So what's the point?

I have been a music lover most of my life. Actually, that doesn’t even begin to cover it – I’ve been music-obsessed for as long as I can remember. The first concert I attended was Crosby, Stills and Nash; to say I “got started early” with music is an understatement as I was still in utero at the time. A few months later it was James Taylor, and then came MTV when I was a toddler. I would sit in front of the TV watching music video after music video (when MTV was still “music” television) and become memorized by Genesis, Adam and the Ants, Queen, and Cyndi Lauper videos.

Since I began writing in earnest I have focused mostly on poetry. Because of my already intense love of music, I seek inspiration for my own work in the songs of the artists I love; it’s actually become that I have difficulty writing anything, especially poetry, without listening to music. Lately, for me, because I spend so much time with music and poetry, the two genres have begun to meld together. I got to thinking, are music and poetry, or more specifically, are song lyrics and poetry really separate entities? I’ve created this blog to grapple with that question along with the following:
• Should song lyrics be treated as quality literature?
• Can song lyrics be considered poetry, and what are the implications of this?
• Can song lyrics stand on their own without musical backing?
• Is it the same to back a poem with music as it is to sing a song with music?

Others have mulled over these same questions; since rock music and pop music came into the foreground of popular culture, music critics and literary critics have argued over how we should consider certain song lyrics. Many seem to agree that Bob Dylan is a poet while they struggle with The Beatles; Bruce Springsteen is one of the greatest lyricists of all time, but should he be as revered as Byron, Dickinson or Kerouac?

While many of these questions are unanswerable and subject to opinion, they are still worth discussing. I have always felt that there are certain songs which should be regarded as poetry; I won’t claim that I could explain why other than they evoke the same sort of reverence I have felt for certain poems, and vice versa. That being said, there are many songs that I personally would never consider poetry. I don’t consider Brittany Spears a poet first of all because she’s not writing her own lyrics, but also because her songs primarily focus on the subjects of partying, dancing in a club, and womanizing men. Or perhaps she’s singing about classic sentiments of carpe diem and the search for real love… it’s hard to say on those rare occasions when I give Brittany Spears any real thought.

In researching these topics I have come across a few books which make a case for both sides of the arguments – rock lyrics are poetry or they are not – and others which don’t really choose a side but present the argument in such a way that the reader is left to draw his or her own conclusions.

Aidan Day’s Jokerman: Reading the Lyrics of Bob Dylan, he presents many of Dylan’s song s through the lens of true literary analysis, which obviously leads me to believe that Day feels Dylan is a true poet. While Day focuses specifically on Dylan, many of his arguments can apply to other past and present musicians and lyricists. The Poetry of Rock by Richard Goldstein presents very little analysis. What Goldstein does is present a collection of rock and pop lyrics and publish them as a book of poetry. Any of his personal thoughts or presumptions are very limited, but seeing some of the songs he chose on the page without the context of a voice or musical backing did change some of my own opinions on the topic of considering certain songs as poems. But that’s another entry for another day. The book I am currently reading is David Pichaske’s The Poetry of Rock: The Golden Years which, so far, seems to focus mainly on the questions I am attempting to answer myself. Pichaske presents both sides of the argument through some analysis of lyrics while discussing how they compare to major poetic works. But again, more on that later.

Based on all of the information I have collected thus far, along with countless hours spent listening to music and music and more music, I will attempt to answer the above questions and see what I come up with. i look forward to a lot of reading and a lot of listening and maybe even figuring some stuff out, too.