Let’s Lyric

Let’s Lyric is a weekly digital journal from myself, Solomon Adams. 

I graduated in May 2024 with a useless liberal arts degree in Math & Philosophy. Through intensive study of said disciplines, I have come to admire language in all its forms. With math (and math logic) being the most bare-boned and precise form of communication versus philosophy being the exact opposite: superfluous bullshit—jk, not really.

Studying the intersection of barebones and bullshit, I have come to understand language in a quasi-number-theoretic way: I see logic as the natural numbers, ordinary language as the rational numbers, non-ideal language as the irrationals, and the metaphor as the all-encompassing real number system. 

All that to say, though language is BS—metaphorical BS to be more exact—I also see the pen’s might over the supposed sword. The meaning of words ebbs and flows, stretches and shrinks, defies intuition, and best of all, evokes emotion. And it isn’t just words. Language truly is everything, everywhere, all at once.

Your gait whispers to spectators. Gendered auras—feminine, masculine, androgynous—introduce yourself before you do. The nebulous cloud frowning down at you amidst the peals of ireful winds floods your pores and ears before the rain does. Everything is in conversation. And just as God perlocuted in Genesis, our language sculpts the world around us.

Devoted to this notion of words as perlocutionary reality constructors, I am an inveterate bibliophile. With time, my literary devotion blossomed into poetic praise, which then evolved into genuflection for music as its own religion. If language is the metaphor, and the poem is the most economically truthful form of the metaphor (as Ta-Nehisi Coates describes it). Then, music is one of the most accurate languages of all.

Beyond communicating meaning and feelings—or denotation and connotation—musical artists emote the words of odes from mere text into seductive syllables and jarring harmonies. This philosophy is what inspired me to start Let’s Lyric.

Let’s Lyric is a music cRiTiCiSm bulletin that ranks and rates albums, analyzes song lyrics, muses on pop culture, highlights shining artists, and archives bops. This page was inspired by a deficit I felt in the music criticism sphere. While musicality is its own beautiful language, I often am held captive by the lyrics of music rather than the sound1 alone.

So with that said, I’m excited to be on this journey with you. If you’re new here, make sure you subscribe. It would really help a struggling recent grad. Check out the primer/glossary before you delve deeper. And welcome. Let's lyric!