Everyone defines “pretentious” slightly differently, so let me give my definition. Rock’n’roll lyrics are generally written by musicians who are primarily interested in the chords, melodies and harmonies and are indifferent to the quality of lyrics. Some even consider writing lyrics a necessary evil, a burden imposed on the song’s composers, and often they must engage a co-writer to write the lyrics. But other times, someone not especially gifted in composing words, much less poetic words, comes up with a phrase or two sufficient to the task, and he goes with that.
When the words he coughs up are simple enough, “I love you, you love me, will you take a cuppa tea?” sort of drivel, that’s unpretentious, but when he comes up with words he barely understands and stews them together with other big words or deep concepts he might have overheard an articulate speaker utter once, well, that’s what I’m talking about.
When the music is good enough, a song with highly pretentious lyrics can become a hit, even a classic, and the song’s listeners will strain themselves to take some grand meaning from the mish-mosh of words. This is how pretentious lyrics thrive, often taking on a life of their own, where fans’ imposed interpretations assume a widespread appeal to other fans, and the original songwriter might even come to endorse these grand interpretations as being accurate.
But it’s still spinach, I say, and I won’t eat it.
One final distinction: sometimes, talented lyricists will write deliberate nonsense, either to make fun of those who too eagerly interpret lyrics as meaningful (Lennon, for example, in “I am the Walrus”) or they’ll write deliberately obscure lyrics that they don’t understand themselves but like the emotions they convey. The latter type of lyrics, exemplified by Bob Dylan perhaps, is sort of pretentious, as I’m defining it here, except that Dylan has shown himself capable of writing very fine and meaningful lyrics, as has Lennon, so I’ll cut them a break. I’m really talking about songs written by musicians who’ve never shown themselves to have a gift for writing lyrics, but who went out on a few limbs and wrote songs, or parts of songs, that pretended to a kind of profundity that doesn’t stand up to any analysis. (Howlers include pretentious songs that contain all sorts of elemental grammatical errors.) I’ll refrain from nominating any songs in this post, but I’ve got several in mind once I hear your nominations of rock songs that strive for profundity but fall well short of that mark.