Popular Music: The Lyrics Strike Back

Popular song lyrics are a very important object of study, although they are sometimes not appreciated properly. The last third of the twentieth century saw popular song receding from its lyrics by the image, namely the video – the image-based legislator of popular music for a few decades. However, the lyrics have found their way to strike back, and this article outlines some manifestations of their importance in contemporary culture(s). With the rise of lyric videos, popular music made a turn toward the interpretative challenges of written poetry because watching such videos involves a process of reading while listening. Further literaturization of popular music comes from the transformation of song lyrics into books – under certain conditions, reading the lyrics as written poems includes hearing them internally as songs.