#nohopelistenio

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I want there to be a website similar to Genius, for annotating song lyrics (and poems and public domain texts and whatever else you want to do with that tech), but instead of each song having one page that just shows the "consensus" annotations, each user would have their own personal page for each song they annotate. So I would have my page with my annotations about Source Decay by the Mountain Goats and you would have your page for yours, and there'd be no such thing as the page for Source Decay by the Mountain Goats that just houses the top-voted contributions (or however it works on Genius, I think it's slightly more complicated but w/e). (Actually there would be a version of "the page" for each song but it wouldn't work like Genius, more on this in a sec.)

Genius is often very good at providing the kind of basic factual information that can't possibly be controversial (the song mentions a town, the annotation mentions that the songwriter lived in that town briefly during 2008, whatever), and it's often very good as a place to collect quotes from interviews of what the band has to say about each song, but on the whole Genius is not as fun to browse as it should be, and I think that's largely because the wiki-like structure prevents it from channeling more than a small portion of the passion and interpretive creativity of, say, songmeanings.com, a once-active site that Genius largely killed and replaced, but it still exists and if you check out old comment sections you can find a lot more rambling and theorycrafting (and crucially, a lot more bad ideas, which are vitally important to any kind of interesting conversation about art).

You will find some of that more speculative stuff on Genius, it's not just for factual background, but the fact that space is inherently limited and everyone's annotation is in competition with everyone else's does not make this impulse thrive. The least weird contributions tend to win out. If you want to add your idea about a particular line, but someone else has already annotated it, your options are: a) "propose an edit" to their annotation that incorporates your own ideas (awkward!), b) try to write your own annotation and have it displace theirs entirely as the thing that comes up when you click the line (you'll feel like a dick even if you're successful at this), or c) leave your thoughts as a "comment" on their annotation (Genius hides the comments by default and doesn't make the button to open them at all conspicuous, but even if that weren't the case your "comment" would still be lower in the hierarchy than their "annotation", and implicitly framed as a reply to the latter).

In my vision nobody's annotation would compete with anyone else's, the annotations are (what they mostly are when made in physical books remember!) more for the writer's benefit than for any other reader, and unconstrained by the responsibility implied in the wiki-ish project of contributing to a public resource you would be free to pursue whatever interpretive rabbit holes strike your fancy, fill each page dissecting evidence for how this record that definitely wasn't intended as a concept album is actually a concept album, fill them with entirely personal connections like how this line reminds you of a weird thing you saw in your Grandma's attic when you were ten, do whatever you want. Other people can come and leave comments on your stuff appreciating your brilliance/sending you death threats if you choose to enable that option, the way I'm imagining it this would actually be a big part of the life of the site and if all went to plan it would actually feel something akin to a social media site some of the time, but that side of it would be secondary to the main goal of each user having a place to house their own thoughts about songs in an organized, presentable, public way.

The site should make it easy to discover the annotation pages of other users writing about stuff you're interested in, the "main page" for each band and then each song would be a sort of hub for accessing other people's pages who have made annotations for that. If it had any substantial userbase this might benefit from some mechanism whereby the community identifies people who are writing particularly interesting stuff and makes those people a bit more visible, although I'd want this to be more subtle than a list ordered by likes/upvotes/whatever, and I'd want there to be some way to show off the range of different ways of using the site, with some people being more diaristic/personal on there, some people doing something like real scholarship (perhaps sometimes on a more ambitious scale than actually-existing Genuis allows for), some people might be doing something more spiritually akin to fanfiction.

I know that this site would be fascinating for (at least) me to browse if it existed and was active; I'm unsure whether there'd be enough interest to make it active. I think it's possible. There's a bunch of you guys I'd like to follow on there if it existed and if you were doing it.

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One good point that the movie Whiplash made is that jazz drumming is really cool and sounds good. That's certainly so.

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there are precious few songwriters capable of writing a sex lyric anywhere near the level of "our hands explore each other's human vessels like four excited spiders"

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I wish I'd listened to more different music when I was a teenager. I didn't know at the time that, when I reach the age I am now, playing an album I haven't heard since I was 15 would be one of the most exquisitely evocative varieties of nostalgia available. It's a finite resource, and I've pretty much fully depleted it by now.

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I've given the newest of Montreal album a few "spins", as we used to say, now, and on the last listen I took notice of lyrics I enjoyed and wrote some down:

too depressed / too depressed to fuck / I am too depressed / too depressed to fuck

sitting by the same river with my prayer beads, with my anal beads, hope I don’t mix them up

the jilted control the narrative because that’s all they have left

do we have to breathe our childhood trauma into every conversation?

all I ever wanted was to be believable / I’ll probably die in-character

impotent vagina reread one page forever / who is Ever?

stepping on scorpions to lose my erection

every time I shave my legs I get you stuck in my head

uncoping people enter the premise and make it sad

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Guided By Voices and Wolf Parade are two bands I've listened to for many years and only very recently found out they each have two main vocalists. In both cases the two voices are quite distinct now I know there's two. Tbf GBV is mostly Robert Pollard with a few Tobin Sprout tracks, but Wolf Parade is pretty much 50/50 and I still thought it was all one guy.

I also learned literally today that arthritis is a three syllable word, I'd been saying it like "Arthur Itis" and I thought it had an extra I after the H.

Slowly I am catching up with the world. Soon I will have noticed everything.

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@medlinka (from the replies of my song lyrics annotations post):

There are so many songs that feel like they should have layers of meaning and then I look up what the actual artists say about their lyrics and it’s like “oh yeah these words just sounded cool together”

And often when the artist does have a concrete explanation for what it means it feels more like a very mid fan theory than anything else! Like it's not at all uncommon ime for an artist's take on their own work to clearly fail to understand what's compelling about the thing they made.

I find it helpful to keep in mind that even when "these words just sounded cool together" there still has to be a reason why those words sounded cool together right, most combinations of words don't sound cool. I think it's fair to think of "what's the explanation for why these words are interesting together?" as being equivalent to (or at least one version of) the question "what do these lyrics mean?", even if the songwriter didn't have much conscious insight into that at the time they were writing. If you're responding to something then you're responding to something right! It's fair to ask questions about what that thing is exactly, even if the person who put it in front of you doesn't really know themselves.

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Sammi Smith's 1970 debut album was originally released as He's Everywhere, named for the first single, but when the second single "Help Me Make It Through the Night" was a number one hit the label rereleased the album under that title instead. Spotify has approached this by listing it under the compound title He's Everywhere (aka Help Me Make It Through the Night), which I think is actually much more emotionally potent than either title separately, if that was the intended name from the start it would have been a stroke of brilliance

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Something that reliably gives me a little frisson of joy is when song lyrics employ a bit of arithmetic (in a coherent way). My favourite recently-discovered example is from Practical Effects by Kleenex Girl Wonder (since the numbers are spread out over a few lines I have bolded them, not to insult your intelligence but for ease of skimming):

It feels like half of the time you're deconstructing your life And I love games and conversation, but I'd rather just fight. A quarter you're nice, exhortatively polite, Normal, cordial, kind and gracious, swearing everything's fine. But the other 25% defies all compromise

So satisfying to see it all add up to 100%! And bonus points for mixing it up with both percentages and fractions.

Another classic is from the start of Till My Head Falls Off by They Might Be Giants:

There were 87 Advil in the bottle, now there's 30 left. I ate 47, so what happened to the other 10?

Haha great question! There are four different numbers in this one couplet and it both makes logical sense and tells a little story with some drama and intrigue. How cool is that!

Now for a slightly problematic (unexciting sense) example. This is from Nothing You Can Do About It by Darren Hayman:

The Scrabble tiles spelled out "ennui", Landed on a triple word and scored eighteen, But you cheated by looking in the dictionary.

Beautiful excecution, no? Except I looked it up and all the letters in "ennui" are only worth one point each in Scrabble, so with a triple word score that would still only make fifteen, right? I'm not really a Scrabble player myself, am I missing something that makes this work? The way he sings this kind of rhymes "eighteen" with "dictionary" (by drawing out the "reeee" at the end of dictionary), but he can't be fudging it for the sake of rhyme because fifteen works just as well for that. So what gives? Did he... miscount and think ennui had six letters in it maybe? Darren is a very detail-oriented songwriter so this is a puzzle to me. (ETA: I was wrong about this! See here for deets.)

Anyway. That's my post about songs with basic arithmetic in them! If anyone has any more please let me know! My three examples have covered addition, subtraction and multiplication, so if I could find a good division example that would be very special, but anything along these general lines will make me happy.

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Oh, hello. That's right, I'm in Bristol, thanks for noticing. I had some business to conduct with some goats, which has just lately concluded. It went very well.

Definitely the best time I've ever had seeing them. It helps a lot that Mr Jon Wurster was present, the last several times I saw them goats it was the drumless version, which is still good but having him makes a huge difference. I hope the fandom at large understands just how special Jon Wurster is, I feel like we have a proportion of people who really do Only Listen To the Mountain Goats or close to it, which is fine as long as you appreciate how lucky we are, the man is a fuckin... like I wanna say he's a fuckin beast but I need to convey that his drumming has tremendous power but also great intelligence and artistry. He's like a fuckin, a beast who's a wizard as well. You know?

Great set list tonight, and although I was rude about the newer albums on here a week or two ago, I have to report that every song they played from the past ten years (there were about 6?) was one I was actively excited to hear. Not that these were new revelations to me, I already knew they were bangers, but it's good to be reminded that they are still putting out some bangers and I'm glad to see the band agrees with me about which ones those are. Or I just got lucky tonight, but fine I can be glad about that too.

It's an open question in my worthless opinion whether Matt Douglas and his contributions have been a net positive on tMG's recorded output, but there's no possible doubt he's been a huge positive to their live presence. There were several moments during the show that made me audibly gasp, or put my hand to my heart, or say out loud "oh fuck", or make some other melodramatic gesture, and a good many of those moments were directly Matt's doing. Also, what a great face he's got? Absolutely iconic face, inspires a combination of enthusiasm and trust otherwise elicited by only the very best dogs.

I love Stabbed to Death but would never have expected it to be a highlight of the gig like it was, I can't describe the mad shit they did with it but I can tell you it was gripping.

I only contributed my voice to I think three songs towards the end, most prominently the best No Children I've ever experienced, but managed to give myself a sore throat anyway. Don't worry, it was mild enough merely to contribute to the atmosphere. I must admit that despite being an annoying hipster who thinks This Year is just a pretty good B+ song, I did get swept up by the spirit of it this time.

It's been a firm and settled matter in my mind for years now that Beat the Champ is the third best album (Tallahassee second, WSABH first), but the last song of the encore was Heel Turn 2 and as the first chords sounded I was instantly and forcefully struck with the thought: "wait, is Beat the Champ actually the best Mountain Goats album??" I feel quite perturbed. I am going to have to think.

There was some kind of throuple directly in front of me who were all dancing with indefatigable abandon and frankly excessive horniness throughout the show, and it's a testament to the excellent general atmosphere, to my good mood, and I suppose also to their winsome spiritedness that I was for the most part simply charmed by this. Normally any stranger being conspicuously happy and in love is enough to fill my shrivelled lonely heart with black bilious resentment, but tonight, quite the opposite. That's part of the magic of them goats, you know.

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I think after Beat the Champ (but not including! That album is top 3) the Mountain Goats have only occasionally touched on the greatness of their former years--which is no insult, JD was a frighteningly consistent songwriter for like 20 albums in a row, and the new stuff is largely just fine--but wow does Bleed Out (the song) burn bright as an exception. Such a high density of perfect lyrics, it literally has 11 separate lines that individually make me want to break into a whooping applause and open a bottle of champagne (I did just count yes, there are 11 lines in the song that produce this exact reaction from me). It simultaneously satisfies the part of me that wants tMG songs to be clever/literary/high-concept and the part that wants them to be cathartic and messy and raw. Hits some classic tMG thematic notes while being completely unlike anything else they've ever done. Thank you the Mountain Goats you have really done a special one here.

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If you'll indulge me to be literally 14 for a second and quote an angsty lyric: "I'm not afraid to try / I'm afraid of trying, and it not feeling good enough" is a real fuckin' mood sometimes imo.

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I've been listening to this band for a few weeks now and I've made very little progress on the question of whether their lyrics are good or bad

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Somewhat mixed feelings about the new Los Campesinos! album on first listen, but I have to admit they've got a strong contender for Couplet of the Year with "Do you still have that one tattoo? / Well, that's how it works, of course you do"

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I remember when Thatcher died I had been listening, the night before the morning it was announced, to Hefner's song The Day That Thatcher Dies, and I remember looking at the song on last.fm (this was an only somewhat anachronistic thing to be doing at that time) and thinking, "when she eventually does die I wonder whether this song will get a huge spike in scrobbles?". It was a very odd feeling to see the news just hours later. I texted that thought to my friend and apparently that was how he first heard.

(It did of course get a huge spike in scrobbles fwiw, although I had to wait a few days to see it because they only updated the graphs once a week)

Second, related memory from that day: I checked Darren Hayman (the main Hefner guy)'s twitter account to see if he'd have anything to say about the song, there was a tweet where he mentioned that lots of people were asking him about it and he didn't have much to say but he uploaded his "response" in the form of a short acoustic song titled The Day That Thatcher Died (note the past tense), saying he'd take it down after a short time. I wasn't in a position to listen when I saw that, and by the time I was it had already been deleted. When I google now I can't find either that song or any reference to the fact that the tweet ever happened, this post you're reading now is possibly the only public record of it that exists.

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I really want this song "What! No Women?", recorded approx 100 years ago, to be about a straight guy accidentally walking into some kind of gay gathering and not understanding what's going on ("what kind of a party is this?"). I do think it's a pretty plausible read but I'm not sure if I'm just being a tumblr user and automatically applying a layer of gay subtext to everything I perceive. It's possible I'm being unduly influenced by the anachronistic(?) double meaning of "this looks like a branch of the YMCA!".

(lyrics begin at 1:30 if that's the only part you're interested in)