06-03-2024, 02:01 PM
I’m posting this with the encouragement of the moderators of this forum. I originally sent it to them as a private message.
Heresit.
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Argument for a lyrics subforum
Pigpen does something nothing else does: it punches poets in the face. Not because they’re lame or geeks or weirdos, but because they deserve it. The ones that really want to be unsung, quiet armchair poets who produce quality work need that.
It’s a boxing gym for poets. And there’s nothing else like it.
The first response I ever got on the forum was mean. Someone told me what I wrote wasn’t even a poem. (I think it was Milo.) It made my heart race. I tried to justify my work and got slapped for failing to take feedback.
I learned everything from that, and just as much by spending hours providing crit to random works in intensive.
It can do that for lyrics, too.
Lyricists are often more motivated than poets to sharpen and polish their work because they intend to have them performed in front of well-intentioned strangers. Often, the first audience for lyrics is friends and family, whose support is indistinguishable from desert mana. So, having some confidence before going into that room or entering a small venue, matters.
But.
More importantly.
Lyrics are crucial intellectual property. To the extent that quality lyrics provide the genius behind musical ideas, and musical ideas are necessary to support video, and video trumps all, lyrics are the phytoplankton of several crucial creative ecosystems.
For a moment, take that overwrought argument as given. The point is, lyrics are valuable. Economically, creatively, and as a beacon of social interest.
Saying that’s so, it becomes impossibly difficult to explain why they’re so radically understudied. You can get a degree—hell, a Ph.D—in poetry. In film. In screenwriting. In—hell, the f-word—short stories. In you-pick-it.
But to date, there are no academic journals, no endowed university professorships, no subfields in organology for lyricists.
Why?
They’re valuable. They deserve attention. People love singing words. So why aren’t lyrics regarded as worthy of study? And, worse, why are they derided as “not mattering,” as if they’re somehow the shit after a good meal: necessary but hardly the point?
And then, and here’s my pitch: Given how radically understudied lyrics are, I find myself completely unable to write a short essay about them. I have no access to meaningful dialogues about what they comprise.
So, inasmuch as pigpen has offered a vehicle to poets, who are already spoiled by millennia of poetic theory, who need to think about their work in a critical way so much that they’ll let us be mean to them, maybe it can develop this entire field of thought from some gushy primordial soup into a formal, useful, disciplined craft.
I would like Pigpen to set about answering this unanswered question: What the fuck are lyrics? How should they be critiqued? How interpreted? How appraised? How perfected?
Right now, lyrics are a solo pursuit. They are the loneliest elephant in a vast desert. Let’s make them the dirtiest pig in a shallow pool of shit.
Make a lyrics subforum.
That’s my pitch.
And somehow, instead of Nay, I entered May. My apologies.
Heresit.
—————————
Argument for a lyrics subforum
Pigpen does something nothing else does: it punches poets in the face. Not because they’re lame or geeks or weirdos, but because they deserve it. The ones that really want to be unsung, quiet armchair poets who produce quality work need that.
It’s a boxing gym for poets. And there’s nothing else like it.
The first response I ever got on the forum was mean. Someone told me what I wrote wasn’t even a poem. (I think it was Milo.) It made my heart race. I tried to justify my work and got slapped for failing to take feedback.
I learned everything from that, and just as much by spending hours providing crit to random works in intensive.
It can do that for lyrics, too.
Lyricists are often more motivated than poets to sharpen and polish their work because they intend to have them performed in front of well-intentioned strangers. Often, the first audience for lyrics is friends and family, whose support is indistinguishable from desert mana. So, having some confidence before going into that room or entering a small venue, matters.
But.
More importantly.
Lyrics are crucial intellectual property. To the extent that quality lyrics provide the genius behind musical ideas, and musical ideas are necessary to support video, and video trumps all, lyrics are the phytoplankton of several crucial creative ecosystems.
For a moment, take that overwrought argument as given. The point is, lyrics are valuable. Economically, creatively, and as a beacon of social interest.
Saying that’s so, it becomes impossibly difficult to explain why they’re so radically understudied. You can get a degree—hell, a Ph.D—in poetry. In film. In screenwriting. In—hell, the f-word—short stories. In you-pick-it.
But to date, there are no academic journals, no endowed university professorships, no subfields in organology for lyricists.
Why?
They’re valuable. They deserve attention. People love singing words. So why aren’t lyrics regarded as worthy of study? And, worse, why are they derided as “not mattering,” as if they’re somehow the shit after a good meal: necessary but hardly the point?
And then, and here’s my pitch: Given how radically understudied lyrics are, I find myself completely unable to write a short essay about them. I have no access to meaningful dialogues about what they comprise.
So, inasmuch as pigpen has offered a vehicle to poets, who are already spoiled by millennia of poetic theory, who need to think about their work in a critical way so much that they’ll let us be mean to them, maybe it can develop this entire field of thought from some gushy primordial soup into a formal, useful, disciplined craft.
I would like Pigpen to set about answering this unanswered question: What the fuck are lyrics? How should they be critiqued? How interpreted? How appraised? How perfected?
Right now, lyrics are a solo pursuit. They are the loneliest elephant in a vast desert. Let’s make them the dirtiest pig in a shallow pool of shit.
Make a lyrics subforum.
That’s my pitch.
And somehow, instead of Nay, I entered May. My apologies.
A yak is normal.