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Why are so many metal/hard rock lyrics such merda?


Barking Spiders

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10 hours ago, caitlin said:

I think you're being a bit unfair, they're only on about animals and insects in most of the GOOD songs.

Anyway, some of it is metaphor. you're just not *getting* it, man 🤣

Anyway everyone DOES want to be Naked and Famous and we're definitely not going to maaaaakkkkeeee eeeeeiiiiiiit,

No, genuinely I'm a big fan.  Got all their albums and seen them live a few times.  They're brilliant. 

I think one or more of them are some sort of entomologist or other animal scientist.  Hence all the lyrics about weevils, ants hiding in peaches, kitties, bug cities, monkey rivers, electric spiders, fleas versus mites (fighting with bites), slow slow flies, ladybugs, troglobites, butterflies, salamanders, frogs, etc..

That's my morning's iPod playlist sorted though!

 

*puts on headphones to try and pretend I'm not stuck in an office*

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Only metal is silly and overblown enough to think 'hey, lets write a song about how cool Carl Sagan is!' I think thats why i love it...

(Nightwish - Sagan)

Make me wonder
Make me understand
Spark the light of doubt and a newborn mind
Bring the vast unthinkable down to earth

Always wary of a captive thought
Beware the very first unkind word
See who you are, where from, what of

Entering the unknown
Sending all the poets to the stars
Daring to see beyond the manmade
Woe to you who evade the horizon
Listening to Sagan
Dreaming Carl Sagan
Unseen streams
With understanding no poet is trapped
Woe to all who stop at the horizon

What kind of world would we call home
Our own
Oasis of love, humility and hope
Eradicating all that`s not for life

What kind of aim would we call high
What kind of life would bathe in the brightest white
A limitless world will rise
Son of man, dare to let go of the cowardice

 

 

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14 hours ago, skankdelvar said:

You're beautiful is now fifteen years old yet in many ways it set a template for so many young, white, male singer-songwriters. Depressed? Check. A failure? Check. Unshaggable? Check. 

Perhaps this is how young men today go about the business of soliciting a mercy fück? Perhaps these neo-pubescent milksops think that gaining access to the mossy bower requires fervent demonstrations of 'sensitivity' and 'consideration'?

I am utterly convinced of the veracity of this hypothesis. For a brief phase in which one of my old bands started dropping into open mic nights, I saw more than my fair share of aspiring troubadours who'd decided that their "unique selling point" was best built around being an absolute wet blanket. Gingerly strumming through the four chords they'd mastered while shyly and sensitively opining what shy and sensitive souls they were. Just like all the others. By the end of the evening, the only way you could tell these affected termini campanarum apart was by the fret they put their capo behind to play the same four f**king chords as the last one.

And oh, how the fashions shifted - the second Pete Doherty's slack-jawed, fat-tongued mockney vocal style was prominent on the radio, every wet blanket at these godforsaken evenings squelched onto the same sodden bandwagon, and supplemented their same set of inane wimperings about how they'd love the object of their desires to bring them Lemsip while they were holed up in their bedrooms with a sniffle, by delivering them in the manner you might expect if (god forbid) Jamie Oliver decided to start a singing career.

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I've always liked the lyrics that Meshuggah come up with.  This gem is from an awesome track called Closed Eye Visuals.

Unbound to the pale and lifeless day by the multi-colored, multiform
A spinning anti-dream unthought. Exceeding the obsolete reality
Overheated inner shape generator. Blowing every cerebral fuse
Insanity filtered and systematized. Feeding the tools of mind abuse
Mind signal transmission peaked, distorted, bent, unrestrained
Neuro receivers short circuit. System parameters over gained
Nerve threads decoding the stream of the reality inverting revolution
The patterned untruth of nondream, the closed eye visual delusion
A frantic cellular race down the switchbacks of mind
Throttling the existenc eengine. A propulsion beyond all limit lines
Convulsive thrusts of septic energy as infected cells collide
Unleashing the video bacterial disease. The sinew conducted pseudovision
Mind signal transmission peaked, distorted, bent, unrestrained
Neuro receivers short circuit. System parameters over gained
Nerve threads decoding the stream of the reality inverting revolution
The patterned untruth of nondream, the closed eye visual delusion
Self unfolds like a disintegrating dream
All revealed but the sinister cause
My lying eyes come apart at the seams
Still how could I ever regret the loss
The self transformed into wave lengths,
Reverberating this unyielding dream. Lost in this greedy illusion
I'm forever devoured by the closed eye visual delusion
A twirling visual overload Explosions of terror and beauty
Colors of fear and pain within clash into unanything
A spectra organic frenzy setting fire to the neuro highways of mind
Revolving me away from time. A soul now rendered unassigned
 
Edited by kendall
add in the music
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don't really see the problem. Opera often deals with the same subject matter as Metal, but because it's considered 'high brow' and often in Italian, we're not debating the lyrical content of any arias. For example, from The Departure Aria:

This damn door sticks,
This damn door sticks
It sticks no matter what I do.
It is marked 'pull' and indeed I am pulling
Perhaps it should be marked 'push'?

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I didn't pick on pop as everyone knows it's vacuous, disposable and targeted mainly at kids while hard rock and metal are meant for older ears.  As for good lyrics you can't go far wrong with hard rock combos like Clutch and Faith No More.  Macc Lads lyrics are gems, courtesy of Muttley McLad. Just check out Now He's A Poof, Nagasaki Sauce and Uncle Knobby 😀. Of course one of the greatest lyricists ever isNigel Blackwell of Half Man Half Biscuit with gems like The Trumpton Riots, Outbreak of Vitas Gerulatis, All I Want for Christmas Is  A Dukla Pravda Away Kit and Totnes Bickering Fair...utter firkin genius!

Edited by Barking Spiders
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15 hours ago, skankdelvar said:

Consider Mr James Blunt's hit You're beautiful

I hate that utter utter c**t who wasn't expecting that. The f**k-wit seemed to go through life completely unprepared, in an utterly pathetic and useless state and I shouldn't wonder would be equally useless with power tools and any semblance of DIY.

Give me 'I feel the urge, the growing need to f**k this sinful corpse' any day of the week.

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4 hours ago, EliasMooseblaster said:

I am utterly convinced of the veracity of this hypothesis.

You may in the course of the next week or two be contacted by one of my people with details of an academic research project I am sponsoring. Your input at the scoping stage would be much appreciated.

2 hours ago, Billy Apple said:

The f**k-wit seemed to go through life completely unprepared, in an utterly pathetic and useless state and I shouldn't wonder would be equally useless with power tools and any semblance of DIY.

I return to my contention that Mr James Blunt and his ilk feigned their pathetic uselessness in an attempt to brainwash an entire generation of young men. For while Mr Blunt was shilling the notion that a state of complete and utter subservience was a condition to which all men should aspire it is also a matter of record that he was getting so much punani that his cronies referred to him informally as 'C**ty Blunty'.

One rule for them; another rule for us. Don't do what I do; do what I say.

Pah.

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1 minute ago, skankdelvar said:

I return to my contention that Mr James Blunt and his ilk feigned their pathetic uselessness in an attempt to brainwash an entire generation of young men. For while Mr Blunt was shilling the notion that a state of complete and utter subservience was a condition to which all men should aspire it is also a matter of record that he was getting so much punani that his cronies referred to him informally as 'C**ty Blunty'.

Not that I am casting doubt on his swordsmanship, but are you sure that's why they called him that?

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Now, if you're talking about lyrics -- you want to look to 1960s Detroit, and the likes of (i.e) Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson. Wonderfully crafted lyrics about real stuff... and I bet they both had more than their fair share of full sex.

 

Quote

"Uptight (Everything's Alright)"
 

Baby, everything is all right, uptight, out of sight.
Baby, everything is all right, uptight, out of sight.

I'm a poor man's son, from across the railroad track,
The only shirt I own is hangin' on my back,
But I'm the envy of every single guy
Since I'm the apple of my girl's eye.

When we go out stepping on the town for a while
My money's low and my suits are out of style,
But it's all right if my clothes aren't new
Out of sight because my heart is true.

She says baby everything is alright, uptight, out of sight.
Baby, everything is alright, uptight, clean out of sight.

She's a pearl of a girl, I guess that's what you might say,
I guess her folks brought her up that way,
The right side of tracks, she was born and raised
In a great big old house, full of butlers and maids.

She says no one is better than I,
I know I'm just an average guy,
No football hero or smooth Don Juan,
Got empty pockets, you see I'm a poor man's son.

Can't give her the things that money can buy
But I'll never, never, never make my baby cry,

And it's all right, what I can't do,
Out of sight because my heart is true,
She says baby everything is alright, uptight, clean out of sight.
Baby, everything is alright, uptight, clean out of sight.
Baby, everything is alright, uptight, ah ah ah ah,
Baby, everything is alright, uptight, clean out of sight.
Baby, everything is alright, uptight, clean out of sight.

 

Edited by Ricky 4000
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14 minutes ago, Unknown_User said:

Not that I am casting doubt on his swordsmanship, but are you sure that's why they called him that?

I am fairly sure that's why Mr Blunt's friends called him that. The rest of us called him that for very different reasons, including but not limited to his espousal of the nostrum 'Man is born free but is everywhere a doormat'.

12 minutes ago, Billy Apple said:

Pah!

Pah!

If we time our pahs right we can create a stereo ping-pong effect and then someone will mention very old video games and the derail will be complete.

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47 minutes ago, Jus Lukin said:

A strange image for Blunt to choose for his act- I believe that in real life he spent time in the army and saw action in Kosovo, shagged his fair share of ladies, and is quite a funny, self-deprecating geezer.

A certain light can be cast on the subject by The Simpsons episode Bart's Dog Gets an F where Lisa buys a girls' magazine entitled 'Non-Threatening Boys'.

tumblr_oirqwsGvvj1vdzwqvo1_400.jpg

Since time immemorial magazines of this nature and pop music alike have shared the same target market, namely 10 to 15 year-old girls. For obvious reasons it is necessary for practitioners in both sectors to convey the suggestion that they are shy, sympathetic individuals whose reproductive organs are of a strictly non-functioning nature.

Throw in the truth that 'arrested development' now means many people continue to have a mental age of twelve well into their thirties and the explanation becomes clear. There's no money to be made trying to flog rampant phallocentrism to today's young women, most of whom yearn for romance yet for abject fear of the red-nosed bacon bayonet find themselves alone at night, sobbing helplessly into their Peppa Pig pillowcases. Hence the tendency for white boy pop performers to espouse the 'wet blanket' approach to hawking their product.

It entirely escapes these bastards that two generations of our young men have effectively been gelded, trussed up and served up by the music industry in supplication to the radical feminists as an hors d'oeuvre before their main course of generally tutting about 'men' and  glass ceilings.

Well might we revise a famous lyric to read:

If there's a bustle in your hedgerow don't be very alarmed now!
It's just actually a spring clean for the May Queen

Here is a warning for us all. Shall we heed it?

 

Edited by skankdelvar
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It should be noted that lyrics of unrequited love, heartbreak and indeed self-pity date back to Hank Williams at the very least, and are probably as old as popular music itself. They can, of course, be done more or less successfully. Personally there's only so much whine I can take without some humour, eloquence or at the very list poignancy and sincerity to back it up. However, I have a rather strong hunch that the majority of those who so often and so loudly feel the need to criticise young sensitive poets are simply rather angry middle-aged (or above) men of less than average emotional intelligence who find it both confounding and upsetting that some people not only find ways to express feelings other than aggression/horniness/triumphant superiority, but are actually rewarded for it as well - in money, and female attention, for whatever that's worth.  

And, in all sincerity, "big boys use Black & Deckers" is, this side of the century, as embarrassing a sentiment as anything found in your average power metal song. 

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