It’s a tradition that jumps from genre to genre, decade to decade and age to age. William Shakespeare. Bob Dylan. Allen Ginsberg. LeRoi Jones (and later Amiri Baraka). Phil Ochs. The Last Poets. Hip hop.
Since antiquity poetry and music have shared a harmonious relationship. Song lyrics, in essence, are poetry in a simpler form, relying on basic rhyme and rhythm structure as a central idiom. But there are those who seek to take their lyrics to a higher plateau, and the aforementioned musicians are by no means alone in their fusing of “higher poetry” into their music.
Uh oh. “Higher poetry”? In music?
This is not in any way meant to debase musicians who stick to more traditional methods of lyric writing. It’s a ham-fisted separation of poetic intent and execution within the genre of music. And of course, it’s as subjective as any music-based debate can and will be.
But ask anyone who’s spun Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks (the easiest clich