Is Taylor Swift making song lyrics more important than ever?

Who actually pays attention to the words in songs? An academic study a few years back of peoples’ different reasons for listening to music through shuffled play found that responses such as “to accentuate a mood” and “to help me carry out a task” ranked far above “to listen to the lyrics”.

I’ve been surprised and bemused on several occasions to find myself talking about some song or other with a mostly perfectly music savvy friend, only to make reference to its lyrics – something surely quite fundamental to appreciating any non-instrumental piece of music, you’d think – and be met with a non-plussed reaction to the tune of: “Oh, I don’t really listen to the words.” For some, general vibes will always outweigh specific meaning. 

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Maybe you’re one of these people. Or maybe you’re the complete opposite type of person, who hangs on each syllable of every verse, chorus and middle eight, searching for poetry that unlocks some hidden truth about yourself or the world. The trend of printing lyrics on the inside of record sleeves began as many trends in music do with The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967 (the practice had hitherto been resisted by publishers because sheet music was still such a lucrative business). Poring over the words of serious songwriters has been a rite-of-passage for a certain sort of music obsessive ever since.   

By much evidence, it’s something which has found new and even more intense form in the online era, through websites devoted to not only sharing song lyrics (some of them hilariously wrong), but providing a platform for correcting, annotating and discussing them. The biggest dedicated lyrics website is Genius. Launched in 2009, it was previously known as Rap Genius and was focused on hip-hop, but a 2014 re-brand saw it broaden scope to pop, R&B and more.

Essentially a community-driven platform which crowdsources song interpretations and supporting information, it attracts around 120 million monthly visitors, making it the third biggest music website in the world (two places behind Spotify, which incidentally now features embedded lyrics for many songs too).  

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Genius’s most popular artist is who else but Taylor Swift (14.4 million views in 2023 alone). Her entire catalogue has been lovingly studied, analysed, embroidered with detailed notes and generally tended to like a giant lyric garden by thousands of loyal Genius users. I’m writing this on the morning of release for Taylor Swift’s new album The Tortured Poets Department, and already all 16 tracks have been fully transcribed, dissected and deeply scrutinised (Matty Healy’s not coming off well). 

Young people today may be more lyric obsessed than record sleeve scouring older generations ever were. And for good reason. As anyone who has found comfort in the words of Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain, Kendrick Lamar or some other supremely gifted lyricist will attest, lyrics can help massively when it comes to processing troubling experiences and emotions.

A 2023 survey by the charity Youth Music found that 73% of young people find that listening to, reading or writing lyrics enables them to process difficult emotions. Put that against stats showing that one in six children aged five to 16 in the UK are likely to have a mental health problem – up 50% in the last three years – and a correlation is easy to see. 

But there seems to be something else much more trivial driving interest in song lyrics too, and it’s mirth and intrigue at the increasing levels of filth and shade that songwriters love injecting into their texts – beefing rappers especially. Behind Taylor Swift in Genius’s top 10 most viewed artists of 2023 list were Drake and Travis Scott – no strangers each to a good celebrity bunfight. Between them on just one collaborative track, last year’s Meltdown, they managed to take aim in four minutes at not only rival rapper Pusha T, but actor Timothée Chalamet, socialite Kylie Jenner (Scott’s ex), and even Vogue editor Anna Wintour.

Are lyric websites really thriving because kids are poring over the poetry? Or do they just want to have a laugh trying to figure out who Ice Spice was dragging childishly when she rapped: “Think you the shit, bitch? You not even the fart”?  

Plainly a fascination with both the profound and the profane is at play. In that sense, young people today aren’t all that different from previous generations. Yes, many of us 90s teens felt seen and understood when Radiohead’s Thom Yorke angstily sang “I want you to notice / when I’m not around” on Creep. Equally, we enjoyed the minor transgression of slipping CDs past our parents with “parental advisory: explicit content” stickers on the cover so we could, say, count all the F-bombs in Insane Clown Posse’s Fuck the World (105). 

Artists need worry much less about parental scrutiny and censorship in the streaming era, and it’s seen a good swear elevated to practically an art form. Take Genius’s second most popular artist of 2023, former Disney child star Olivia Rodrigo, whose lyrics are coarser than a bag of Brillo pads (my seven-year-old daughter recently discovered her music, which has made for some awkward conversations).

In the song Vampire – which Genius users explain is all about “vulnerability, self-discovery, and the importance of liberating oneself from toxic relationship dynamics” – did Rodrigo really need to use the expression “bloodsucker, fame fucker” several times? Probably not, but she’s just keeping it real, and that’s why kids love her. Even once squeaky-clean Taylor Swift now curses like a sailor (17 fucks in new song Down Bad alone). 

Popular song is a platform for the restless evolution of everyday language and its undimming power as both balm and abrasive. Lyrics clearly aren’t of interest to everyone, and fair enough. But when it comes to holding up a mirror to society in our internet-centric age – its petty squabbles, its meme-generated tacky humour, its spiritual emptiness, and yet the incredible sense of instant connection and community it can foster between people everywhere – the words of songs arguably mean more now than ever. 

Malcolm Jack is a freelance journalist.

This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine, which exists to give homeless, long-term unemployed and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income.

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