Why Are Good Lyrics So Bad?
Topics: the great new Kim Gordon LP, how to write smartdumb lyrics, buying you shit because you wear it, the physiological impossibility of coming and going at the same time, when artists imitate AI.
Whoa! Thank you Chris Black and Nick Catucci for the mention, and thank you Zach Baron for yours, even though the mention was “blogger.” Many thanks also to Adam Moerder, Tyler McCauley, and Matthew Perpetua for their encouragement. I love reading all these people – check them out.
For those of you who’ve just joined: I’m an LA-based producer and songwriter who’s had a lot of different careers within music, from writing for Pitchfork to founding record labels and co-founding artist development companies to developing music tech products to racing the Strokes in go-karts. My latest project is called smartdumb – a music company for music that begins with a question mark and ends with exclamation point. I started this newsletter to describe, catalog, and advocate for this strain of music I call “smartdumb” – music that makes you say “what?” then “wow.” It’s my favorite kind of music. It’s often misunderstood.
Smartdumb music tends to come across a bit ignorant. You might write off a smartdumb song as mere novelty, of which there are many examples: Crazy Frog’s version of “Axel F”, the “Just Like a Mini-Mall” song, Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road”, etc.
But there’s a difference. With a novelty song, you understand the gag on first listen. Setup, punchline, we’re out. Smartdumb is a little more elusive. Are they joking? The mystery lingers a little bit longer. It’s like an old bottle of barolo – on first sip the taste is so off you wonder if it’s skunked. But over a few listens it begins to reveal its depth, and decades later you’re still thinking about it.
Lyrics are the hardest thing to get right in a smartdumb song. They are not clever in any typical songwriter-y type of way. In fact they tend to be mindnumbingly literal (“It’s getting hot in here/ so take off all your clothes”) or delightfully absurd (“razorblades/ galangalangalanga”), or barely ‘written’ at all (“One more time”).
Smartdumb songs values lyric repetition more than other types of songs. At its best, the repetition functions prosodically: the lyric and the melody and the rhythm are all working together in an interesting way, as opposed to the melody just being a mere vessel for words. Two easy ones for non-musicians to understand: “Shots! Shots! Shots! Shots! Shots!…” – because the shots are endless, with the bonus prosody that it sorta sounds like gunshots when enough people are shouting along. “One more time! One more time! One more time!…” – QED.
The meaning is not just in the words themselves. With smartdumb, what the words mean is secondary to how the words make you feel. This is different from moral complexity, i.e.: It feels so good to say this horrible/tasteless/supposedly ‘bad’ thing, though that’s often a part of smartdumb too.
I would go a step further in the opposite direction. For me, “good” or “meaningful” lyrics often detract from the feeling of a song. They take me out of the dream. It’s why so many ‘good’ lyrics — lyrics that draw attention to their goodness — are so bad.
I have a simple ask of music: I just want it to make me feel something. To get me out of the prison of my head, to bypass all signification, and to just make me feel the damn thing. Maybe if Spotify had kept Glenn McDonald on board, he would have arrived at a similar categorization of music using data, listener affinities, etc. But for me the concept of ‘smartdumb’ begins with the personal.
And personally, I’ve always kinda hated ‘good’ lyrics.
I love words, to be clear. I love writing song lyrics and melodies – thankfully, as that’s my profession. I do not relate to Didion at all: I actually love the act of writing. And I love reading great writers. I spent four years studying Greek and Latin poetry, then learned German so I could read the scholarship on said poetry. My closest friends are all writers. I married a writer. I love poems, I love rap music, I love stand-up, I love television advertisements. Writing is a compulsion. It is how I work it all out.
What I suffer from is an unfortunate suspicion of words. Part of that is going to a private American university in the early 2000s, when the dominant approach to all humanities seemed to be deconstruction. Deconstruction, like any hammer, only sees nails. It turns everything into a text – filled with hidden meanings, subconscious supressions, and basically a whole lot of other stuff that the author doesn’t even realize they’re saying. My takeaway from college was: The text doesn’t matter. What the author thinks they’re saying kinda doesn’t matter. Subtext matters. Intertext matters. But not the text. I can’t tell you the plot of the Aeneid. But I can talk at length about how the poem is actually just one big long critique of the founding of Rome and its new imperial phase, and you know the belt of Turnus…
I also suffer from an unfortunate reality hunger I haven’t quite shaken, namely: If you are singing, you are performing. If you’re performing, you’re at least partly unbelievable to me. And if you are a good performer, you are almost definitely full of shit. My favorite artists have tricked me into thinking they’re not artists at all. As much as I value hard work, I don’t like the sound of it.
Lastly: I have serious artist trust issues. I was 12 when Kurt Cobain killed himself. He was the closest I had to a contemporary ‘favorite’ artist who wasn’t like, a fusion jazz player. It’s taken me two decades to realize the effect his death had on me. Granted I didn’t understand mental illness or addiction at the time. But I had spent a few critical years navigating the various sadnesses and confusions of adolescence with Kurt as my guide, wondering at every twist and turn What Would Kurt Do?, reading the liners to Incesticide like a prayer book. What would Kurt do? When the answer appeared to be “Kurt would shoot himself with a shotgun”, well – that was pretty fucking confusing!
(14 years later it would happen all over again with David Foster Wallace. What would Dave do? His death shook a lot of us – the not-great stuff about his person would come out later, but his work was an impeccable moral compass. One person I talked a lot about DFW with was James Murphy. When James asked me to write the liners to the documentary about the “last” LCD show at Madison Square Garden, I ended my essay with the following: “That’s why LCD had to end. As if to say: We should know better than to get our answers from rock stars.” I had to put the phone down when James told me he was getting the band back together...)
At any rate, I’m skeptical of artists who sing stuff with the intent to make me feel something. Which yeah: A pretty tough spot to be in if you like music! It’s hard to feel much of anything when you just don’t believe who’s saying it. It’s not that different from refusing to laugh at someone’s joke even if you thought it was funny. To listen to sentimental music is to be willfully manipulated. You have to be cool with being submissive, suspending disbelief, taking the blue pill. I’m kinda not.
It’s why I’ve always taken notice of the songs and melodies that do make me feel something. Frankly I’m in awe of them, and I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how they work. The first time I was moved to tears was the b-section of “If You Really Love Me” by Stevie Wonder. I remember feeling absolutely invincible the first time I heard “Can I Get A Fuck You” by Jay-Z. I genuinely didn’t care how stupid I looked the first time I heard “Love Shack” by the B-52s – I just had to keep moving.
I’ve noticed that my favorite lyrics don’t read well on the page. It’s not that they don’t feel written, though that’s a part of it. My favorite lyrics need their musical context for full effect – lyric and melody vessel for each other. I seem to like lyricists that treat words like slippery objects – playthings of the mouth. And the play is the meaning.
It’s maybe why I gravitated to rap, and particularly why I gravitated to supposedly ignorant commercial rap over the blisteringly sentimental ‘gangster tales’ type stuff or the more clever, densely referential, supposedly lyrical rap of the backpacker era. A conversation I had with K. Sanneh decades ago about Young Jeezy’s ad libs and Southern rap in general really made things click for me, in sum: ‘good’ song lyrics are ‘good’ only if they sound good.
When I want philosophy, I’ll just read philosophy. When I want poetry, I read poetry. (Everybody should read Jane Hirschfield.) What I want from music is just that: stuff that sounds interesting. I want words in songs to function musically — to take incredible advantage of the simple ways aurality encourages new pathways of meaning. I don’t want to hear somebody trying to make a mistress of Wittgenstein, or to burden a poem’s natural musicality with unnecessary harmonic and rhythmic information. In a way, I want to hear words that only make sense as words in a song.
Which is to say my work life is pretty fucking complicated! I work in commercial music, and right now the dominant style of pop lyricwriting is logorrhea: pathologically excessive wordiness. Wall-to-wall text. I have worked with artists who worry aloud that, if they aren’t singing all the time then how will people know they’re the artist? And I find that many vocal artists and songwriters see “the rest of the music” as a “musical canvas” – something to spray their words onto, rather than something that interacts with their words and melody, whose interactions could heighten the feeling of said words and melody. And they’re not exactly wrong for thinking that way! Look at the charts!
You could argue everything has gotten wordier – or at the very least less tight – with the infinite expanse of the internet. This very newsletter – Exhibit A. Writing tight is a lot harder than whatever the hell I’m doing here.
But as for why songs have gotten wordier, when the relative lengths has only gotten shorter… That’s a fun one to think about. Strictly riffing here: I suspect loop-based, sample-based workflow, which encourages a Procrustean bed of pile-on, is partly to blame. Video-based social media is perhaps a larger contributing factor lately. The best-performing content currently is people talking straight to camera (with subtitles) — that’s going to affect the writing.
Rap is perhaps a larger reason. So many virtues of rap – slippery wordplay, emphasis on timbre and rhythm, free-associative mosaic-style writing – spilled over into other forms of music, but with zero understanding of rap’s musical economy, i.e. a rap song can sustain this kind of verbal bebop because the instrumental itself is repetitive and fades into the background. And to carry the metaphor: the ‘head’ of a rap song is beside the point, barely even an organizing principle. It’s about the breakneck ride from one bar to the next – the mouth solos, if you will.
Because the internet: Music, as an entertainment, now has more than subtitles. Mystery — the magical space between your ears to imagine the artist, what they look like, what they eat for breakfast — is not something fans tend to value as much as I did. That affects the writing. The internet is a visual medium, not an aural medium. That’s going to affect what we consider ‘good’.
I suspect we’re overprivileging the lyrics that look good to our eyes and brain, which tend to be overly diaristic (diaries are, in fact, written) or overtly clever (“it’s bad bitch o’clock/ it’s thicc thirty”), designed with artist merchandise in mind, or some kind of “challenge” to create fan interactions. I am not criticizing, only noticing. Contexts shift. What people want out of songs is constantly changing. I appreciate the abilities of artists and songwriters to meet the current moment.
But overprivileging the meaning and referentiality of words over their aural qualities — which is what we’ve let the dominant technologies do, probably inadvertently — doesn’t exactly strike me as a good thing either. It’s why I’ve always had it out for Rap Genius. There’s a lot to love about the site as it currently exists, and what it does for music culture. But the founders fundamentally devalued rap’s musical qualities, and overprivileged its textual ones (referentiality, cleverness, etc). It’s had an impact.
To be clear: I’m not complaining. Anybody who loves any kind of music… that’s a good thing. I suspect a lot of people who wouldn’t like music like it a lot more now that it is more word-y and less music-y. I’m happy people love Taylor Swift, even if I can’t always find a way in.
My concern is ecological. Music is a tiny little ecosystem. When one species of song becomes overly dominant, it can come at other song species’ expenses, especially in the sphere of music that aims to be popular. I will spare us all the old “songs used to tell stories!” chestnut. But there was a time not too long ago when you could write a song with six verses and no chorus and people still knew how to engage with it, “Oh, this is one of those ‘songs that tell a story’ type songs. Guess I’ll have to listen to the end.”
I don’t think smartdumb songs are in danger of disappearing completely. There are very many examples of popular smartdumb songs. But I’d say that they’re harder to come by, and more endangered than they used to be. Smartdumb is, to me, the most musical of songwriting, which is to say it’s the most magical as well. What? wow.
Protect Kim Gordon at all costs. “BYE BYE” is textbook smartdumb – a packing list that also doubles as a Fluxus performance. Protect TiaCorine at all costs. “You ain’t tired/ your dick need a pep talk” – that she briefly studied physiology should surprise no one. Protect Ka Baird at all costs: no words, just a record whose clicks and blurps unfold like a chemical reaction, or a Kandinsky, or a Rube Goldberg machine. Protect 4batz at all costs: “I buy you shit because you wear it.” Good for him. I can’t tell you how many articles of clothing I’ve bought Mina that never see the light of day.
Protect Mk.gee at all costs. Two Star & The Dream Police might be the first album that sounds like text-to-music AI. Input: ‘Frank Ocean makes classic rock for the Pollen playlist’. If you’re not paying attention, it sounds like music. Upon closer inspection, it’s something else entirely. The lyrics are elliptical and nonsensical, full of emotion but no clear intent. The instrumentation has the blurry, transient-shaved glaze of Youtube-to-MP3 conversion. Faces are smeared. Fingers are missing. What is this?!
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable, and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature.” – Eno.
We have strayed from the gospel of Mark E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ng54cKdkDw