2 Foot Yard took the uncategorizability of the evening about as far as it could go, way out on a limb; and managed the acrobatic feat of pulling it off with music at once bizarre and compelling (although the lyrics were hard to follow on a first hearing).
What with the evening only consisting of an acoustic set, the up-tempo numbers worked far better than slower songs, but the evening was rounded off with a wonderful rendition of the master Bob Marley's "Running Away" that fed into a 10-minute jam, Matisyahu was in this segment at his most compelling, spitting out lyrics in perfect harmony with guitarist Aaron Dugan's choppy reggae chords.
As an exemplar of a traditional, more generous value system in which the performer serves the song rather than vice versa, there are few singers as compelling as the lyric soprano Barbara Cook, whose new show, "Barbara Cook's Broadway," opened a limited engagement (through April 18) at the Vivian Beaumont Theater last night.
"Passion," as Mr. Sondheim points out, scarcely contains any traditional song forms at all, which "makes the lyrics less compelling to read than others".
Away from the mannered retro-Goth-punk affectations of the Kills, meanwhile, Mosshart proves a compelling frontperson, spitting out lyrics with a rancid delivery that's equal parts P J Harvey and Peaches.
Anchored by surf/spy guitar riffs, immensely repetitive in its lyrics, incredibly compelling in its entirety, Hefti's theme was released in 1966, and instantly covered by artists as diverse as Jan and Dean (on an album entitled, straightforwardly enough, "Jan and Dean Meet Batman") and the Who.
While "trax" refers to the one-off, stripped-down, skeletal polyrhythms of minimal Detroit-style beats with little more than kick, snare, and 909s, Chicago-style "house" prefers melodies, songs, stories with soulful lyrics and compelling, resolved harmonies.
In 2013 Rankine was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in the following year she published Citizen: An American Lyric, a compelling chronicle of racial aggression and the continuum of violence in the United States.
Students should then choose the most compelling phrases, slogans, poetry, song lyrics or images from their scrapbooks and artistically display them on a poster.
Tom Waits on Tom Waits (Aurum, £12.99) by Paul Maher Jr is an anthology of 50 "interviews and encounters" over four decades with a man "whose spoken rap is as compelling as his diamond-precision lyrics".
