Speechless

I have one problem with music: lyrics. I can’t really listen to them. Sometimes I cam hum every single instrument of the song, know every note triggered and yet being totally unable to sing some simple english I have listen to a gazillion time.

“That’s weiird”

Though I always found that french was not a really good language to sing with, even young and listening to french stuff I could not pay attention or care about it. Learning song lyrics by heart was annoying for me.

Music first. I automatically focus on music you know, the background noise that make lyrics shine. So much difference between being before, not understanding at all what is going on to now, where i can dissect almost any complex piece of music and give you the name of that synth or see the waveform in my head. Mmmh ADSR..

Problem is lyrics from songs are a big part of pop culture. I could not sing anything, except what I did search and learn patiently making myself, karaoke-wise, a pure disaster.

I do learn some from time to time, well after digging the music of course.

“Hey wait, what is he/she saying? Let me see from what I feel with the music”

Now that I did that for a couple of years, I think what I like the most in lyrics is canevas of ideas, not stories. I’d rather have some EW&F:

“Celebrate, change your thoughts to love
Celebrate, what you’re thinking of
Time ain’t long, soon we’ll be moving on,
Moving on…”

than some DJ Quik:

“This is for the ho in you
In you, the ho in you
This is for the ho in you
In you, the ho in you”

Ok it’s a bit extreme but I took this example because in both case I appreciate the music. But I can’t sing something as shitty as a fake sexy-porn story. Sorry, I’d rather do it for real.

I think it’s not just coming from the fact that I do music. I was not at 5/6 –well barely starting- and I can’t say that I hate words, I always loved to read.

Sorry mermaid, it.does.not.work

I think it has to do with mind independence.

Having someone telling me a story 10 000 times, with the same tone, the same manner, the same words is not something I search for. Actually this is something that my brain fight against because it knows how speech is powerful. Reading is my own voice. I can interpret, do what I want.

I know it’s a bit of paranoia and autism that I experience. It’s underneath, I can’t control that. It’s like if I can’t make the audio speech mine, if I can’t relate deeply, it just goes from one ear to the other.

Or the opposite: with sad lyrics it’s really easy to feel the same. I can’t sing I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo. Hell no. I know I am a weirdo, no need to accentuate that by singing it hundreds of time! You just have to search “creep” to find the Radiohead song, first result. Scary.

I would not say that lyrics make people do stuffs. It’s just that they’re part of the culture and if a song can change the world in a good way, hundreds of them storytelling gangbang with whores for entire generations of men, cannot not have an impact. The impact is the glue that makes them so slow to move on but this is not the subject. Gladys Knight is right.

I listen to the singing melody, not the lyrics. I listen to it musically –voice grain, rhythm, flow-. This is what I love with some hip-hop songs, I don’t give a shit about what the dude says –bragging stories, nostalgia blabla- but the voice is so greatly part of the sound that I can loop it over and over. Now that’s a musician behavior.

Anyway, this all thing is socially impairing to me. But surfing this ocean of sounds is so good.