Music vs. Lyrics: Music
In this room of hyperliterate nerd-asses, arguing against the artistic power of words might seem foolhardy. After all, we’ve all come here…
In this room of hyperliterate nerd-asses, arguing against the artistic power of words might seem foolhardy. After all, we’ve all come here to spend the better part of an evening in the thrall of well-placed words. And there is no disputing the narrative tug, the intellectual allure, and the punchy, yet precise brilliance of words well placed.
But this night is music themed. Music is often outside our purview as writers, we who circle emotions impotently, stabbing at them frantically with words but always missing, like a seagull trying to grab a French fry from the sand while atop a spinning unicycle.
We writers try to capture ineffable experiences by unspooling words in pages, or even whole tomes of text, never grasping that which exceeds our reach. It took Proust over 4,000 pages of text to depict the vicissitudes of memory, something that Beyoncé accomplished in 3 minutes and 59 seconds with her song Déjà vu.
Music exceeds even the best writer’s abilities. While writing can capture fleeting thought and render it tight and coherent, music is expansive and abstract. It does not labor to do an experience justice, it creates an actual emotional experience itself. almost forces it upon you. It moves you, whether you are swaying your ass in your office chair or thrashing in the shower wailing atonally.
Our response to music is immediate, passionate, and physiological — which is the exact antithesis of reading, with its slowness, ambiguity, and interiority.
All of which is to say, in the realm of the song, music is a fuckton more important than lyrics. It is the arrangement of sounds, the layering of beats and samples, the weaving of harmonies, the lilting melody, the surging anthem, that makes us fall in love with a song. Not the text pinned to it like an afterthought. Music is the birthday gift. The lyrics are the card.
There is no better illustration of this than songs with frequently misheard lyrics. Even if you thought Taylor Swift was singing “Got some lonely Starbucks lovers” instead of “Got a long list of Ex-lovers”, Blank Slate was still 2014’s optimal song to cry-sing on the treadmill with sweat running down your ass.
It didn’t matter that no one could understand the chorus to Sia’s Chandelier. I and every other female Millennial in existence has sung that dance-pop masterpiece to ourselves while gyrating in front of the mirror a minimum of 200 times, and absolutely none of us know the actual words to that fucking song.
But even when a song’s lyrics resonate with us and stay with us, it’s simply because the music is doing its job. Music imbues lyrics with all of their potency. Very few lyrics hold up when the music is stripped away.
Think back to the time when it was cool to post song lyrics as status updates on social media. That was never. It’s the wackest, emptiest most alienating shit ever. You post a lyric, nobody knows what the hell you’re talking about, your mom comments, saying, “Aw sweetie, you’re not a creep, you’re not North American Scum”. The only people who like your post are people who have heard the actual song.
Without music to enliven and elevate it, lyrics are just poems. And I hate to say this in front of a bunch of lapsed English majors, but most poetry sucks and nobody wants to read your Xanga, okay?
Poetry is hard to grok. It’s inscrutable and difficult.
Music is accessible. Its appeal is immediate. Music is so powerful it can make you enthusiastically belt out words that you find morally reprehensible. We all knew Blurred Lines was rapey as shit, but we still all found ourselves singing I know you want it, I know you want it while folding our clean period panties on some idle Sunday last summer.
It wasn’t the lyrics that did it. It was that banging, carefree, stolen-from-Marvin-Gaye jam.
Music is nearly supernatural in its ability to influence us. Decades of social science research reveals the ability of music to raise or lower heart rate, to relax mood, focus attention, and even improve memory. Facts are easier to memorize when set to music, as any viewer of Schoolhouse Rock, Animaniacs, or the Pokemon Rap knows.
When brain injury patients sustain damage to the motor cortex and lose the ability to speak, they can still sing. Music helps encourage premature infants to nurse and gain weight. Music keeps you from tearing out the esophagus of the guy whose shoulder is grazing your sideboob on the El. Music makes it possible for all of us to drown out the noise of chattering coworkers, blaring ambulances, and screaming children, so that we can sit down to write.
And music can do all of this without the help of any words at all. Some of the most transcendent music is lyricless, from Vivaldi’s Winter to Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, to the early 2000’s techno hit, Sandstorm by Darude.
We are word people. Of course we are biased and inclined in favor of words. But that also means we can recognize better than anyone the limitations of words on the page. There are many aspects of human life that are more instinctual than words can convey. Music is the rawest transmission of the creative human id. It transfixes us, makes us vibrate with emotion.
Words exist to share specific, concrete contents of the human mind. For everything else, every fleeting sensation, irrational moment, bodily experience, emotional surge, profundity of feeling, for everything boundlessly creative and stupid and wild, there is music.
— — –
This piece was originally read live at Write Club, and the Hideout in Chicago. It won, so a portion of the show’s proceeds will be going to Barrel of Monkeys, which teaches creative writing in Chicago Public Schools.
Originally published at erikadprice.tumblr.com.