i had started a thread like this 2 years ago hehe, but it's nice to see this topic again.
here's why lyrics are important to me:
an instrumental track or even an operatic aria (which is slightly different by virtue of how the human voice is an instrument unlike any other) is purely affective. by that I mean the piece invokes some kind of emotions, feelings, subjective states of mind that elude the realm of linguistic value, or "meaning" in general. even if we have a universal "meaning computer," it's not possible to put a Beethoven sonata in there and grind out a meaning, no matter how contingent. (tangentially: visual art comes quite close to this as well - with the significant difference that the attempt by realist schools of art to represent the objective world means there's a vague way of correlating meaning through images in the artwork [the "leaf", the "vase"] that correspond to objects in the real world. obviously this has been challenged in more recent art history e.g. abstract expressionism, but this is an entirely different debate which I don't really want to enter..)
in addition to this affective dimension, a song (with words) also has a semantic dimension. the song (presumably) means something. the singing of a song can be translated into something like the unfolding of a narrative, with some sort of content that can be communicated to the listener. i want to stress that i'm not saying it's essential to understand the lyrics to appreciate the song, since the magical thing about music is that it impels listeners to feel so powerfully in a way that transcends what language can do. i'm suggesting that this semantic dimension is incommensurate with and therefore not reducible to the affective. if you don't understand the language, you lose access to this dimension, full stop. and translations don't count - they just give you access to another set of lyrics that's other than the original. in any case, not understanding the lyrics may or may not be a good thing. sometimes having an appropriate "distance" from a work of art is a good thing; by way of a useful metaphor, think of how it's impossible to "see" a painting if you're too far away, but also if you're standing too close to it.
this leads to another issue that came up in previous posts: interpretation. this actually isn't as controversial an issue for me. at least in literary criticism today, scholars who try to appeal to the authority of the author (author/authority - they are etymologically the same) to determine the meaning of a text are just made to look very silly. in the context of music: everyone can agree that the writing of a song is a creative act, but what most fail to realize is that every instance of an individual listening to a song is equally creative in that it produces an experience that's singular, unique, one that can never be "shared" with another individual, and which the same individual himself/herself can never reproduce at a later date. think of how wonderful it will be if you can fully retrieve that feeling you had when you first heard your favorite song by your favorite musician (well of course you can do it psychologically within your memory, but not experientially.) so for me, each experience you have when listening to a song at a particular point in time is an invaluable supplement to what the song "is." that's why a song is never fully exhausted by harmonic analysis, discourse analysis of lyrics, or any form of objective theoretical analysis we come up with; yet i think it's also inaccurate to claim that a song can just mean anything since there are always certain "meaning constraints" imposed by words in the song regardless if you understand (and accept) them - if that's the case all the songs we have would be versions of one big Song. so oddly enough, knowing what lyrics mean both enriches our experience of a song, while delimiting it in another way.
just my 2c!
