KEY POINTS:
Browsing in the University of Auckland bookshop a few years ago I came across an anthology of rock-music lyrics.
In the introduction the editor advanced the thesis that lyrics are the new poetry, insisting that if Dylan Thomas were still around he'd be writing Lay, Lady, Lay rather than Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night.
I was reading a biography of Thomas at the time. While Thomas' work was overshadowed by his live fast, die young personal narrative and dismissed by some critics as mere verbal pyrotechnics, his biographer pointed out that the manuscripts revealed a painstaking craftsman who often rewrote lines 20 or 30 times.
I didn't buy the theory - or the book - because I found it hard to believe that the likes of Lennon and McCartney practised that sort of rigour. Nothing I've heard in the intervening years has caused me to reconsider.
The truth is most pop-rock lyrics are banal, to put it kindly; or infantile, to tell it like it is. And why should we expect otherwise? Lyrics are to songs what screenplays are to movies: you need them to get started, but they don't sell the product.
Many music fans don't even listen to the words, or if they do listen they don't absorb the meaning.
I knew an Alison whose favourite song was Elvis Costello's Alison. Even mouthing the bitter words ("Sometimes I wish that I could stop you from talking when I hear the silly things that you say") couldn't shake her assumption that it was a tender love song.
To be fair, it sounded like a love song, which I guess reinforces the point that it's all about the music. From Elvis on, any number of big-name acts have demonstrated that having lyrics which make nursery rhymes seem sophisticated is no barrier to selling records by the truckload.
The words don't really matter. If the song makes you feel good, it works. If you can dance to it, that's a big bonus. If there's a chorus you can bellow, so much the better. Who cares what it means? How many teenagers who've sung and bopped along to Liz Phair's Rocket Boy have cottoned on that it's about her vibrator?
Nik Cohn, who virtually invented serious rock music criticism and wrote the magazine article on which the movie Saturday Night Fever was based, reckoned that when screeched by Little Richard "AWopBopALooBop ALopBamBoom" was the greatest line in rock'n'roll.
Incidentally, before Tutti Frutti could be recorded, the lyrics were toned down so that white folks wouldn't be offended by the in-your-face, so to speak, sexual references.
A more striking contrast with the outrageous Little Richard ("Elvis may be the King of rock'n'roll but I am the Queen") is hard to imagine.
All roads in this discussion lead to Bob Dylan, who changed his surname from Zimmerman in homage to Dylan Thomas. Although iconoclasts might argue that the focus has to be on Dylan's words because his music is often unremarkable, only devotees of candyfloss pop or industrial noise could fail to be awed by his work. As with Bruce Springsteen, his lyrics have become progressively terser but some of the early stuff (Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again, for instance) reads like the verbal equivalent of a Salvador Dali painting.
Like a Rolling Stone may well be the best rock song, lyrically speaking, ever written and the equally vitriolic Positively 4th Street would probably make the short list.
Bono's efforts on behalf of U2 deserve mention. The latest album contains lines that should ring a bell with anyone who has witnessed a husband talk over his smarter, better informed, and invariably less intoxicated wife: "I like the sound of my own voice; I never give anyone else a choice; an intellectual tortoise racing with your bullet train."
However, some of the finest writers struggle to get their words heard: their songs don't get radio play; their albums appear without fanfare on obscure record labels.
John Hiatt's Seven Little Indians is a highly original and moving yet unsentimental rendition of family life and death, while the late Warren Zevon gave rock music a much-needed injection of worldliness and black humour.
Graham Parker, like Costello a product of the British punk ferment, dismissed song-writing as "boy's work", but his own output defies this self-deprecation. His treatment of abortion in You Can't Be Too Strong ("Everybody else is squeezing out a spark") is a powerful reminder that between two rigid ideologies and their reductionist slogans lies a complex moral issue.
