Word: lyrical
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Lyrics are important, but they don't have to matter. Even when Bob Dylan, arguably America's finest lyricist, mumbles through a number, the poetry of his words comes out in the phrasing. "How does it feel?" Dylan famously asked on Like a Rolling Stone. We may not have known exactly what he meant, but we knew how it felt. Today's musicians have taken that lesson to heart. Thom Yorke of the British band Radiohead wrote some songs for his album Kid A by cutting up lyric sheets and pulling lines out of a top hat. The Icelandic band...
...white underclass, when he manages to get past his fixations on his mom, Everlast and boy bands.) And the undying Tupac Shakur--named for a revolutionary and tied, through his mother and musical executor, to the Black Panther movement--is a far more political figure than his lyric sheets suggest. But popular hip-hop, P.-Diddy-all-about-the-Benjamins-style, tends to be more like the black E! channel, celebrating money and fame. Only a handful of artists, like Dead Prez, are calling to change the channel: "You would rather have a Lexus or justice, a dream or some...
Four years later, the same benign neglect greeted his next book, Strong Motion, about toxic subterfuges carried out by a Boston chemical firm. "Sixty reviews in a vacuum," as he later put it. Franzen began to wonder if literary fiction were going the way of the lyric poem, a deluxe specimen of cultural product enjoyed only by the happy few. When, he asked himself, was the last time an ambitious novel achieved the name recognition of Portnoy's Complaint, to say nothing of Catch...
...post-Mottola career, Carey does most of the creative work herself, including the lyric writing and producing. A reluctance to delegate and a crushing travel schedule put more pressure on her. For several years, a Sony executive notes, Carey has had problems sleeping. A close friend was "not surprised at all" by the breakdown. "She works ridiculously hard." Since she became a star at the age of 19 in 1990, she has made nine albums, in contrast to three by Whitney Houston...
...Drifters hit made them cautious with other writers? songs. Mann and Weil had written "Only in America" as a scathing denunciation of civil inequity: "Only in America/ Land of opportunity/ Do they save a seat in the back of the bus just for me." Leiber and Stoller rewrote the lyric as a straightforward, Horatio Alger anthem. The meaning was lost; worse, it was twisted...