One or the other - you can't have it both ways

When I was a teenager, it was a well-known "fact" (read: consensus opinion, or truism) that when you put two similar but different elements in one end product - the most obvious example being the radiocassette - one of the two would suffer. I can't remember exactly why people believed this, and I am not sure it is all that true, but we definitely believed it. 

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the many links between technology and the way I experience and appreciate music. I will definitely write about that some other time, but for now,  all I have to offer is a strange similarity between this somewhat dismal view of combi-electronics and the bands I liked as a teenager, namely the fact that many of them made great music (or at least, music I still like today) but lyrics that I like a lot less. 

As a teenager, this was not a problem, because I never really listened to the lyrics. I would hear a word here and there, and maybe the most striking line of the chorus, but I was usually blissfully unaware of the inanity that populated some of the more popular tunes of the Beach Boys, the occasional pretentiousness of some of my favorite Simon and Garfunkel songs, the ear-pleasing but not always intelligible phrasings in some Supertramp songs ... and I could go on. 

Of course, each of the above groups have written and composed songs that deserve to be heard again and again, but even so, there are not too many people out there who can do both equally well. Paul Simon in his later years (after going it alone) is probably the exception, together with Cole Porter, but I am definitely much more impressed by Brian Wilson's musical than lyrical skills.   

Now the solution for this, you might think, would be to get a great composer and a great song-writer together. But that seems to be just as rare as having both qualities in the same person. Off the top of my head the only such combination I can think of are the Sherman brothers (of Disney's  "Jungle Book" fame) and Elton John and Bennie Turpin, and then especially for Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. (Lennon and McCartney don't count - they stimulated each other, but often wrote the songs alone, as was the case in many bands). 

Just a thought.