by Demola Rewaju

For some of us, lyrics make up the song. Yes the beat is important and the voice matters but it was the lyrics that kept us listening again and again.

Back in the day, music wasn’t much different from what it is today despite what some people try o make it out as. There have always been different types of genres, lyrics and artistes. Back then, there were artistes who were so raw you couldn’t listen to them with your parents without feeling a little embarrassed. The difference these days is that the airwaves are filled with more “Explicit Content” songs than not. That is not to say that there aren’t artistes who sing great songs because there are, we aren’t just listening to them.

The way we got music was quite different in those days: cassette tapes were the thing for my generation. It had tapes that could be played on both sides, usually 45, 60 or 90 minutes running time and never ‘scratched’ or skipped tracks like CDs or DVDs do. It could however cut or get wound up and you had to untangle it. If your cassette player didn’t have a rewinder, a pencil or BIC or Eleganza biro fit snugly into the two holes as though they were created for that purpose and by spinning the tape round and round on the pencil or biro you could rewind or fast-forward the tape.

That was how we listened to music and got their lyrics: pressing play, pause, rewind and play again to hear whatever it was the artiste was saying. It was important to us you see, to hear the lyrics and sing them along. Almost everyone back then had a songbook where lyrics of their favourite artistes were written. Then came properly printed lyric books, one of which was Ayo Animashaun’s HIPHOPWORLD while others usually had suspicious lyrics that were different from what the artiste had said, as we heard it.

For some of us, lyrics make up the song. Yes the beat is important and the voice matters but it was the lyrics that kept us listening again and again. Bone Thugs ‘n’ Harmony seemed to rap in fast-forward mode and knowing what they were saying was usually a matter of pride because only few had the patience to get the lyrics: the lyric-books rarely bothered with Bone Thugs. I remember ‘miming’ their “If I Could Teach The World” with Wahab Raheem and Dayo Fasina-Thomas at Birch Freeman High School to the admiration of their boys who then reloaded and tried to outdo us at CMS Grammar School. We were stuck on the song we knew so they just learnt “East 1999” and got the glory another day.

With blues, you could hear the lyrics clearly but sometimes, it made you feel like they were saying outrageous stuff. Celine Dion sang “Because You Loved Me” and attributed supernatural things to the man who loved her and that was when the gist started that perhaps she was singing for the devil – “You touched my wings I could touch the sky…I lost my faith you gave it back to me” among many other things. Boyz II Men then came and told us they would never walk again, remaining On Bended Knees until a particular girl came back to them: deep stuff, but it was all in a bid to take the listener to a depth of emotions that they had never reached before.

Lyrics don’t matter much in our choice of music today. Just have a dope beat that people can dance to and you can get away with singing almost anything. That’s why songs don’t last. Songs that invest time into great lyrics leave the hearer wanting to hear them over and over again. This reality is lost on many artistes in these parts of the world: having a great voice or ear for music doesn’t mean you can write lyrics. In other climes, there’s no shame in getting someone to write the lyrics to your music. R. Kelly wrote “You Are Not Alone” and Michael Jackson recorded it: a synergy that worked.

Some of my deepest artistes lyrically are mostly foreign: Joshua Radin, Sade Adu, Michael Bublé, Jason Mraz, James Blunt and some other old time greats. In Nigeria, Age Beeka is one of the deepest I’ve found but I have heard from him in a while – that’s the guy who sang “Angelica”.

If you have to release a track every other month just to stay relevant, lyrical depth isn’t so easily attained. That’s the big problem with our music over here.

 

————————-

Read the article from Demola’s Blog

 

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.