Music can have a large impact on an audience. It can play a crucial role in telling a story. But lyrics are different from music. Lyrics are just words. They are not tempo, rhythm, tune, or—especially—sound. At least, not when written down.
Lyrics in text have no sound to them, which means they can be interpreted as sounding any way the reader wants. One could risk spending many, many paragraphs on each syllable to make sure the reader doesn’t, or assume that using lyrics to a popular song would mean that everyone would know the song you quote.
The first way is a quick way to lose most of your readers—or at the very least their memory of what was happening during the music in your story. The second way… have you ever heard ‘Born this way’ by Lady Gaga? She’s so popular these days everyone’s trying to cash in on her fame. You have to have heard it. I haven’t, but surely you have.
Still, it’s worth the risk, right? I mean, the lyrics convey the mood, making your work as an author so much easier. It’s worth that break to also lose readers who find it hard to be immersed in the story and concentrate on the actual action when the story keeps skipping to lyrics, right? Your story will be up for years after the song falls into obscurity, some event makes the artist unpopular, a new musical fad shows up, or even a new generation with new tastes appears. People will still understand the point of the story, won’t they? They won’t find it lazy to use lyrics to replace actual work, even though spending time on telling the reader by yourself, you can create suspense and tension, or make the reader relax. It’s obviously much better to rush through that with a few lyrics by someone else.
Heck, you can even use lyrics to develop characters and plot. Everyone will know exactly who the lyrics are referring to. Even if they’ve never hear the tune, or forgot the tempo, or if they read at a pace that doesn’t match up with the lyrics perfectly.
If music can do all that for you, then the more you use, the less risk there is. The music is just that good. You know it. If ninety percent of your story is lyrics, then you’re just using it to its full potential, not accenting something you didn’t make with a scant amount of your own work which you didn’t put much effort into.
It’s worth the risk to alienate people with making the music distracting, doing the work for you, and interrupting what little work you’ve done, isn’t it? Much more worth it than doing your own work or writing for a medium that can actually incorporate sound.
Right?
I understand you’re message here, but I do feel certain books, like The Help, have a clear message that the audience can’t miss unless they’re completely daft. Even though one person may interpret music lyrics or a poem differently, the whole point is, is that the writer has you thinking.
Context is always key, but you also have to be writing to an audience who would be quick to get the meter, as well as not be distracted by the music, which has to add to the writing.
Sorry, this was for the post below yours;my internet got confused. It does that.
My point is incorporating music into stories is near impossible for the reasons I listed. A play or a movie would work well with music, but text is almost impossible to blend with music because the audience can’t hear it and the music can be very jarring in the middle of a story.
I get what you’re saying as well, to a point, but I don’t wholly agree. Lyrics and poetry both share meter, which can help the reader through the lyrics or prose just by how the lines are broken up. If words are used properly according to their… I’ll say syllabic nature, then I think the reader will naturally fall into the proper rhythmic reading.
Is there more context necessary to understand this piece as well? I feel like I’m missing that context that would allow me to fully understand what you’re getting at here…