My mother says I have boring percussion.

At first I was laboring under the impression that Chinese lyrics didn't rhyme. That turned out to be untrue - they don't rhyme in translation.

My mother says I have boring percussion.

I can imagine lyrics becoming better written by smart machines rather than stupid musicians. Songwriters generally have nothing to say. They may as well be replaced by machines.

Yeah, except that when I write pop songs I have pretty strict constraints that I impose on myself. 69 Love Songs is a constraint. That the titles have to begin with "I'"s is a relatively strict constraint. Charm of the Highway Strip is all travel songs. And I am free to change the plot slightly to accommodate something that happens to rhyme conveniently.

Popular music of the last 50 years has failed to keep in step with advances in musical theater, namely Stephen Sondheim. But the two have grown apart so that popular music is based more than ever on a rhythmic grid that is irrelevant in musical theater. In popular music, words matter less and less. Especially now that it's so international, the fewer words the better. While theater music becomes more and more confined to a few blocks in midtown.

I gave up music criticism because of the increasingly obvious conflict of interest. I couldn't say anything bad about the records when I might be meeting that person's manager backstage an hour later.