- Does a song needs meaningful lyrics? –

The painter needs colours and shapes, the author needs words and sentences, and the musician needs rhythms, tones, sounds and voices. These are basically the main differences of the three art forms. Words and text are in principle not required components to paint or make music. It’s enough to have a title or name for paintings and music pieces.

Music is a language of itself. This is obvious for instrumental music like concerts, symphonies, organ, piano, etc. Rhythms, tones, melodies, sounds and voices mediate mood and feeling without singing meaningful lyrics. Therefore many international songs and hits for example are successful not because of exciting and meaningful lyrics, but due to the unique musical compositions and the specific sonic characters of the singing voices in accordance with the moods, minds and tastes of the mass of listeners.

But the human voice is an individually different musical “instrument� to be used as an outstanding stylistic device as part of a song, a musical, opera or other music pieces. It needs sounds in such a way of vowels, consonants and resonant syllables to get a voice musical audible. Songwriters and rap vocalists apply words and text of known languages which fit to the chosen rhythm and sound.

To express a voice musical effectively, it’s not necessary to use a native language like English, French, Italian, German, etc., an artificial, freestyle fantasy language can be applied as well as part of a music piece.
Folksongs, hits, musicals and operas utilize traditionally meaningful lyrics for singing and recitative. Many foreign-language lyrics may not be readily understood always and completely by the mass of listeners. It’s not essential to understand the used language to know the true promise of the musical piece.
Naturally it’s easier to sing in a native language than creating an adequate and tuneful fantasy language. However there are the possibilities to imitate a native language and hybrid forms of tongues. The imitation of a native language has to take care of the characteristic phonetic attributes of the selected native language. Well known are for example the nasal sounds of the French language.
Who is using an imitation of a native language or fantasy words for lyrics is able to compose a song with vocal arrangement like a traditional songwriter.

But there are still only a few vocal songs published using an artificial or fantasy language. Similar to the poetic licence of literature, the music maker can create new phonetic acoustic and language-like lyrics to use the human voice as pure art form for music.

Is there anything to be said against or in addition?

Philos60 on Besonic.com

I've been listening to Tom Waits for years...because of him, I consider most lyrics outside of his domain to be pretty meaningless.

I argue that most lyrics are not meaningful. They're just "cool sounding" phrases chained together arbitrarily. Sometimes they follow a certain theme. The listener is engaged by the familiar words.

I've been listening to Uz Jsme Doma constantly since Seba introduced them to me. The words are in Czech...I have no idea what the heck's going on lyrically. My girlfriend and I sing along anyway!

Artificial, improvised language in popular music? Sounds like a publishing company's worst nightmare!

Actually, I think this is already the norm, people just don't realize it.

Actually, there are a few "new age" artists who have tried that sort of thing with varying degrees of success.

philos 60....werent you on that music forum where you showed Total vocal improvisation?

well anyway

lyrics is a seamless way of putting a specific emotion or state of mind through their music. it all depends on the kind of lyrics. there are blunt lyrics that spoon feed you the direct meaning to the song without giving thinking space or room for personal interpetation. i honestly dont mean to point fingers but you can see that alot in the suicide, angst ridden anthems of punk rock or the "ghetto" beats of rap. just something i notice. there are many exceptions of course but these are where i find it more apparent. it doesnt nessecarilly have to be bad either. perhaps the artist has the blunt feeling or wants to get strait to his/her point with the music. there are metaphorical lyric types which are either really out there but still have a direct meaning to the emotion of the song or are just random lines mixed together that may even better create an imaginative emotional impact. i myself prefer the latter of these two seeing that some of MY favorite artits sing in this way (radiohead, red hot chili peppers). this impacts the music to invoke thought to the listener. those who are willing to think will listen to more of tihs. music without lyrics tho are some of the most emotional things ive ever heard. even without lyrics they can cause a heavy impact. perhaps even better. perfect ambience...fear...love...fantasy...erotica...its all possible through the music without lyrics. in a way lyrics might have a bound in the song when you want to take style changes mid-way through the song, even though im not saying its possible with lyrics.



dear god i have rambled again. im going to stop now...i dont seem to have a point >.<

i also full heartadly agree with philos that music is a language in its own.

Have you heard Aventures by György Ligeti? It's the only example of artificial spoken language in serious music I can think of right now. Ligeti's music is always fun to listen to and you can always count on him to be extremely methodical. I found a little Webpage as well:

http://www.d-sites.net/english/ligeti.htm

Isn't scat singing in the same ballpark as well?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scat_singing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouth_music

Lyrics to me r very important personally....one main reason for me not liking nu-metal is this that they have crappy lyrics...though they have shit music aswell but lyrics r worst....i guess

Hi Roivas,
thanks for your interesting contribution.
I would like to listen to György Ligeti.
Can you post a link to his music?
By the links you posted I could not find a song...?

Kind Regards
Philos60

Hi prady!
Lyrics are important for those musician,
who would like to communicate with music
a message ore a story.
Music with voice as pure musical "instrument"
(mouth music)
is an alternative and not exclusive!
By the way, applied meaningful lyrics could be
seen up to now as a standard.
It's a question of taste, whether someone likes
pure music only.

Philos60