December 4, 2017

All the Song Lyrics You Love Are Puerile and Stupid

Daniel DeSlover via ZUMA

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Atrios digs himself into a gigantic hole today:

I Don’t Care About Your Lyrics

Good lyrics can make a song. I completely get that. But making a song is not the same as being the important part of a song. The thing I hate about all “music criticism” of pop/rock music is that it focuses on the lyrics. I get it. It’s hard to write about the music part of music. But “Musician X used to write about farms and trees and now writes about love and milkshakes” doesn’t actually tell me anything about whether I might like the… music?

A good lyric is good. A catchy lyric can make a person rich, when attached to the right melody. But setting Taylor Swift lyrics to music by Rush isn’t going to convince fans of either.

Well, he had a good run. But after 17 years, I think Atrios has finally written his death sentence. It was nice knowing him.

Nonetheless, his bravery is a lesson for us all. I, for example, will go even further. Not only do I not care about your lyrics, I think most of your songs would be better if they were set to Gregorian chants or Russian poetry. I mostly don’t listen to lyrics at all, but every once in a while I do, or I get curious and google them up. And almost without exception, they are so puerile and stupid that I can hardly believe anyone over the age of 15 takes them seriously. They work fine as sounds to make while singing your favorite song in the shower, but on the printed page? Please.

I would like to say that I hold this opinion only about pop lyrics, but it’s not so. Your favorite indie band? Your favorite rapper? Bob Dylan? About 99 percent of what they write is just plain dumb.

Now, this is obviously a provocation. I am provoking people to form torchlight mobs and come over to my house and blast their favorite songs through my windows. However, there’s actually an interesting question here: how many people care about lyrics vs. only caring about the tunes in popular music? To me, the human voice is just another instrument in a song, like a keyboard or a guitar. The meaning of the words is extraneous. But for many people, the lyrics are really important. Even a catchy tune leaves them cold unless they like the lyrics. And then there’s the vast middle ground.

So which are you? And does it say anything about your personality? I hereby call on some enterprising PhD candidate in freakonomics to study this burning issue.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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