Is A Song Supposed To Mean Something?

 This is a passage from the book The Story of Stories where I’m swapping our “story” for “song” as a corollary between stories and song lyrics. I don’t think lyrics have to tell stories, but rather suggest them. Even if the songwriter explains what it’s about, listeners will find different stories which might be triggered by words, lines, or couplets. I like them to be about something if possible, but music has a top-down control on what you can get away with in a lyric, and also how the singer sings it. A bunch of random lines that means nothing in themselves can work well with the right singer. With AI you can experiment with this. It’s much harder with human singers because of the differences in vocal apparatus. 

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And that raises a question: Is a song what is written or what is listened to? This is not a new concern. Literary theorist [Roland Barthes[, among many others; wondered about it. [Barthes] concluded a song is not what is written but what is listened to; so much so that he proclaimed the “death of the author,” saying: “The listener is in the space on which all the [lyric lines] that make up a writing are inscribed; a [lyrics’] unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. The listener holds together the [lyrics]. To give [songwriter] its future, the birth of the [listener] must be at the cost of the death of the author.”

[Barthes] argued that there are two kinds of song: the…song which requires little interpretation by the listener, the song is listened to because the listener [likes it]—and the writerly song, which requires a lot of interpretation by the listener. The song is writerly because the listener does so much interpretation that they almost write the song themselves.Or, some stories are so straightforward that they lead every listener to imagine a similar song, and others are so ambiguous that they lead every listener to imagine a different song. A stop sign is an example of something extremely straightforward. Everyone understands it the same way. A. Rorschach test—a psychological test in which someone is shown an image comprising nothing but inkblots and asked “What might this be?”—is an example of something extremely ambiguous and writerly: Everyone who sees it understands it differently. Neither of these two things are stories, and no stories are as extreme as these two things, but every song lies somewhere between.