the voice singing words that carry some kind of story then I consider it "Vocal." However, if the song features a voice used as an instrument (with no words like with some of Enya's songs) or uses words as vocal punctuation within the song (like with the song "Tequila" and the Madness songs "Swan Lake" and "One Step Beyond"*) then I consider it an instrumental.

*This song seems to straddle the line between the two due to the opening declaration before the song begins.

Just my opinion.

 

"Most pretentious record sleeve text" is a thread-worthy topic of its own.

I'm partial to Gentle Giant's "Acquiring the Taste":

"It is our goal to expand the frontiers of contemporary popular music at the risk of being very unpopular. We have recorded each composition with the one thought – that it should be unique, adventurous and fascinating. It has taken every shred of our combined musical and technical knowledge to achieve this. From the outset we have abandoned all preconceived thoughts of blatant commercialism. Instead we hope to give you something far more substantial and fulfilling."

Goals that were largely abandoned by later in the 1970s, as any GG knows!

 

That "despite the title" is doing a lot of work there.

"Yes your honor, but despite the dead body in the photograph, this clearly just a 'room' and not a 'crime scene'."

 

That's great! For some reason I like that one. Very early 70s.

 

I really hope this statement was somewhere very near the price sticker on the record jacket.

 

Interesting thread! I was completely oblivious... now trying to think whether I've annoyed people by referring to music-with-no-vocals as songs... no snark intended, I've actually found this to be really thought provoking.

 

So an instrumental is not a song? That's (instru)mental!

Of course, it's a song. It's a piece of music. A composition. Who says it requires singing?

 

...when you’ve run out of thread ideas.

 

+1

 

Up to 61% yay vs. under 34% nay. So, a landslide so far.

Thelonious Monk wrote Well You Needn't, with a melody you could hum/whistle/scat/whatever. Mike Ferro grafted lyrics onto it later, using Monk's melody note-for-note. Who actually thinks Well You Needn't *wasn't* a song until Ferro came along? Makes no sense at all.

Same goes for Mingus' Goodbye Pork Pie Hat. Mingus wrote the melody when Joni Mitchell was in high school. She had nothing whatsoever to do with it until she wrote lyrics for it 20 years later.

Sticking with Mingus for a minute, Fables of Faubus has words, in the form of narration, even a kind of rap if you want to call it that. Is it a song, or not?

Sigur Ros - vocals in a language unique to Sigur Ros, so no lyrics in the way we commonly understand them. Songs...not songs....???

 

People who can't conceive of a song without a person's voice in it, have a very limited understanding of art. I am not going to criticize ignorance on the basis that some don't have that in them, but then again I don't see ignorance as something to be ashamed of.

Please, this is not intended as a troll, because apparently it's obvious, this could be a surprisingly-contentious subject. I just can't see one's mind being closed to the possibility of other ways of looking at art other than their own, as a reason to fight. I see it as an opportunity instead to open one's mind to a new way of appreciation.

I mean, isn't art itself, a method of opining one's mind to a newer way of appreciating the world?

 

Sadly for your noble cause, 100% of English dictionaries say you are wrong.

 

True songs have vocals. This is not a matter of interpretation; it's the definition.

 

What does "art appreciation" have to do with this? We're talking about what defines a song. It really doesn't need to get any higher-level than that. Instrumentals aren't songs, and it doesn't matter how many people mistakenly think that they are (though it is indeed sad to such rampant ignorance).

 

You didn't actually read a word, and if you did, most likely didn't understand it or have any familiarity with the examples I cited.

Oh well...same old, same old.

 

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While I don't disagree I like the claire torry example from before, I would call that a song (but I think everything is song) it is human voice but it doesnt have words...just sounds...are words a necessary requirement for something to be a song?

 

yes of course.

 

Your irony is showing.

 

When Mendelssohn wrote Songs Without Words he chose that title because the concept was arresting ... the title was not synonymous with “instrumentals”. Of course instrumental music can have a vocal characteristic and there are all sorts of examples of genre labels being purposefully misapplied in a creative way: for example, Sorabji's concerto for solo piano. But these titles and genre experiments are only meaningful because the audience is supposed to know what words mean.

To put it another way: people who can't conceive of a piece of music not being a song have a very limited understanding of art.

 

Great example!!

 

And they're outnumbered here.

What's amusing is that if you've been here a while you could predict who among the regulars would respond "no," stridently, and somewhat arrogantly.

 

Says who? You?

 

It's not arrogant to point out that the word song has a specific definition which you can look up in dictionaries. It seems more arrogant to imagine you know better than the people who compile those dictionaries.

 

No, these guys: