What Makes Music “Good?”

Whenever someone refers me to a musician of any genre that they find “good,” I’m always hesitant to accept that what qualifies as “good” to them will be the same for me. Really, there are so many ways to connect with music and so many ways to judge it. Eminem for example can be perceived as a god of rap talent or as perpetuating the misogynistic theme of violence against women. When I first started expanding my appreciation of rap, I asked my friends what they liked about artists like 2Pac and Biggie because they didn’t quite fit into my understanding at the time of what constituted “good” rap. To me, good rap meant fast rap. Speed equated to talent, but I quickly found in these artists that a good understanding of rhythm and lyricism (both political and comedic) can often create a more profound effect than speed alone. I also realized that though Tech N9ne’s “Caribou Lou” was a great song to crank up and roll your windows down to, its lyrics contribute no substance whatsoever to the song. At the end of the day I was listening to a rapper list the recipe for a mixed drink over a really cool beat.

While different ways of evaluating value of music can open up many avenues for appreciating artistic talent, every person has their own taste and expectations. Something that has always been a crucial factor to me is lyricism. The more poetic and complex the lyrics, the more I get sucked in. I know I’ve talked about Marina and the Diamonds in the past, who began writing poetry and transferred her talents to songwriting and music production, but another master of lyric composition and one of my personal favorites is the band Say Anything. Judging solely from their sound, they fall right into the category of teen angst punk music. However, looking closely at the lyrics complicates their image by showing the band’s appreciation for poetry and profound understanding of the power of language. As a writer, I deeply admire the sentences they construct because many of them hit me on both an emotional and an intellectual level.

For example, from the song “Yellow Cat Slash Red Cat” off of their 2004 album …Is A Real Boy, lead singer Max Bemis spits the words rhythmically, almost as if to poetic meter:

Again, I watch my cousin Greg watch MTV inside his home.
He makes fun of the Hip-hop videos from the couch he rides alone.
Snug in the cushion of his cackling he forgets his looming doubts.
He has relied on this for years; you will not yank the carpet out.

The complexity of his sentence structures along with the obscured themes hidden deep beneath contemporary imagery emphasizes the complexity of adolescence and what it might really mean to be an “angsty teen.” By turning what could be crude or cliched imagery into poetics, he shows that this isn’t just some rant, rather it is a deeply thought out reflection on the grittier parts of life and how everyday scenarios (like an encounter between two cats or watching MTV) can factor into these issues that people think they understand.

Off of the same album (my personal favorite of their body of work), the song “The Futile” offers the same sort of combination of complicated language mingling with the raw emotion of the instrumentals and Bemis’ voice. In the opening of the song he starts:

Shit!
Nothing makes sense, so I won’t think about it. I’ll go with the ignorance.
Eat, sleep, fuck and flee; in four words, that’s me.
I am full of indifference.

I don’t want to clutter this post with direct quotation, but I think the lyrics often speak for themselves, reaching each listener on their own level of personal experience with the feelings that they are wrestling with throughout the song. The climactic moment of the song arguably comes to a head at a suicidal moment, though he never explicitly says he’s going to kill himself in explicit terms:

I’m eating rat poison for dinner.
Pull the cord from the phone. I am dining alone,
Tonight, rat poison for dinner.
Pull the cord from the phone. I am dining alone,
So goodnight.

Something about his use of totally non poetic words in these truly telling metaphorical and imagistic ways gives listeners a way of really rethinking and grappling with their own personal sense of these complex emotions. Everyone has felt anger, angst, frustration, maybe even suicidal at a point in their lives, but these tired and worn out adjectives are given fresh meaning by the syntactical feats of Say Anything. “So goodnight” can say so many other things than can a straightforward suicidal goodbye. Here, language is taking on the huge task of representing an arguably cliched theme for this genre of music and making it both personal and relatable at the same time.

This just scratches the surface of all of the things I love about this band. The way they use instrumentals to accompany these lyrics adds to the overall effect in a way that reading these lyrics on the web cannot convey.  At the end of the day, whatever way in which music speaks to you, finding ways of articulating and sharing this sense of “good” can open up a world of opportunities for others and yourself to experience music in a new way.