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Are Lyrics Important?




















Jarvis Cocker: the secret of saying the unsayable

Bowie's a master, James Blunt misses the point completely. Singer-songwriter Jarvis Cocker celebrates the misunderstood art of composing pop lyrics

Lyrics aren't poetry, says Jarvis Cocker

Take Louie Louie by the Kingsmen. The lyrics are unintelligible but it doesn't matter: it just sounds right. There are at least 130 versions of Louie Louie out there, but none of them comes even close to that one.

Yet when a lyric and a piece of music really work together, the combined effect is much more powerful than either of them on their own. "We could be heroes just for one day" is a vaguely uplifting sentiment. But when I listen to the song, I'm there. I am swimming with the dolphins. When I'm listening to that song, Bowie has me sold on the whole package.

Because, apart from the words and the music, the delivery of the song is a massive factor in its success or failure. David Bowie delivers "Heroes" as if he's trying to sing the throat out of his body, and the result is heroic.

I remember having an argument with Noel Gallagher over the lyrics to I Am the Walrus. Noel cited that as an example of how you could write any old nonsense and it didn't matter, which I vehemently disagreed with. To me, John Lennon is not just stringing together a load of unrelated imagery. It's an active rejection of meaning. A two-fingered salute to those who look for significance in song lyrics, and to the whole concept of making sense. A refusal to play the game or participate in the charade of straight society, which he felt at the time that his use of LSD had exposed as a sham.

But, although I Am the Walrus dispenses with most established rules, there is one it does adhere to - it rhymes. Should songs rhyme? My answer to this is a qualified yes. There's a sense of intense satisfaction when you get a good rhyme in a song. But beware: it can also lead to some of the greatest crimes that have ever been committed in the name of song.

I Am the Walrus uses internal rhymes, so you've got, "I am he, as you are he, as you are me" and "See how they run, like pigs from a gun". So the end of the lines are floating free. The more complicated rhyming structure gives the impression that the song doesn't really rhyme at all, but, in fact, it's quite carefully structured.


This question of rhyme is where many a songwriter comes a cropper. It's the one thing they know a song must do, and so they pursue it at all costs. And they become a rhyme whore. A rhyme whore will do anything for a rhyme. They will defy all notions of good sense, good English, intelligibility, logic, syntax, taste - you name it, anything goes as long as they get a rhyme. And this can have unintentionally hilarious results.

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Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

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