The question of whether song lyrics can be poetry has been around at least since Bob Dylan upended the three-minute rock ditty with his rambling, Beat-by-way-of-Baudelaire sensibility.
When he's lusty, he's still monogamous, as when he plays a truck driver speeding home in "Hauling One Thing" or tries to rekindle desire with his wife in "Let's Do That Again," over a steadfast soul beat by way of Al Green and the Eagles.
Verses often used light-fingered counterpoint and reggae-tinged beats by way of the Police; choruses bulked up with grunge riffs and sustained emo-style choruses: "You're so contagious and I can't get away," Chris Brown moaned in something like a love song.
I realised that my disappointment came from a deep-seated desire to see a couple of financiers take a beating as a way of making us all feel a bit better about the credit crunch.
All this can be done electronically at the blink of an eye, which sure beats the old way of running down the hall to find someone while everyone else sits and waits.
Performance is reported either by a table giving counts of correctly and incorrectly classified beats, or by way of statistics inferred from such a table.
He said his show, beat.net, is his way of continuing to look for the technology edge.
Storytelling is a fundamental human need, and there is nothing that can beat opera as a way of telling the stories that need telling, the stories that help us to understand what it is to be human.
Porch-swings, doing nothing and small lizards: beat that for a way of passing the time.When SXSW ends I head to the outskirts of town for the Star of Texas Fair and Rodeo, which goes on for three weeks every March.
And that style, and that method of communication, has proven that it can beat a politically correct way of communication.
