Music Talks

Hello there, glad you decided to read this blog post. For starters, my name is Frankie, one of the hosts for Apex Radio. Our show consists of podcast-style talking segments about various topics or concepts, while having some music breaks in between conversations that we try to match to our theme.

Now, for our main topic, music lyrics. Now, all three hosts of Apex Radio have a very mixed music taste. We all enjoy Hispanic music in commonality but have a wide range of genres only one or two members out of the three enjoy, for example, rock, alternative, country, rap, and pop. Now, why does this relate to our main topic you ask? Well initially just to show how music comes in all shapes and forms, but also to show how different people may listen to different genres of music for different reasons. An example would be our main host and I: both of us enjoy listening to rock music, however, our main host listens to music and pays closer attention to the instrumental part of it, how instruments and sounds carry the emotion and message of the song. However, I listen to music more for the lyrics of it and the message they try to convey.

Different genres of music may sometimes be different by the topic of the music or the way it portrays messages of individual songs. An example of this would be how country music has a recurring theme of life in the countryside and will always reference things from that way of life, while rock music could be about more diverse topics but in an edgier way. The best way for me to explain the concept of the way genres portray the same messages in different forms would be rock and rap talking about political topics yet doing so in different forms. To better illustrate this difference I will refer to Green Day’s “American Idiot” and “I’m Not Racist” by Joyner Lucas. Green Day’s “American Idiot” is a political rock song with a very fast-paced instrumental and a very rough lyrical delivery about what the group deemed to be some of America’s biggest downfalls or flaws. In comparison, “I’m Not Racist” by Joyner Lucas is a slower-paced beat with intense lyrics illustrating the stereotypes of 2 different races. Green Day being an edgier group and genre of music have no fear in calling out several flaws of the American culture according to them, and these are things that many could deem outrageous such as in the lyrics “One nation controlled by the media, information age of hysteria” where Green Day believe that Americans are all controlled and follow the agenda of the media that is shared and where everyone could go into hysteria based on the information received. Joyner Lucas, on the other hand, picks the topic of racism and portrays it in a devil’s advocate style of split lyrics. He first raps from the perspective of one race and ends each “stereotype” lyric by saying “I’m not racist” and then proceeds to do the same from the perspective of the other race. The song ends with Joyner Lucas talking about how people always know things from their side, their story, their perspective, and they never know the side, story, or perspective from the other side and calls out to the audience to learn to talk to others about your differences because by learning how the other side feels or sees things can be very eye opening and could result in fixing problems or at least taking a step towards fixing the problem.

To close it up, I believe that lyrics in songs are very powerful. The beauty and magic of lyrics do not just lie in what to say, but also in how to say it, how to deliver the things, what pauses to make, and how much emotion is meant to be expressed. Everything about lyrics makes or breaks the song’s image because these different aspects of lyrics decide how genuine, powerful, and emotional a song can be.