What can't lyrics be simple and cliche?

[tubetonez]

 

I'd like to stick up for cliches... But as soon as someone mentioned Britney, I thought back to the "online live-blog review" I wrote of Britney's recent album on the day it came out... and some of the lyrical cliches in that really brought it down, even as the production seemed to be a compendium of production cliches from the past 15 years or so. But the production managed to somehow make that formula work (at least a little) while the lyrics... ugh ... the lyrics. And it was not just the cliches but the staleness of the cliches... because were relatively recent cliches -- but that seemed to make them all the more stale -- like the Mexican pan (bread) that is so fresh and fluffy in the morning but by two in the afternoon it's getting crusty and hard. Stuff like, "I've got you on my radar," and "Do you want a piece of me?" Because they were once, not that long ago,amusing and fresh for 15 seconds or so (sometime within the last decade or two -- relatively recently in our culture) it makes them seem all the more trite and cliched. But... anyhow... I like inverting and playing with cliches, which, admittedly, is not the same thing as just dropping them in or using them because you can't think of anything interesting. Still, it doesn't always work, particularly if the inversion is kind of flat-footed. In 1980 I wrote a little reggae rocker that just seemed to want to start off "Sitting all alone / by my telephone..." continuing with that tight rhyme scheme. And I liked everything but that line. I tried subverting the cliche a little by changing the telephone to videophone right after I wrote it... and I've used that a few times since (but now that sounds so 90s). So it's back to telephone... maybe when the term videophone has faded a little farther into quaintness, I can dust it back off... Anyhow... cliches... they're worth studying and thinking about -- many of them really are pithy or witty -- or were -- compact little constructions that once delivered a lot of punch. (How they became cliches, of course.)

 

 

I agree with you, it is not the cliches themselves but rather how they are used. In your example of "sitting all alone/ by my telephone", this is a pretty dated cliche. More likely we'll have a cell phone in our pocket, or a wireless phone in our home - "waiting by the phone" is not the same.

 

One of my favorite lyricists is Bon Scott. He used a lot of cliches and innuendos, but was quite clever.

[kurdy]

My argument is yes--lyrics can be simple and cliche. I think it happens all the time in popular music, more than many songwriting "experts" care to admit. For one thing, cliches didn't get to be cliches overnight.

 

But I will also make another argument and say that even though you can get away with cliched lyrics, if all you're doing is strumming a few major chords on a guitar and singing a droning melody, you aren't going to get many people to pay attention. Most stuff on the radio is heavily produced, with a lot of underlying musical and instrumental hooks, which in a sense, sort of pick up the slack where a weak lyric falls short. The best stuff also has a very strong melody (which I maintain is perhaps the most important factor in a memorable song.) So if you aren't particularly adept at the musical side of things, (or if you don't happen to work with great musicians/arrangers or producers who are), your song probably isn't going to stand much of a chance of getting heard.

 

However, a good question to ask yourself might be, even though you might be able to "get away with it", why would you want to? If you have the option of making all the elements of a song the best they can be, why settle for mediocrity just because it's easy?

 

Also another thing I should mention--if you are only writing for yourself/your band, you can get away with a lot more in songwriting than if you were trying to get a song recorded by another artist. But like I said, do you really want to? There are already a ton of mediocre bands--I think anything you can do to stand out from the pack is a good thing, not the least of which is writing great songs.

[Lee Knight]

 

However, a good question to ask yourself might be, even though you might be able to "get away with it", why would you want to? If you have the option of making all the elements of a song the best they can be, why settle for mediocrity just because it's easy?

 

 

Yeah. That was my initial reaction to the opening question as well.

 

The more you do something, the more comfortable you get with the mechanics of it. Then the easier it is to get past the "just getting by" and into really playing with all the possibilities.

 

Clich

[bluesway]

i try and avoid cliches as much as possible....and i sometimes wind up with pretentious {censored}. i think cliches have a place. and for the record "she loves you" is a great example of taking a cliche and twisting it into something original

[myredshoes]

 

What's wrong with simply saying what you mean in as few words as possible? Do we have to have a Harvard Degree in Literature to express how we feel? What's wrong with using a cliche in a song? They are familiar to many and put the point across. How does the average listener define good lyrics? I'm sure My Humps or Hey Yeah are not literary masterpieces - just examples. I'm sure that A LOT of the music produced by your favorite band is not that complicated lyrically....

 

 

I think cliche' should come from song lyric.

 

Not the other way around.

[Stackabones]

Simple works. Cliches open up too many cans of worms on the dark side of the moon during the month of June.

[Johnny-Boy]

Yeah, simple (and short) lyrics work:

 

White Christmas

 

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas

Just like the ones I used to know

Where the treetops glisten

And children listen

To hear sleigh bells in the snow.

 

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas

With every Christmas card I write

May your days be merry and bright

And may all your Christmases be white.

[Lee Knight]

 

Yeah, simple (and short) lyrics work: White Christmas I'm dreaming of a white Christmas Just like the ones I used to know Where the treetops glisten And children listen To hear sleigh bells in the snow. I'm dreaming of a white Christmas With every Christmas card I write May your days be merry and bright And may all your Christmases be white.

 

 

Nice. Good call. Simple yet totally new images without any clich

[WrdsNmuzik]

a (possibly) interesting side-note here is that you can never know just how (or even whether) lyrics are being heard.

 

case in point, I had a song that I'd carefully crafted, a song about an arsonist who gets trapped by the fire he set. at one point a bandmate turned to me and said, "I really like that song.....it's about masturbation, right?"

 

she had misheard one line, which made her misinterpret the rest of that verse, and then misunderstand the chorus, and thus, the whole song.

 

as much as I fuss over lyrics in my own stuff, I find it's the total impact of a recording that gets me, a combination of the production, the arrangement, a neat turn-of-phrase, the mix of instruments, the arrangement, the timbre of the vocal.....some songs I loved for years but had NO idea what they were about.

 

and finally, have you ever found that people respond much better to the songs you throw down in an hour than the ones you painstakingly built over the course of a weeks or months...the one you SLAVED over and are proudest of? that hoits!

[King_For_A_Day]

 

...have you ever found that people respond much better to the songs you throw down in an hour than the ones you painstakingly built over the course of a weeks or months...the one you SLAVED over and are proudest of? that hoits !

 

 

SO TRUE!

 

I think it's because the songs that are done in an hour often have an emotional basis (from the heart) and the ones that we slave over have an intellectual basis (from the head). People respond much better to emotion than they do to intellect. Of course, the ideal is to combine head and heart.