Nowadays, unlike the songs of the previous music generation, most modern songs are based on their rhythm. There are lots of trend songs that don’t even have lyrics at all. The ones that have lyrics, mostly, consist of some random, meaningless words. Although they have such fantastic beats, can we define this as music, or can we even call it art?
In the past – not so far, like 10-20 years ago – all well known songs had a story to tell listeners about life. There were messages that may affect people’s thoughts, decisions, and even their lifes. These lyrics were mostly based on the common feelings that most people feel, like love, anger, bravery, depression, happiness and more. The songs were meaningful and really has a purpose to exist, touching people’s lives. For example, God’s Plan – a song named by Drake that came out in 2018 – is about Drake’s past life. Because he was a black person and he suffered because of the impossibilities that come from the ghetto lifestyle, he wrote a song to tell people how hard is life for the people lives in ghettos have. He mentioned that most of them can’t get a proper education, they don’t have enough financial situation to live a normal life, they work underpaid than the most of the white people, etc. Also, he mentions about his life, how he struggled, how he had a chance to met the right people to push forward his career and how lucky he is compared to others. He also gave away one million dollars to people he saw at streets and really needs help, as a second chance.
Although the lyrics should have purposes and stories should be told, songs that are based on meaningfulness are not popular now. Nobody listens love songs and the stories no more excites new generation of listeners anymore. This generations listeners want songs that hide the emotions in the tunes. The rapid and loud of bass is defines aggressiveness, slow melody means sadness, random and high pitched melodies represents happiness. Although all of these mention happiness, didn’t you notice something is missing? They are lack of stories. Because new songs are based on feelings, they don’t include any story which also takes out the meaning from the lyrics. Lyrics becomes sounds that only exists for harmony if it has not any meaning in it. At the end, lyrics becomes meaningless and music becomes the combination of some sounds.
To conclude, songs become meaningful with lyrics, and lyrics gets its meaning with the story that it tells. Without story, the lyrics would be nothing but a random vocal , and without a meaningful lyrics, whole song becomes nothing but a mixture of sounds. Music should have meaning to be music, and art should tell a story to become an art. Turning back to the first question we mentioned, the answer is absolutely not, there can’t be art without any meaning.
