It is easy to suggest that great music needs both, so let's skip that obvious position.
Take a stand; either great music needs lyrics or it does not.
Arguments that are well written and supported with external substantiation are encouraged.
Sources to consider:
Rolling Stone Magazine's top 500 songs in history all have lyrics, so if lyrics are not essential why does this list, compliled by "experts," not have at least a few songs without lyrics?
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/500songsUnderlying topic: If you love music, then you love poetry.Even one of the greatest song writers in history promotes the connection (see excerpt from the New York Times).New York TimesSeptember 14, 2006
Who’s This Guy Dylan Who’s Borrowing Lines From Henry
Timrod?
By MOTOKO RICH
Perhaps you’ve never heard of Henry Timrod, sometimes known as the poet laureate of the Confederacy. But maybe you’ve heard his words, if you’re one of the 320,000 people so far who have bought Bob Dylan’s latest album, “Modern Times,” which made its debut last week at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart. It seems that many of the lyrics on that album, Mr. Dylan’s first No. 1 album in 30 years, bear some strong echoes to the poems of Timrod, a Charleston native who wrote poems about the Civil War and died in 1867 at the age of 39.
“More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours,” the 65-year-old Mr. Dylan sings in “When the Deal Goes Down,” one of the songs on “Modern Times.” Compare that to these lines from Timrod’s “Rhapsody of a Southern Winter Night”:
A round of precious hours
Oh! here, where in that summer noon I basked
And strove, with logic frailer than the flowers.
“No doubt about it, there has been some borrowing going on,” said Walter Brian Cisco, who wrote a 2004 biography of Timrod, when shown Mr. Dylan’s lyrics. Mr. Cisco said he could find at least six other phrases from Timrod’s poetry that appeared in Mr. Dylan’s songs.
negative effects of "senioritis"
