What's Most Important?

All of the above.

I'm 27 and love well 'rounded' music. It takes 'All of the above' to get me to keep listening, anything short of that.......I change the channel and/or CD.

I was going to pick all of the above, but I thought about it... and I decided it's A, C, and D.

Songs with great lyrics, melody, harmony, and bad rhythm = so-so song that will be great with a different rhythm. Just ask Laura Nyro and Three Dog Night - they only reworked her tempos to make hits (and if you didn't listen to folk music in the 60s you're sitting there saying Laura who?)

Songs with great lyrics, harmony, and rhythm, but a poor melody = boring. Lyrics alone will make a reputation (see Dylan, Bob), but if you don't have at least a few tunes with a decent melody you'll never get out of the poetry books... as near as I can tell, Dylan does about 5% decent melodies, and those will be the songs you've heard of.

Songs with good lyrics, rhythm, and melody, but poor harmony are likely to become successful covers - arrangements can improve them. I'm struggling for a decent example because bad harmony is usually formulaic - everybody's done it.

Songs with all four elements in good shape are good songs. So are songs that entirely lack lyrics. I'd also put into that category things that barely have lyrics, like "Tequila". So lyrics aren't important to a good song - tunes like "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed" or "Classical Gas" stand up fine without them. That said, bad lyrics will kill a song with three good elements.

I'll say rhythm. It's the basis for phrasing, and the font from which groove emerges. If you don't have a solid and tasteful rhythm in a song, you ain't got nothing. Conversely, you may have nothing else of value in a song, but a tight band can make up for it. The kind of band that's always firmly in the pocket, making even backing chords sound hip.

None are absolutely requiered for me. Great lyrics can safe about anything, and a combination of other stuff can also result in a good song.

I guess it really just depends on the point your song is trying to get across. If you are trying to say something really important, then lyrics. Likewise, if you are trying to make a song just sound cool, any of the other three could be most important; it depends on the song.

Just listen to the Stones for PROOF. Do you think any of their stuff would be as good as it is without Keiths chugging Rythm? THink about how many tunes and how many artists were based on Bo Diddleys rythm beat.

It seems to me this is really kind of a misplaced question.

A song is precisely the lyrics, melody, harmony, rhythm and arrangement.

Any one of those items being horribly bad will make for a horribly bad song, no matter how good everything else is.

Any one of those elements being supremely good will make for a really good song, no matter how mediocre everything else is.

Songs are greater than and less than the sum of their parts at the same time.

Musicians who come from a stylistic background that's big on one or two areas will say that those areas are most important -- Rappers will think lyrics and rhythm, rockers will think rhythm and harmony, vocal jazz folks will think lyrics and melody, classical players will think arrangement . ..

You can analyze a song in terms of it's parts, but you can't talk about the a part being the most important in general terms, only for specific songs. There are rap songs where the most important thing is the melody line, it's what makes an otherwise mediocre rap tune stand out. There are jazz songs where it's the rythm that takes it over the top because everything else is ho-hum.

It might even make sense to talk about which is most important in the confines of a particular style. But which is most important or least important in general is a question that can't be answered.

I have to go with teleplayer on this one, kieth richards ROCKS--the dog