Opinion of uber-intellectual lyrics in songs with incoherent screaming

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I have a feeling your definition of uber-intellectual lyrics and mine are somewhat divergent.

intellectual =/= intelligent.

Would those lyrics qualify as intelligent?

Not particularly. Nice line about theory and practice though.

Which is kind of ironic considering my whole exchange with memphis.

I'm disappointed Gully didn't express disbelief that those lyrics were real.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

BRTD, those lyrics that you posted are somewhere around 'Cold Dog Soup' by Guy Clark in terms of intellectual content and somewhat below the overtones of Shingon Buddhism in Kajiura Yuki's songwriting ('Houseki', 'Kouya Ruten', 'Natsu no Ringo', etc.). Guy Clark has the advantage of having a pleasant voice, good melodies, and being heartfelt, real, and an American legend. Kajiura Yuki has those advantages as well if you replace 'having' with 'being able to enlist' (pluralizing 'voice' in the process) and 'American' with 'internationalist' and/or 'geek culture'.

[minionofmidas]

To demonstrate:

William Butler Yeats in jeans
Got up to play guitar and sing
In some joint in Mission Beach last night
At the door sat Tom Waits
In a pork pie hat and silver skates
Jugglin' three collection plates, Jesus Christ

Townes Van Zandt standin' at the bar
Skinnin' a Hollywood movie star
Can't remember where he parked his car
Or to whom he lost the keys
Full of angst and hillbilly haiku
What's a poor Ft. Worth boy to do
Go on rhyme somethin' for em' man
Show 'em how you really feel

Ain't no money in poetry
That's what sets the poet free
I've had all the freedom I can stand
Cold dog soup and rainbow pie
Is all it takes to get me by
Fool my belly till the day I die
On cold dog soup and rainbow pie

Ginsberg and Kerouac
Shootin' dice and playin' Ramblin' Jack's guitar
With the cowboy paintin' pickguard on it
And they sat in the back and drank for free
And rhymed orange with Rosalie
Now there's a pride of lions to draw to

Ain't no money in poetry
That's what sets the poet free
I've had all the freedom I can stand
Cold dog soup and rainbow pie
Is all it takes to get me by
Fool my belly till the day I die
On cold dog soup and rainbow pie


Namedropping doesn't prove you know what you're talking about.

Oh, and I love Guy Clark but this is far from my favorite lyric of his.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

*snip*

Namedropping doesn't prove you know what you're talking about.

Oh, and I love Guy Clark but this is far from my favorite lyric of his.

Same here. Off the top of my head, 'Hank Williams Said it Best' has better (and vaguely hypnotic, actually, after a while) lyrics, so does 'Die Tryin'' from the same album as the song in question, so do any number of other songs by him. All of which are better than the stuff that BRTD listens to. (Though, I do love the chorus to 'Cold Dog Soup' an incredible amount, both lyrically and musically.)

I was listening to the Cold Dog Soup album when I wrote the post, that's why I used it as an example. I was in fact selling Guy Clark (and alt-country in general) rather short, if anything. Guy Clark isn't a hipster who took an intro-to-philosophy course and thinks he's clever because of it. I'm not sure what he was trying to do in that particular song but to me at least it's more interesting than that in any case.

There are at least a few Stars songs that are more genuinely intellectual than that, and I don't usually go to Stars for incredible breadth of lyrical reference (though I do like their lyrics on other levels).

[minionofmidas]

wtf be "Stars"?

Hmmm... Guy Clark lyrics I particularly love... the chorus of "Dublin Blues" was my sig for a while. Of course, that song too does a fair bit of namedropping. "LA Freeway" partly because of the off-the-wall bits ("that moldy bag of vanilla wafers"?) "That Old Time Feeling". So many more...

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

It's funny you mention choruses because those are actually considered "unintellectual" to this type of crowd and they don't have any in their songs. Using the verse-chorus-verse format is very rare in this type of music. In fact if there is one usually the chorus is just the breakdown and mosh part.

[minionofmidas]

Obviously, there is not much of a difference between phobically avoiding and slavishly following the arch-traditional format of songs.
Intelligent songwriters tend to play with it (though not in every song they write). Especially if it's the story that's important - an unchanging chorus rather limits the ability to tell a story.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Stars is a somewhat sappy indie band without much particularly unique about it that nevertheless does what it does (in my opinion) better than most bands of its kind.

There are a lot of songs that are able to use unchanging elements to tell (or reinforce) some sort of story, but most of them in my experience tend to be traditional or from a very long time ago or both. Flat-out refusing to do something just because conventional songwriting does do it is indeed almost as bad as doing it just because conventional songwriting does.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Here, have some of the lyrics to 'Natsu no Ringo':

It was a summer where nothing happened
I fell in love

The midsummer night where the crescent is dancing
Brings together a dreamlike love
While counting the lemon coloured stars
I leave a kiss on your heart
   
The melody of flute
carries you off
In the wind,
to the autumn is coming soon

The green apple which is not yet ripe
It tastes very sour as if it was some kind of metal
From the branch where the pain becomes the fruit
You have taken it

The apple/lemon/flute are the Womb Mandala. The metal/stars/moon/wind are the Diamond Mandala. The line 'It tastes very sour as if it was some kind of metal' sounds a lot better in Japanese, believe me (’銀紙の味がする' means 'it tastes of tinfoil', literally, but what that indicates in Japanese is the way the line is translated).

From the lyrics to 'Ongaku':
   
I don’t really know since when it’s been over
I really don’t know when it ended
so just a little more, at least another step
   
I don’t know where I want to go
so to the voice insistently calling
I give my anger, choosing the storm.

Running out of power to scream, where those clouds disappear
a violent dawn will dry the ocean.

I’ll believe in the streak of light until my soul is finished
I’ll surely sing while crying beyond the sleepless nights
your music

This is a song that seems to be, essentially, A Secular Age by Charles Taylor (or an expression of Kajiura's existentialist view of her religion more generally) in song form. Here's a hint: 'You'/’君’ is probably not a human loved one, and the 'it' that's over isn't an individual human relationship--or, come to that, either individual or a human relationship. The 'ocean' is the same thing that it is in 'Dover Beach'.

Lyrics such as this are, I feel, more 'uber-intellectual' than songs that namedrop Adorno without giving any indication of familiarity with the ideas concerned. They don't demonstrate that these bands did well in a philosophy class, just that they read the syllabus for one. They may very well have done well but it doesn't shine through in the songwriting.

Songs written and/or produced by Kajiura Yuki, however, tend to involve such things as melody, harmony, and pleasant (usually female) voices, so I doubt BRTD would like them very much anyway.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Songs written and/or produced by Kajiura Yuki, however, tend to involve such things as melody, harmony, and pleasant (usually female) voices, so I doubt BRTD would like them very much anyway.

I think you're only familiar with a small portion of what I listen to. Look at my 10 most played bands on last.fm:

1 Rainer Maria
2 The Appleseed Cast
3 Superchunk
4 Mineral
5 The Hated
6 MeWithoutYou
7 Small Towns Burn a Little Slower
8 Lifetime
9 Ampere
10 Brand New

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Songs written and/or produced by Kajiura Yuki, however, tend to involve such things as melody, harmony, and pleasant (usually female) voices, so I doubt BRTD would like them very much anyway.

I think you're only familiar with a small portion of what I listen to. Look at my 10 most played bands on last.fm:

1 Rainer Maria
2 The Appleseed Cast
3 Superchunk
4 Mineral
5 The Hated
6 MeWithoutYou
7 Small Towns Burn a Little Slower
8 Lifetime
9 Ampere
10 Brand New

I'm not familiar with any of them, but Rainer Maria gets my seal of approval because its name is a reference to a write I like a lot.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

They picked the name because it was unisex sounding and when they started the vocals where male/female deliberately singing out of harmony with each other.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Interesting.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I've joked that if I ever wrote for Glee this is the first song I'd make them do: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct7u59o49rU

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

That actually is not bad at all!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXf6jkO_SRA

This is the aforementioned 'Ongaku' (Kalafina is the name of Kajiura Yuki's current harmonizing band, which I think is either her third or fourth long-term group project). I don't care if nobody on Glee speaks Japanese, if I write for them they will sing this and they will like it. (Those lyrics that would seem trite in English are fairly accomplished in the context of modern Japanese lyric poetry for the most part, mainly because the whole thing is.)

(There are certainly aspects to the way the song is presented here that I don't like, but those are just aspects of the way Japanese musical stagecraft works.)

I still maintain that the concept of religious faith in the modern age as essentially a race to see which runs out first, one's will to believe or one's lifespan (in the hope that it's the latter), which is what this song is allegorically addressing, makes up for the lack of discussing particular philosophers, particularly as one of Kajiura's singers says she (Kajiura) was reading Matthew Arnold while writing the album in question. It's entirely possible that the song is in fact from Matthew Arnold's perspective, since some of the pronouns used indicate a male narrator.

[This user has not been convicted of 34 felonies]

Quelle Surprise by Enter Shikari:

Analysis of the human race in 2011 AD
We've got the technology to move forward
We've got the knowledge and the means to build upstream
We've got the technology to go faster
We've got the passion and the talent to make this real

We're so f**king adaptable, controvertible, ducking and weaving from the truth
If it adds weight to the content of our pockets
We'll sit and stagnate with banks and use rockets
To oversee that it's our bottom line that gets carried to the high seas
Well quelle f**king surprise

If you stand for nothing you will fall for anything for anything
If you stand for nothing you will fall for anything for anything

We're aware they're trying to take away our dreams
We're aware they're trying to take away our means

If you stand for nothing you will fall for anything for anything
If you stand for nothing you will fall for anything for anything

We're aware they're trying to take away our dreams
We're aware they're trying to take away our means

If you stand for nothing
If you stand for nothing
If you stand for nothing
You will fall for anything

We're so f**king adaptable, controvertible, ducking and weaving from the truth
If it adds weight to the content of our pockets
We'll sit and stagnate with banks and use--
To oversee that it's our bottom line that gets ca--
Well quelle f**king surprise

We're aware they're trying to take away our dreams
We're aware they're trying to take away our means
We're aware they're trying to take away our dreams
We're aware they're trying to take away our means

You are not gonna take away our dreams
You are not gonna take away our means
You are not gonna take away our dreams
You are not gonna take away our means

It's not really "screaming", but it's shouted.