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I recently proclaimed sagely that I don’t listen to song lyrics, as though this somehow made me seem as though I had inside information. Far from asking me the secret to my wisdom, however, the friend to whom I was talking turned her nose up at me and basically called me a Philistine.

“Why would you bother to listen to music if you don’t know the words?” she demanded. After some tortuous metaphor or other, I almost got away with it – before inadvertently revealing that I didn’t actually know the words to even my favorite songs, such as Run by Snow Patrol, or even all the words to my number one song of all time, A Private Future by Love & Rockets.

Great was her indignation, and so I ruminated for several days on why this might be. I now have an answer.

Most song lyrics are actually merely bad poetry. I cannot stand bad poetry, and even when set to music and released by Journey, it’s still just bad poetry. Example:

My Pickle:

…may my pickle stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it’s sunday may it be wrong
for whenever gherkins are green they are not young

and may my sweet and sour do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than pickle-juicey
there’s never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one bite.

Ok, I think we can agree that this is, in fact, some dreadful poetry. (Thanks to a certain Jon Glass for this, by the way – I have no way of contacting you to request your permission to reproduce this truly awful drivel, but I will happily send you $10 via PayPal if you wish to contact me, or would reluctantly remove it at your pleasure.)

But… now sing it to yourself to the tune of You’re So Vain by Carly Simon. Go ahead, try it. Or Hotel California – nobody could ever figure out what the hell that was about, either.

Suddenly it’s STILL just bad poetry! Nothing changed! It just has a tune! The banality of song lyrics – with obvious exceptions such as Paul Simon, Suzanne Vega and Katy Perr… errrr… means they are simply not worth listening to. It is the music that creates the emotion, most of the time.

This is why I like Kraftwerk.