No, and I have been known to find better lyrics and sing them to the tune (at least in my head).
I also don’t like artists who butcher lyrics–they are an integral part of the SONG–could you please enunciate so that we can understand you? Is it too much to ask? (I refer all Dopers to Louie, Louie, and rest my case.)
Absolutely. I don’t even try and understand the lyrics to a song untill about the third to fifth time I listen to it. First and foremost, a song must have a good tune for me to like it.
Yes, most of the time I need to like the lyrics in order to be able to enjoy a song.
In general I don’t like songs with really stupid or disturbing lyrics no matter how good the instrumental portion is…I just tend to think “What a waste of good music” in that case. 
I love the site http://www.songmeanings.net because it has helped me make sense of some fo the more weird/silly lyrics I’ve run across ( incidentally, this is the page where people are speculating on the meaning behind the “I am an American aquarium drinker” song: Wilco - I Am Trying to Break Your Heart Lyrics | SongMeanings )
Lyrics usually don’t get in my way when I’m listening. Even nonsense lyrics can be fun when they’re done right (e.g. Dylan, Lennon, Plant, Cobain), although I couldn’t tell you what it is that makes them “right”.
But when it comes to playing the songs, I often balk. Lennon’s “Dear Prudence” is a joy to play, and the words have a coherence to them that makes it all work. But I just can’t bring myself to sing “jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule” (Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna”) or “aqua sea foam shame / sunburn from freezer burn / choking on the ashes of her enemy” (Cobain’s “All Apologies”) even though I enjoy listening to the songs.
What really grinds my gears is a lyric that smacks of laziness and unoriginality, like Hagar’s “only time will tell if we stand the test of time” or Huey Lewis’s “don’t need no credit card to ride that train”. I’ll turn those off at the third note.
There’s no denying that a simple-yet-rich and insightful lyric can turn a good tune into a classic that bears repetition much more gracefully than less well-crafted words. Gillian Welch comes to mind. I can get chills from her stuff despite having listened to it dozens and dozens of times. And in the right setting, “Amazing Grace” still reduces me to tears.
Most of the time? Yes I can enjoy the song, but not if the lyrics just piss me off majorly.
For example I hold up “Lightning Striking Again”. Until I actually listened to the lyrics, I didn’t mind the song at all. Now I just wanna go kick the guy’s ass.
As a huge fan of 70’s progressive rock, it stands to reason I enjoy songs with lyrics that make little or no sense!
Pete Sinfield was probably stoned out of his mind when he wrote the lyrics to “In the Court of the Crimson King,” and Greg Lake probably had no clue what the lyrics were supposed to mean… but they SOUNDED great anyway!
“Every day a little sadder
A little madder
Someone get me a ladder.”
Sounds great, Greg. Okay, that’s a wrap!
Lyrics are an afterthought for me. If a good song also happens to have great lyrics, then it’s a bonus. But I’m generally more concerned with the way the words sound than what they mean.
Bad lyrics bother me. Favorite case in point: The Fireballs’ 1963 hit “Sugar Shack,” one of the few songs from that year I find musically interesting. Then we hit:
Expresso coffee tastes mighty good…
NO NO NO… :mad: 
all wrong… no ‘x’ in Italian… did no one at the studio mentiion this? Ruins it for me every time.
And don’t get me started on plain old dumb lyrics…
Don’t like? No, I can’t enjoy the song if I dislike the lyrics. I don’t have to love the lyrics to like a song, but they can’t make me mad.
Can’t understand? Not as much of a problem. I like “Glina Z Wo³omina” by Pan Helcount very much, but I have no earthly idea what song is about, or even the language.
I cannot fully enjoy a song if I don’t like the lyrics. The words are a huge part of the song. If you have nothing better to say than “I’m on fire/With desire,” why should I spend my time listening to your song? I’ll give an example: there’s a song called “You Love to Fail” by one of my favorite bands, The Magnetic Fields. By all rights, this should be one of my top 3 songs: I love the tune, the production, Susan Anway’s voice and most of the lyrics. However, there’s that pesky verse 3.
My Wagner in dungarees?! I puke just thinking about it. Although I still love the song dearly, it can never achieve its full greatness, in my mind.
One thing I’ve noticed in this thread is that many people are equating nonsense lyrics with bad lyrics. pepperlandgirl gave the example of “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” my favorite Wilco song. I don’t have a problem with these lyrics because they aren’t aiming to create a narrative exactly but rather a tone. In songs like these (see also the work of Robyn Hitchcock and many, many others), it’s the sound of the words or the imagery that the words create that matters. I’d rather listen to someone with interesting “nonsense” that means something to me rather than hear tired cliches that have become so misused and overused that they no longer have any meaning.
Melody, vocal quality, emotional intensity, and rhytm are much more import to me than lyrics. Bad lyrics detract from an otherwise good song, but they seldom ruin it completely. And good lyrics are simply icing on the cake.
I’m a big fan of music, not songs. I had a friend once that thought he was a huge “music” fan because he had like 10,000 songs on his computer and could identify a good chunk of them if he heard the lyrics. But he couldn’t do nearly as well with just the music, for example a friend had a ringtone of his favorite song and he didn’t recognize it.
For me, it’s all about the music, really. Vocals are just an instrument, the sound of the vocalizations can be good or bad, but the words themselves are wholly meaningless to me.
I tend to be a big fan of classical music, with a heavy focus on the Baroque era, the classic era is great too (turned off a bit by romantic) I enjoy operas without caring about the words because the vocals have a good sound to them (obviously assuming it’s a good piece/good performer.) I’m a huge fan of the symphony and the string quartet.
For modern music I like all kinds except for 90% of country music I dislike. I dislike the “country good ole boys lets party in Nashville” type of country music but the more “Western” oriented “country” music I can find a good rhythm to and enjoy.
My favorite genres tend to weight towards big band music, jazz, and rock and heavier rock because of a big focus on music in all of these. I also perplexingly really like the crooners but again that’s more the sound of their voices and not what they were singing.
I couldn’t sing 25% of the lyrics to my ultimate favorite songs, I just don’t care about lyrics in that way for whatever reason.
Nope, the lyrics make it or break it for me.
That’s why the country song “Holes in the Floor of Heaven” makes me want to rapidly poke woodland creatures with a sharp stick.
I agree with Abbie Carmichael, although we listen to different music. Let me give you an example of what I mean. John Cougar Mellencamp has a song which starts of with some melodic guitar licks which I really like. To me, it’s reminiscent of good Bruce Springsteen. Before I got to know it, I’d get into it and relax the way I do when a good song comes on the radio. Then the lyrics start (they are approximate):
The result is I can’t stand a song I’m inclined to like. They really do ruin the song for me.
I’m a fan of folk music, in part because it has more interesting lyrics than rock and roll. Still, there’s one thing in a song by Stan Rogers which bothers me just a bit every time I hear it. It’s the last line of a song called “Famous Inside”. It reads “I know that you all feel a little Famous Inside and I’m no different than you.” Each time I hear it, part of me whispers “‘from’, not ‘than’!” It’s still a good song, though.
Even in my church choir where we sing a lot of music in Latin, I think I do a better job if I understand what I’m singing and I like the fact that they print the lyrics in English as well as in Latin in the church bulletin.
CJ
I couldn’t possibly be a fan of David Byrne, Andrew W.K., or Tom Waits if the lyrics were the prime focus of a song for me. Especially in Byrne’s case… half the time the words seem like just an excuse to make a nice-sounding noise, and that’s all right with me.
I remember the first time I heard “Bandages” by Hot Hot Heat. I thought - “Holy fuck – he’s saying ‘Burn the jews’!!!” Then I immediately thought, “Shit, and it’s really catchy!”
This pretty much sums up my attitude. For most music I listen to, the main point of the song is the music, and not the lyrics. The only lyrics that bother me are cheesy “love-dove/fire-desire” type rhyming lyrics. Abstract and nonsensical lyrics do not bother me in the least, and I often prefer evocative imagery and word association (Pixies, REM, anyone?) to more linear plot-based lyrics.
This is not a rejection of conventional structured lyric writing. It’s just that my kind of music doesn’t marry well with this approach. If I listen to, say, Jeff Buckley, Eliot Smith, or The Magnetic Fields, then the lyrics certainly are a focal point and can make-or-break a song for me. But with bands where music is clearly the focal point, my concern is more whether the song “rocks” or not.
I’m definitely more of a lyrics person. Probably because I really like to sing, and I can’t sing along with stuff I can’t discern. But some lyrics really do piss me off. Someone mentioned Lou Christi’s Lightning Strikes, and, Jesus on a pogo stick! This guy’s talking to his girlfriend and saying “I’m gonna go screw as many girls as I want, because I’m a guy and that’s the way we are; but you be a good little girl and sit here and wait for me to be ready to settle down and then we’ll have a nice little wedding”. He followed it up with the chillingly stalkerish The Night Has A Thousand Eyes, in which he reiterates “Hey, don’t screw around on me, girlie, 'cuz if you do, I will find out about it!”
If I find a lyric in a song that I really hate, eventually it’ll drive me nuts. I don’t have to love the lyrics to a song, but if they’re really bad, it’s a problem. Heck, I don’t even have to understand them, as long as they’re interesting SOMEHOW. I really like word soup a la Lennon or Tori Amos as long as it’s done right, with some interesting sounds or images or juxtapositions or something.