When Did You Start Paying Attention To Lyrics?

NateSean

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It was very recent for me. I pride myself on learning a song well enough to sing it to impress people but when I started rattling off certain lyrics for my boyfriend, it occurred to me that the meanings of certain songs might send the wrong message.

For example, I love Alphaville's Big in Japan because without going into a lot of detail, it perfectly describes my situation. On the other hand, Cyndi Lauper's Time After Time can kill a romantic evening. Benjamim Orr's Into the Night should probably not be dedicated to any teenager you're familiar with unless you want a guest spot on a Chris Hansen special.
 

Brightdreamer

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I've listened to lyrics for a long time - can't remember when I started, even. And, yes, lyrics and meaning matter. (My eternal answer to the question of whether lyrics matter is the classic scene from the sci-fi comedy movie Spaceship - YouTube link.) Back in the 1980's, all those people dedicating Every Step You Take to their loved ones... I'd file a restraining order if anyone dedicated that to me. These days, I have trouble listening to fun's songs, because there almost always is that one little line in there that ruins it despite the catchy beat, the abuse reference or some such.

I am aware, though, that many people don't listen to lyrics, or understand them. (I remember reading somewhere how someone liked that nice Tommy Makem song about the little old lady and her farm: Four Green Fields, the powerful anthem to Irish unification.)
 

cornflake

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I remember someone asking Sting about Every Breath... on some talk show and he was like yeah.... in hindsight, not cool. Heh.

The classic example of people not paying attention to lyrics is Reagan and other mostly GOP politicians (and people) using Springsteen's Born in the USA, as some sort of patriotic anthem, when it's really, really not. I've never quite understood how that gets misunderstood so often. It's not like he's Dylan or a metal or grungy or punk band or whatever, where the lyrics are garbled or hard to parse. You can hear the man singing, clearly.
 

Jason

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I remember someone asking Sting about Every Breath... on some talk show and he was like yeah.... in hindsight, not cool. Heh.

The classic example of people not paying attention to lyrics is Reagan and other mostly GOP politicians (and people) using Springsteen's Born in the USA, as some sort of patriotic anthem, when it's really, really not. I've never quite understood how that gets misunderstood so often. It's not like he's Dylan or a metal or grungy or punk band or whatever, where the lyrics are garbled or hard to parse. You can hear the man singing, clearly.

I feel the same way:

Born down in a dead man's town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
End up like a dog that's been beat too much
Till you spend half your life just covering up

Born in the U.S.A., I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A., born in the U.S.A.

Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man

Born in the U.S.A., I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A., born in the U.S.A.

Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man said "son if it was up to me"
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said "son, don't you understand"

I had a brother at Khe Sahn
Fighting off the Viet Cong
They're still there, he's all gone

He had a woman he loved in Saigon
I got a picture of him in her arms now

Down in…

Hardly patriotic

Oh, and to the OP - I have always paid attention to lyrics...
 

NateSean

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Elvis Costello's Veronica sounded catchy and fun, till I realized it was about a woman who used to be vibrant and free and is now (at the time of the song) suffering from Alzheimer's.

Recently, I listened to Penn Jillette's audio book Every Day is an Atheist Holiday. The first chapter is him deconstructing the popular Christmas song, Hallelujah!, which isn't as joyous as it sounds when you realize it's about the end of the world.
 

Dawnstorm

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I've always paid attention to lyrics to some extent, and I still don't do it all the time. I don't really know what about a song makes me pay attention.

I remember, back in the day, they would play Frank Zappa's "Bobby Brown" up and down, with no-one complaining, while you'd hear plenty of complaints about less explicit songs.

And then there's Elton John's "Cold as Christmas", which would always come around during the Christmas programs around here, and it would even end up on some Christmas collections - it's a song about a couple's desperate last attempt to save their marriage; it's set in July during a vacation in the tropics and has little to do with Christmas (using it only as a metonymy for the time of the year, and perhaps for a contrasting effect to the mood of the piece).
 

Maze Runner

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I was weaned on the standards, so immediately. Nothing of much importance being discussed there. Mostly just love and death, but poetically. I think the post standard era has produced more interesting, meaningful lyrics.
 

MaeZe

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Elvis Costello's Veronica sounded catchy and fun, till I realized it was about a woman who used to be vibrant and free and is now (at the time of the song) suffering from Alzheimer's. ...
Bob Geldolf's I Don't Like Mondays (performed by The Boomtown Rats) sticks in my head like that because of what it's about.

I grew up on lyrics, music was a movement in my earlier years.
 

dianeP

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For years I sang Alannah Miles' Black Velvet, but it's only when my guitarist introduced "a song about Elvis" that I realized what the song was about... And this despite the line "Love me Tender leaves them crying in the aisles. Clearly I didn't pay much attention to what I sang.
As for bad song choices, my sister asked me to sing Sinead's Nothing Compares to you at her wedding. She didn't care what the song was really about. She loved the chorus.
 

Devil Ledbetter

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I remember, back in the day, they would play Frank Zappa's "Bobby Brown" up and down, with no-one complaining, while you'd hear plenty of complaints about less explicit songs.
From memory:
Hey there people I'm Bobby Brown
They say I'm the cutest boy in town
My car is fast
My teeth is shiny
I tell all the girls they can kiss my hiney

Here I am at a famous school
I'm looking smart and I'm acting cool
Got a cheerleader here wants some help with her paper
Let her do all the work
Maybe later I'll rape her

Yeah... I'll leave off before I get to the transphobic stanzas. At least Zappa was mocking people who thought like that, not advocating assholery.


To answer the OP's question, I started listening to lyrics when I was 3. My sisters made fun of me for singing "Don't you love her Bradley" along to The Doors.
 

bin_b0x

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Around seventeen I suppose, but even so I still have to listen to a song at least twenty times before realising that the words might actually mean something.
 

yoghurtelf

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Since high school I have been in love with good lyrics - the Smashing Pumpkins are my fave band largely because of Billy's poetical genius. Plus, I love the music, so that helps. ;)
 

Transformersfan123

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I have certain moments of clarity with most songs at one point or another. It could be on my third listen or my three-hundredth, but eventually I really listen to the words. Something else that helps is to actually see the lyrics written down. That can make things click home so much better for me!
 

DeleyanLee

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As soon as I realized those were real words, I've been listening to lyrics. However, I'm kinda old, so the songs I loved in my teens and young adulthood give me the willies when I listen to them with today's sensibilities. So many "love songs" (even modern ones) are stalker songs or emotional blackmail songs or or or and I just don't find them as enjoyable anymore.

Part of me understands that fiction isn't real life (and songs are writing, so they're fiction in their own way), but I'm just not comfortable with it anymore. I find myself sticking with soundtracks and instrumentals more as time goes on.
 

Frankie007

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Baby it's cold outside. is that a big enough example for you?

and also, Sting's "Every Breath" .... if you think about it....it could be a Christmas song....Santa is always watching you. LOL
 

Layla Nahar

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Middle school - by High School it was well underway
 

Wind Ann Wise

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I recently started really listening to lyrics of songs. Of course, most of the time, if I know the real meaning behind the lyrics, I can't look at the song the same way again. Case in point: The Police, "Every Breath You Take." Every time I hear it, I think, Why is this a wedding song? It's about a stalker!
 

Cobalt Jade

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Hey there people I'm Bobby Brown
They say I'm the cutest boy in town
My car is fast
My teeth is shiny
I tell all the girls they can kiss my hiney

Huh..huh..huh.. he said Hiney (Butthead laugh)

As a kid I always listened to the lyrics. At 7 or 8, I understood all the rock opera Tommy by listening to my brother play it ad infinitum. Of course, it was easy for me to understand because Roger Daltrey had such good diction and was such a wonderful interpretive singer.

Elton John was more frustrating. Wonderful voice and songs, but I could never fully understand him because he was so muckle-mouthed. Later, I read that Bernie Taupin would come up with the lyrics, and Elton would write the songs around them. Maybe that's why. Elton's later, Taupin-less songs were easier to hear and sing.

To the poster who misheard the Doors song: I always interpreted "Try to set the night on fire" in Light my Fire as "China set the night on fire..." riding with my older brother and sister in a finned Chevy with a push-button radio.

Yeeks I'm old.
 

Jason

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One powerful set of lyrics that was introduced to me recently via Chris Stapleton's Either Way:

We pass in the hall
On our way to separate rooms
The only time we'll ever talk
Is when the monthly bills are due
We go to work, we go to church
We fake a perfect life
I passed the point of giving a damn
All my tears are cried

Chorus
We can just go on like this
Or say the word, we'll call it quits
Baby, you can go or you can stay
But I wanna love you either way

It's been so long since I've felt
Anything inside these walls
You can't heal, you can't hurt?
When you don't feel at all
I used to cry and stay up nights
And wonder what went wrong
It's been hard
But hearts can only do that for so long

Chorus (repeat 2x)
 

NathanLyle

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I started really paying attention to lyrics in middle school (early 2000's) because I was starting to listen to more hip hop and my mom hated it. She said rap was all about booties and boobs and shooting people. I started paying closer attention and dissecting every lyric in an attempt to prove her wrong. It worked better for some songs than others.
 

anaemic_mind

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I've always paid attention to lyrics and find it interesting knowing what the meanings of songs are. The first single I ever bought when I was five I got my Dad to type out [on a typewriter...showing my age now lol] the lyrics for me so I could sing along to it. As I got older I obsessively bought Smash Hits magazine as that always had lyrics to songs printed in it. Then when I started buying albums, hated ones that didn't have lyrics printed in them because the first thing I did was hide myself away and listen to it several times over to learn them all.
 

AaronJKaplan

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I was raised hearing, learning, and usually understanding the words, but not really sympathizing with them. Later, I began learning the meanings and sympathizing with them. Even later, I realized that I was just falling into their trap, and that I really didn't sympathize with almost any of them. Lyrics are usually poorly written sentiments that could mean any sort of thing (unless you directly ask the writer what they meant, but then, people tend to lie or associate with what they would like for them to mean at different times), and usually, the writer means something that isn't conveyed well. Sometimes, they mean something that I would never want to say out loud or even think. Sometimes, they mean something beautiful that comes out in a way that I would never want to go on record as having said in such a way, because it is conveyed improperly. Very rarely are lyrics so well composed and presented that they convey their true meaning well to all who learn of the lyrics, and even more rarely are they something I would want to associate with. I've mostly given up on music to tell me anything, or even to entertain me. I try to use it as inspiration to make the world a better place, so I find myself listening to obnoxiously brutal music in the gangster rap, heavy metal, hardcore, punk, etc. genres. But, occasionally, there is a well-thought out, well-composed, and well-presented song that really strikes a chord with me, and I'll play it (usually to death, because it usually ends in meaning something other than I heard at first) over and over. There are a few exceptions to this rule I'm getting at, but for the most part, music is written by people "matured" at a younger age for purposes of entertainment... the young kids version of writers. And it shows. Nowadays I have a hard time listening to anything more than once, because of this hearing-disgusting-lyrics-clearly or not-understanding-what-they-mean or they-don't-know-what-they-mean problem, so I usually skip around through my music library and try to find the thing where I can't even hear the lyrics, but then I feel weird listening to something that could be telling me go do something horrible. The struggle. Also, most music is polluted with the desire to have many people hear it even though it isn't really presentable, because money and fame.

On the other hand, when I find music that I really, truly enjoy listening to, there's nothing like it. Music is amazing. I've just been drumming for so long that I tend to play rhythm while the front-people make a fool of themselves, and I'm tired of it I say! I demand for clean lyrics and vocals! Sure, it's art, but it's also writing, and it should be concise. That's my take, anyways.