VEGANGELICA

I agree with those, such as Crowe, who feel eliminating the songwriting section of MB would be a loss to a community that banters about music (all of which had to be created by someone through some process before getting to the point of being able to be critiqued as a song).

While writing songs .com website is an excellent website for songwriters, what it appears to lack is exactly what MB has to offer: a section that describes different genres of music and is visited by people who may spend more time listening to music than trying to create it, and thus are knowledgeable about how lyrics or songs-in-the-works might sound similar to previously created songs or genres. This knowledge could potentially be very helpful to those who are trying to write songs.

I also feel it is unrealistic to expect that people who find the song creation process especially interesting to be as well-versed in bantering about existing songs. The reason: time constraints. If it takes someone 10 hours of free time to create a song during a week, those are 10 hours that are (probably) not spent listening to all the wonderful music others have created. While this may not be true for everyone who likes to make music, it certainly is for me, and so while I try to listen to others' music, if I were to do that as much as I would like then I'd have no time to work on my own projects...which, of course, might delight a few people:-).

Finally, responding to those who say much in the songwriting section is "worthless" and should be scrapped, I disagree with the view that there is some universal system for deciding whether particular song lyrics are "good" or "bad." What I love about art is that relativism is supreme in this area of human creation: what may be bad to one person may be delightful to another, and neither is incorrect because it is a matter of opinion.

Jansoon wrote: If a teenager is writing about wanting to commit suicide or about other strong feelings common to many going through that period of life (when people generally are trying to get to know themselves better as well as their views of how they fit into the universe), there may be some reader to whom those lyrics speak profoundly as if they were her or his own.

While lyrics can be critiqued in a wide variety of ways (structure, intent, awareness of historic poetry/song trends, use of poetic techniques), whether people like them or not seems less important to me than helping the writer decide if the song is conveying what the writer wants and in the way s/he wants. Also, I actually think it is almost more interesting to figure out what sort of songs people feel are "crap," because these songs reveal something interesting about the reader and the society. For example, are simple lyrics that are very emotional considered too effusive to a culture that may value stoicism? Or are lyrics that appear to lack originality (in images or metaphors used) considered "boring" because the culture values "individualism"?

I enjoy the songwriter section because it is a privilege to see how people who write songs are feeling/thinking...and this section allows you to talk to them about it, which is nearly impossible to do with any of the songwriters whose works have become popular and are bantered about in the upper music banter section.
--Erica