![]() ![]() Whether taken from musical comedy, light opera, big-band or sextet jazz, pop, blues, rock, folk, cajun/zydeco, or even “AM country” music, they are far more inclined to obey a regular meter and, yes, often enough even to rhyme. Because most lyrics must fit the music they are joined with, and music has usually a certain structure, they cannot be entirely free form. Lyrics nevertheless can be read aloud without music or any form of percussion, and doing so can magically transform (some of) them from lyrics into poetry-but not any kind of poetry. It is, in a sense, a form of demur solo a cappella singing, which comes clear in less demur forms such as unaccompanied rap, which, whether you like it or not, qualifies as a form of poetry no less than the hipster-beat “slam” variety. In that sense, poetry is to language art the precise opposite of what instrumental music is to song. In poetry, the sheer artistry of the construction creates its own subtle music through devices like cadence, alliteration, and assonance. The fact that lyrics by definition are set to music changes them definitively, of course, into something not precisely poetry. Yes, and a leaky faucet rhymes too.īut just as there is plenty of lyrical tripe out there, real beauty-genuine poetry-also abides in many song lyrics. Nick? “Well, it did rhyme,” some may rise to defend Ms. As the Marines hit the beach at Da Nang, countless American teenyboppers were singing this:Īnd so on and drearily on, until it ends: Take for example Shirley Ellis’s horrifying song “The Name Game,” which became a big pop radio hit back in 1965. Most popular song lyrics drift light years away from anything one could reasonably call poetry. ![]() It’s time for illustrating the point: Lyrics really can work as poetry. While her writing may be mostly forgotten, her neologism has a bright and shinning future.Īh, but this is no time for nostalgia or snobbery. ![]() Sylvia Wright did that for us in 1954, she of the aging classics Get Away From Me With Those Christmas Gifts (1957) and A Shark Infested Rice Pudding (1969). For this reason, the wondrous neologism “mondegreen” had to be invented for our age. The ubiquity of unbidden singing features in a recent television commercial in which two people, each alone driving their cars in urban traffic, are singing along-and soon singing with and for each other-to Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline.” I’m not fond of the song, and am radically less fond of the commercial-but that’s just me.Īt any rate, thanks to radio and other technologies of musical reproduction, exposure to lyrics has become so ubiquitous that a great many people think they know the words. Some people who do not sing especially well think little-too little, usually-of bursting forth in the presence of other people just because they know the words or can readily access them. Nearly everyone, however, knows at least shards of popular song lyrics. Even fewer-indeed, maybe no one at all-hold poets equal to prophets, their words the stuff of heavenly muses and other forms of divine visitation, as was almost universally believed true three millennia ago. That is not entirely to be rued.įew read and memorize poetry anymore. But their cultural status in most countries has long since been displaced by song lyricists. We still have poets in the Western world, bless and keep them, even in these crass commercialized times when language, like almost everything else, has been dragged down to the sticky dust of the marketplace floor. ![]()
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