There comes a point in my relationship with every song I love that I start truly attentively listening to the lyrics. This moment either ends with me pasting the band’s poster above my bed, or swearing them off for all eternity. 

What many call “good” music can have terrible lyrics, and no one seems to mind. Yet I believe it is impossible for a truly great song to exist without impressive lyrics. 

Coincidentally, I’m listening to “New Slang” by The Shins as I write this in the newsroom. This excellent song speaks about the apathy and regrets of the average man and how hopeless it is that his fortune will be reversed.  But I can’t remember the last time I heard it outside of my laptop or in the movie “Garden State” (I highly recommend the soundtrack).

Compare that to “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, a hot song on iTunes and radio stations.  Shall we compare the two?  Here’s the cleanest verse of “Thrift Shop” that I thought well-represented Macklemore’s song:

“Dressed in all pink, ‘cept my gator shoes, those are green

Draped in a leopard mink, girls standin’ next to me

Probably shoulda washed this, smells like R. Kelly’s sheets.” 

“A” for effort! I do love gator shoes and leopard mink. This criticism isn’t just because I’m not a rap fan – there’s plenty of substance in that genre. There’s nothing wrong with “fluff” songs, either. But when song after song on iTunes has cotton ball-weight lyrics, we may have a problem. To contrast, let’s look at “New Slang” by The Shins.

“I’m looking in on the good life I might be doomed never to find

Without a trust or flaming fields, am I too dumb to refine? 

And if you’d ‘a took to me like- 

Well I’d ‘a danced like the queen of the eyesores 

And the rest of our lives would ‘a fared well.”

You have to think about it. This does not conform to the five-second attention span our society has. It isn’t happy, either. Frankly, it’s a bit depressing. But you know what? The duty of the arts, in my humble opinion, is to reflect all of the entire human experience while giving us something to ponder. I am putting that down on my list of “Most Pretentious Sentences Ever.”

With a major in Journalism and minors in creative writing and music, I probably care more about this than most people do. But I think that music isn’t only a release and a distraction. There’s a reason that Rebecca Black was able to make “Friday” and it went down in widely viewed infamy, even though hundreds of great artists aren’t noticed. Sometimes music is simply the mirror of society. And right now society “smells like R. Kelly’s sheets.”