How important are lyrics to you?

How important are lyrics to you?

  • Very Important

    Votes: 15 22.1%
  • Somewhat Important

    Votes: 43 63.2%
  • Not Important

    Votes: 10 14.7%

  • Total voters
    68
crimsonfloyd said:
It depeneds. Poor, comprehendable lyrics can destroy good music. Poor uncomprehendable lyrics (ie most metal lyrics) are easy to ignore and therefore have little impact on the overall musical experience. Good lyrics improve pretty much any music.
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I hate it when I'm listening to some otherwise great album and I'm thinking "shit now comes that cheesy part".
 
Vocal delivery is vastly and monumentally more important in any genre ever than the lyrics themselves.
 
somewhat important....if i can understand them i don't want them to be corny or about dragons and stuff. If i can't understand them I really don't care. I don't read lyrics much.
 
If the lyrics are amazing it pushes the band to the next level IMO. However if they're shit and the music is still quality I'll still enjoy it.
 
Pretty important to me. I listen to some bands with some laughable lyrics but they would have to be serious and intelligent in my own music.
 
I very rarely even read the lyrics, and whether they're good or not doesn't change anything about my views on the band in question. However, Pagan Altar have the best lyrics on earth.
 
Anal Cunt lyrics, good or funny?

Anyways, good lyrics are nice, but I don't think they can totally ruin a song or album.
My lyrics of any band hands down is Acid Bath. These guys not only know how to rock, but how to write. Heres a sample....

The Beautiful Downgrade

Fingered slowly like the first time you came
The agents of oblivion descend upon the sane
Caked with mud and mother's blood
Playing death games in the rain
And we wonder how it feels to be free
I thought I heard them whisper mutiny
Living room rape scenes
We cut their throats while they slept
Dreaming and digesting shards of turtle shell
The television's blaring
And the ghost of Hitler speaks
Crowned with barbed-wire
I smear my warm semen on the walls of my oppression
I accuse God for the murder of eternity
My everything that is nothing
Christian propaganda and dog sperm
Degeneration...
The beautiful downgrade
Do you remember the first sunrise?
Sharpened bone clenched tight in your fist
Screaming into the blue
An urge to kill the sky
I can smell the forest like pussy in heat
Barefoot I run through the chaos
The assassins of freedom tend the burning of truth
As we walk these prison walls
It's maddening, always touching something
 
Xorv said:
Anal Cunt lyrics, good or funny?


in the proper context, a live show, the lyrics are hilarious. They put on a sort of improvisational crowd-interactive show during a show in Minneapolis with Anal Blast (i'm not sure if it is anal cunt's typical set antics) where they (anal cunt) kept making fun of members in the audience, singing 30 second songs to various members of the audience, the lyrics simply consisting of "Tom is gay", or whomever was being ridiculed. It was honestly great dirty fun.
 
Anyone who says "very important" should not be allowed to listen to music.

And sorry to disappoint you all but Navicon Torture Technologies' Leech has the best lyrics in the Multiverse.

BENEATH THE VEIL OF SANITY BEATS THE THROBBING PROCESS OF DECAY.
travesties of unarmed neurological pathways
my draconian countenance, an inescapable glare
desires for annihilation of the external and indulgence in the basest internal natures
i have never seen heaven.
there was never a time when i was taught to accept an intrinsic positivity in the nature of humanity,
my observations have only convinced me of the exact opposite;
love is a dead language;
my eyes are a predator's eyes;
i see nothing but an ever-shifting amorphous blob of bloated human insects, like an excited swarm upon a smashed and gutted corpse – this world upon which we thrive – i am miserable as i come to understand the minimal (yet important) role i play in the continual decay of this planet.
in an attempt to grapple with the madness i feel rising within me, i take on the persona of a superbeing, an immortal god-emperor whose very name sends entire galaxies into panic.
in my internal universe, I Am Him.
I AM HIM!
this self-indulgence only barely saves me from the daily humiliations of my life...
a point comes when it becomes too powerful to contain within me. the violent, genocidal-rape-fantasies coalesce into a new organism which explodes from within my distorted body. i am momentarily empowered, but i realise only too late that the presence within my body had been all which sustained me. i use this New Knowledge to construct an infernal device to pump my blood until my greatest desires are fulfilled.
the beast which was birthed by me assaults an incalcuable number of humans, laying waste to this world, while at the same time fostering the inception of a new ecology which waits for the dark days to draw to an end.
i become the god-emperor i had always wanted to be, my one-beast-army maintaining my absolute power with the very real threat of its own existence. the population turns to me as their divine saviour, the man who is responsible for their utter extinction.
my health fails yet the machines keep me alive, vast oceans of blood are fed into my brain every hour. the most holy of words become synonyms for my name.
absolution and vindication are the lights which glow dimly in an otherwise empty sky. the only horizon which i am able to perceive is a landscape of nightmarish disappointments plaguing me until i lay coughing up blood as cancer grinds me into nothingness.
this is the brightest future i can imagine:
living a mundane unexceptional life upon a dead earth where the oxygen supply is poisoned and depleted due to excruciating and irreversable over-industrialisation. food supplies are synthesised and waste products are recycled. too little, too late.
man's folly; man's end; man's destiny.
'god bless us for fulfilling christian dogma.'
i say a silent prayer thanking my victims for providing me with the energy to sustain my life beyond the bounds of biology. i have always dreamed of bearing witness to the last gasp of man's empire. it has long been my most joy-filled dream to observe the first sunrise over an earth devoid of human life.
my wish has come true.
my corpse crumbles into the wind and birds begin to sing again after centuries of silence...
 
Somewhat important. To me, the lyrics don't have to agree with my ideals to actually be good. In fact, if they're thought provoking all the better. Arghoslent has great lyrics but they're not exactly parallel to my ideals.
 
The right lyrics in the right musicians' hands can make it important, but even the right lyrics in the wrong musicians' hands can ruin it too. I'd sooner listen to kickass music with terrible lyrics than listen to terrible music with kickass lyrics, cause odds are that the terrible music would diminish the value of the lyrics in that situation.
 
Saint Vitus has great lyrics.

Every time I'm on the street
People laugh and point at me
They talk about my length of hair
And the out of date clothes I wear

They say I look like the living dead
They say I can't have much in my head
They say my songs are much too slow
But they don't know the things I know

I know I don't belong
And there's nothing I can do
I was born too late
And I'll never be like you

In my life things never change
To everybody I seem strange
But in my world now something's died
So I just stare with these insane eyes

I know I don't belong
And there's nothing that I can do
I was born too lte
And I'll never be like you


have got to change my ways
'Cause I'm losing my mind
I have got to stop drinking
'Cause I'm dying inside
I feel twice as old as I am
And it's getting worse
I'm in the palm of habit's hand
I can't escape the curse

There is nothing that I can do
I have no self control
I have let myself become dead
I have ruined my soul
Every time I wake up sick
I say never again
But then opportunity knocks
And I'm wasted my friend

I can't control my addiction
I've tried time and time again
I'm losing all my friends and lovers
Alcohol knows it's gonna win

Now I have lost everything
And I really don't care
Everybody that I have known
Has out cast me here
Drinking has wasted my life
And I'm dying inside
I feel twice as old as I am
I've lost what left of my mind

I can't control my addiction
I've tried time and time again
I'm losing all my friends and lovers
Alcohol knows it's gonna win





I've been down so long, I cannot see
Any way out of me

I live under rocks and under stones
That's where I spend my time alone

People don't know I exist
Their company is never missed
I never see the light of day
Somehow that don't bother me

Nothing ever changes
I gave up trying

Once I stuck my head above ground
I didn't like what was around

Crime, disease and poverty
All of this assaulting me

People shove as hard as they can
No one lends a helping hand
You could drop dead in the street
And they'd just laugh hysterically

Nothing ever changes
I gave up trying

Worlds may come and worlds may go
I'll just stay here down below

Bats and worms are my friends
They'll stick with me until the end

Don't want to be a part of your land
'Cause down here I am my own man
I live and hope eternally
For a world filled with peace

Nothing ever changes
I gave up trying
 
most of the time, i enjoy the pronunciation and delivery more than the lyric itself. i can hear what the song is trying to say without knowing what the words are. there are certain parts though that really stand out...

for example, "my promise is made, but my heart is thine." <--opeth, face of melinda....think...ending of castaway...
 
not really that important. there are plenty of bands who are purely instrumental, and i enjoy their music.
 
Some bands have great music and cheesy lyrics and I think the bands are pretty awesome. Some other bands tend to relate a little with me lyrically like Nightrage and a lot of Zyklon's anti-society lyrics, it makes the music more powerful but bad lyrics with a good band arn't really that important.
 
Good lyrics always make music better, but I don't care that much about the lyrics if the music is good, and bad lyrics usually don't detract from a good song. There are some cases where songs have simply rediculously bad lyrics, and as a result, I find it very hard to take the song seriously. If it gets that bad, then we have a problem.