When the lyrics don't matter

Robert Plant doesn't sing "If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be a lawman" on "Stairway to Heaven," as so many fans, including me, thought for so long; it's "don't be alarmed now." The wrong lyric is confusing and the right lyric makes sense—hedgerow bustles don't matter for career choices, but are potentially alarming—but no one cares, and no one should. The words don't matter. In a book on the Rolling Stones album Exile on Main St., John Perry writes that "A phrase in the opening verse [of "Soul Survivor"] that I would always hear as 'front-row view' is actually 'cut-throat crew.' ... I find I've been happily misreading five of the seven lines that make up the first verse---without the slightest diminution of enjoyment. It doesn't matter a bit." He praises the Stones' tradition of

the absence of a printed lyric sheet, or of lyrics emblazoned on the outer sleeve. ... you sometimes miss a great line, but this brings the imagination into play. You can fill in the gaps with your own ideas. I like the idea of there being whole passages of a song that you have known and loved for years without having a clue what half the words are."

Examples like this are legion and everyone has their favorites, from Jimi Hendrix not singing "Excuse me while I kiss this guy" on "Purple Haze," to pretty much everything Michael Stipe sings on Murmur by R.E.M.

Of course it is only sometimes. Paul Simon's song lyrics read as poems, with each word carefully chosen. Change any word in, say, "Graceland"—try messing with the line "Losing love is like a window in your heart"—and you mar the song. And in his ranking of all recorded songs by the Beatles, Bill Wyman takes off points for lame or clumsy lyrics.

There is a way of thinking about art (I count pop songs as art) where, ideally, every feature of a work matters, each detail contributes something to the work's meaning, and if one had been even a little different the work would have meant something else, and might have been either better or worse. Nothing is neutral; each dab of paint, the exact level of distortion in the guitar sound, is to be considered intentional. When the lyrics don't matter, this is the wrong way to think about the song. But why?