Long renowned for his interest in cut-up lyrics, Bowie delves into alternative lyrical strategies in "Girl Loves Me", a mad polyglot babble: like some of Eliot's poetry, it should probably come with footnotes.
In the early 1990s, with bandmates Rick Smith and Darren Emerson, Hyde assimilated techno into the art-rock tradition, lacing pulverising rhythms with frantic cut-up lyrics, eccentric humour, subtle textures and a taste for improvisation.
A control freak whose gift for subverting everyday language in surreal cut-up lyrics made him a genuinely radical post-punk voice, Smith was a man who'd rebelled against – but also internalised – the berserk discipline of a bullying father.
It's there in the songs, the cut-up lyrics and startling juxtapositions, showing that he not only appreciated the absurdity of his extraordinary fame and success, but that he was complicit in it.
She was also beginning to explore cut-up lyric techniques, inspired partly by her interest in the occult, and furthering a talent for creative writing, which she studied at Birmingham University while working on her music career.
Plus the dropout toward the end, when the track cuts to just lyrics, that gives you your perfect window to nail some stunt work.
McKenzie's lyrics cut to the chase: he didn't portray misery but narrated it.
It's a deceptively peppy cut, whose melancholic lyrics are offset by a swingy horn line and the give-and-take of Cumming's and Bougerol's vocal parts.
The lyrics cut through something – the resistance to shedding our skins in order to reveal ourselves, to be vulnerable, to grasp something fleeting, even if it is just the sexual or fraternal pressing of another warm body against ours.
A mere 30 minutes long, it maps the breakdown of a relationship, but rather than stewing in despondent aftermath there is a keenness to Michaelson's storytelling, there in the sharp cut of his lyrics, the humour, the precision of his vocabulary, that lifts these woebegone tales from the gloom.
"I did the rough demo, sat down for 10 minutes, finished the lyrics, cut the vocals and then jumped on a plane," she giggles over a peppermint tea in an east London cafe, the three small croissant-shaped rolls of hair perched on her head shifting with every eyebrow raise.
