The Brunettes... I love their lyrics! esp. Spice girls rip off "if you wanna be my lover you gotta get with my friends!" (unknown Brunettes song played on Space).

lol...wicked!!!

Okay, my problem with this is threefold - as somebody who has the, er, fortune to have worked both as a poet & a lyricist - lyrics aren't poetry. They're not intended to be read. You can't seperate them from the vocals (say, the way Martin Phillips' voice quavers on the "she's" in "what do I do if she's lost / just the thought turns my heart to pink frost" in "Pink Frost"); or the way vocals combine with the music - if you didn't need music for the lyrics to work, why bother with it? (I should also say something about genre conventions; use of cliché etc but this post will be long enough as it is . . .)

"lyrics that can make you feel something; that you can react" is incredibly subjective & any answer anyone gives will likely be correct; + there's all the issues of usage/context/etc inherent in the dialogue between artist and audience. Things vary wildly depending on mood, circumstance or whatever - personally, Bob Dylan does nothing to me while, say, Telepopmusik's "Breathe" has had me close to tears; or having the repitition in Underworld's "Cowgirl" approach a near-liturgical power. When I was eking out a scumtron life as a student, early Verlaines suddenly made perfect, undeniable sense (sorry, I'd dig out some examples if my CDs were on the same island as me).

Let's see - are you wanting lyrics to tell a story? In that case, I think you should be investigating hip-hop ;-)

(& "Leather Jacket" has great words - it's all about the transition/dialogue between warmth/joy & loss/memory/responsibility that happens about halfway through the first verse!)

(&& er, no offence or whatever intended by this, but I've got a vested interest. oh & "rockist" was a term coined by Melody Maker journalists in the early 80s to denote a sort of attitude that is obsessed with authenticity, worships the canon (ie only likes things if they have/will "stand the test of time", favours albums over singles, mind over body, moralism over materialism. Er, probably shouldn't have introduced it into the debate etc)

(er, the following isn't meant to sound snappish or whatever, but this is likely to be bashing-my-head-repeatedly-against-a-brick-wall material)

Er, how can lyrics be "right"? Can they be "wrong"? I'll paraphrase what I said at the end of my first paragraph - if there's music (or, fuckit, a specific human voice) there, that's part and parcel of the track/artwork/whatever. Privileging lyrics & divorced them from their context makes as much sense as privileging the hi-hats or the reverb or the coverart or the promotional campaign.
& nothing's absolute, of course - but I think the whole "rock is poetry" thing was advanced in the 60s/70s as a strategy in the (word warning!) pre-postmodern (wrt/validity of pop/youth culture) climate that "rock" was "art". But, er, look at one of Dylan's songs on page and quite frankly, treated as a poem, it's not very good. How it works as a song is a completely different matter.

//but many "rock" artist have songs that tell stories//
Well, yes. Due to genre conventions (chorus, rhyme+length, notions of "singing") & limitations (instrumentation), it's not as easy/common. Hip-hop's verbal cadences & freedom & density (& perhaps lack of a strangling tradition) tend to make storytelling the default in hip-hop, as opposed to the simpler narratives & emoting of rock. Yesyesyes these are sweeping generalisations and there are millions of exceptions, but, say, what rock song sets up a narrative as well as, say, Public Enemy's "By The Time I Get To Arizona" or "Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos"? Oh yeah & see : folk music (well, actually /you/ mentioned Guthrie etc etc etc).

thanks jimi.
stupid comma.