Perhaps the most convincing way to demonstrate that the best of rock lyrics are effective poetry is to show how skillfully certain techniques are used to develop themes which these techniques are organically suited to treat. The relatively more objective poems employ drama, irony, implication, and ambiguity to treat the theme of daily restriction, whereas the more subjective songs present their worlds solipsistically and surrealistically to develop the themes of non-conformity and independent thinking. Both types often rely on setting to reveal states of mind.
To illustrate these trends in popular music, I have chosen the hybrid genre of folk-rock as performed by Paul Simon because the lyrics found in this idiom often provide the best examples of those songs that dramatize objectively their theme, that of restriction and failure. Let us begin, then, with songs that view the world more from the outside than within a mind and that use the more traditional poetic devices of drama, irony, ambiguity, and implication; then let us move from these to songs that describe worlds which individual minds form solipsistically and surrealistically. An example of a dramatic song is Paul Simon's "America" which portrays by means of a monologue and through a short conversation the failure of communication between the speaker and his girl and between the speaker and his country, or what that country stands for—the American Dream.
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