Lyrics

There was some music on the radio the other day from the late '60s and early '70s and I was struck by the idiocy of some of the lyrics which we all used to sing along to.

I'm sure some groups developed really good tunes and thought; "That's brilliant, but we can't simply do an instrumental - we have to come up with lyrics," upon which they each took turns to write a few nonsensical lines that vaguely rhymed and strung them together.

I believe this was actually a strategy for David Bowie and saw a documentary many years ago showing how he did this using the cut-up method, which involved taking existing text and cutting it up to create new pieces of text. 

Bowie would often use random sources, like newspapers and diaries, and put the words together to form new lyrics. He believed that this method helped him to be more creative and to write lyrics that were surprising and interesting, which in his case they were.