Parrot moment

[robinbloke]

One of my friends once said to me that the lyrics of a song weren't important; the voice - she said - was just another instrument, another sound to be blended in with the others. I didn't agree with it at the time, but since then over the many years now and then I've actually stopped to listen to certain songs that I've really liked and listened the the lyrics and what they've actually meant (or not meant in some cases) rather than just mindlessly mimicing them as it played, letting the words fall out of thought almost as soon as I'd said them.
It changed several songs for me, some for the worse - I didn't like them quite as much before, others for the better. But always there was something else there. I tend to listen to songs and extract the feeling of them rather than concentrate on any message, hence why occasionally people have expressed surprise at certain bands I listen to as a little unusual for me, but it's usually because when I've first started listening to them I've ignored entirely the message they're trying to give across and just listened to the sound of the song instead; my short term memory isn't dynamic enough usually to cope with extracting the deep fundamentals of a song, it's more about the dancing and the feeling.
That said, there are certain songs whose lyrics I do know, understand and relate to, they just tend to be in the minority, most of the others I just sing along to parrot-fashion.

Comments

[nisaba.livejournal.com]

I've had that lots too - occasionally it's made a song better, but mostly it's made it worse, and that kinda annoys me. Like the song at the end of 'Good Will Hunting' (love that movie), Elliot Smith's "Angeles" (which for starters I thought was "Angels"). I could never quite get most of the words but the feel of the music and vocals and just everything was so sweet - then I looked at the lyrics and it turns out to be quite a cynical little piece about the gambling in Los Angeles. Pah *grumps*

[(Anonymous)]

'The Cocteau Twins' solved this by inventing their own obscure language (of sorts) so that Liz Fraser was effectively singing nothing but the melody with no semantic content. Works for me!

Lensman