This piece by Suematsu has an interesting analysis of music versus lyrics in music. I recommend giving it a read.

Some of his analysis is interesting, and I haven’t heard it before. In particular, he discusses non-English speaking cultures, and their ability to appreciate music over lyrics, which is likely true. Personally, I have always been in the ‘music’ camp, and ignore lyrics pretty much entirely, modulo the sound of the lyrics. And I can appreciate jazz and love instrumentals.

I do think he was unnecessarily harsh on the “art of spoken word”. When comparing different forms of art, one can ask several different questions:

1. Is one form inherently more complex than the other?
2. If not, is there something about popular pieces of work in a given art, that is dumbing down that form of art?
3. Is the total amount of abstract thought across all artforms in a given culture changing as 2. changes?

As to this specific example, I do not believe there is anything inherently more complex about one over the other. Of course, we can debate whether or not this is true, but I suspect most will agree with me. Therefore, I think it is more interesting to talk about questions 2 and 3, instead of 1. This is likely true of any two sufficiently complex art forms.

In the piece above, I believe the author was essentially mixing all three questions without sufficiently answering any appropriate question. I would suspect english majors or linguists would jump on this immediately.

I think there may be some arguments to suggest that 2. is true in popular music. I’d be hard pressed to believe that 3. is true though. Perhaps the art forms that become popular are just changing over time. I would suspect that there is more interest in games and technology right now over music. Personally, I don’t appreciate visual art nearly as much as music, but I spend far too much of my day in abstract thought, so I wouldn’t hold it against me. I’m not sure how easy it is to calculate 3 as a whole though across a population.