NTP lyrics
You’d think I know more about NTP lyrics than I do, but it’s also been awhile since I wrote a lot of lyrics.
I suppose the issue with summarizing NTP lyrics is that there isn’t a summary – they’re about everything and nothing, except that they’re probably not about the songwriter. If they are about the songwriter, they are likely to hide behind a concept or a metaphor. Even my semi-autobiographical double album before I was Restless Mosaic made a lot of math references or were done as an acrostic (“AEIOU and Sometimes Awry,” where each new word formed a new music section as well). Ti loves tight rhyme schemes – my lyrics sometimes suffer because I fall in love early with the rhymes – and Ne will take those lyrics all over in terms of subject matter.
NTP music
I’m of course more familiar with INTP music. For myself, Si brings genre/subgenre knowledge for the Ne to play with – taking styles at the same tempo and smushing them together is a favorite pastime. What Ti does is lay some rules down – unusual rules, ideally – to give the Ne-Si a fighting chance of making sense. Time signatures are stereotypically beloved among INTP musicians, and I love them too; along with chord sequences, they’re a great rule set/tool set to make things feel unusual, and they allow for some novel intricacies.
That’s another big word for the Ti music writer – intricacy. Intricacy is not the same as complexity; intricacy connotes more of a reason for all the parts to go together.
Ne-Ti does not care about the distinction as much as Ti-Ne does. ENTP music, not just for having Ne on top but also having Fe in the third slot, is more likely to be chaotic fun in alignment. If it is parented by Ti, it will have juuuust enough coherence for people besides ENTPs to enjoy it.
Some ENTP songs
“Reflection” by Haisuinonasa (Music typing [it’s an instrumental])
I’m putting this one as ENTP rather than INTP off my idea that sometimes the distinction is literally which function hits you first versus second. Here, the song is made of disparate things that don’t sound like part of the same song, and there’s no indication that this is going to cohere. Then the strange elements become a loop that gets built on with some hyper jazz drums in 5/4, and suddenly there’s an actual song. It shifts time signatures a few more times – what I think is 7/4 with a triplet-feel piano on top, then regular 7/4, then back to 5/4, and 11/8 shows up – but it keeps reusing a lot of the starting collage in various places. It hangs together as a song way more than all of my description would indicate, and it’s both unique and charming (at least I think so).
“Soon” by Jazzanova (Lyric and music typing)
I could argue this one as ENTP or INTP, but I’m giving the edge to ENTP because I think the lyrics are higher on Fe than Si.
Places and spaces that I’ve been to mean so much to me – that’s an Si start. Hmm. Keep going.
Everywhere I go, the things I see
Change what I know, and question what I believe
There’s so much to explore – I desire much more
There’s always something wonderful and new – I wish the same for you
Now that’s more Ne-Fe.
One day, all of you will feel the same thing I do
Okay, that’s an extroverted idea; an INTP daren’t say that.
Meanwhile, the music is in 4/4, but it’s not even close to obvious. The squiggly synthesized bass doesn’t give out many hints, and the drums are programmed in an 8+1+7 figure for most of the song. It legitimately took me awhile to figure out it was in the regular ol’ setup.
“Windowlicker” by Aphex Twin (Music typing [it’s an instrumental])
The Ne is obvious in this song from the first few seconds; it goes all over the place. But what sets it apart – and helped make it not only a top-20 hit in the United Kingdom, but one of the most acclaimed songs of the ‘90s – is the use of Ti and Fe. Re: Fe, the song is unusually happy for being so weird, and the glitchy style comes off super-playful instead of virtuosic or just plain loud.
On the Ti…I had to think for a bit. The Ti is trying to parent this mess, and it never actually does, but the promise of Ti – the teasers that this could be organized at some point – is how it manifests. So even the Ti is used for audio trolling.
And if you want even more Ne: the last few seconds of the song (6:05 to 6:08 in the video I linked) is an audio “printout” of a picture of a spiral. Another song on the single does the same thing, only with a picture of Aphex Twin’s face. As I noted with unhealthy Ti, Aphex Twin is easy to respect but hard to like sometimes. With “Windowlicker,” he made his weirdness likeable, and it was a smashing success.
“A Huge Evergrowing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld” by the Orb (Music typing [it’s an instrumental])
There’s a cover of Minnie Riperton’s “Lovin’ You” not that far away from a rooster. As a representation of a brain, it genuinely makes some sense. There definitely is a Ti structure to this song, mostly in an all-the-black-keys hook that everything else bounces off, but it frequently disappears amid all the Ne, like that book you’re sure you just saw in your room but somehow got buried in a pile of laundry.
I could say more about this one, but it’s easier for you to listen to it and soak in the Ne-Ti feeling. It’s in some ways a proto-“Windowlicker” – just parented more.
Some INTP songs
“Knock Knock Hornets Nest” by Necromonkey (Music typing [it’s an instrumental])
When I first encountered this song, I felt heard. You’ve got jangly guitars next to 8-bit medieval keyboards, you’ve got cheap drum machines with real drums on top, and you’ve got a few extra noises (including a rapping distorted voice that shows up a few times). But it’s all under a time signature of 5/4 that’s chunked in 3s. I love both time signature and number of bars not going by fours like “normal.” But before hearing this, I was the only musician I’d known who’d done that. (I had a song called “The Bunker” from 2012 that was 5 beats x 5 bars to emphasize the bunker’s square-ness.) It’s trying to be progressive rock, alternative, and chiptune at the same point – and thanks to being those in equal measure, it succeeds.
“Mmm…Skyscraper I Love You” by Underworld (Lyric and music typing)
Underworld’s production style is super-INTP overall (the high Se example of “Born Slippy.NUXX” notwithstanding). Underworld frequently spends the first few minutes setting up the unique rules of the song, and then they’ll break them the rest of the way. Electronic elements get surprise guitars laid on top of them; songs slowly turn into completely different songs (“Banstyle/Sappys Curry” is a fantastic example of the latter).
Part of what makes Underworld’s structures idiosyncratic is having actual lyrics and vocals. But it’s not just any lyrics and vocals; it’s really simple melodies and a lot of seeming stream-of-consciousness lyrics. So while there’s a human in the center of the mix – what our brains are most drawn to – the production around that human is what’s impressive. It’s like the song is hollow.
What was stopping me from using this song as a complete INTP example was that Karl Hyde is singing about all sorts of things he sees in the city; they’re present tense sense impressions. But the odd bit about that is that nothing other than the titular skyscraper is described for what it actually is. A Melody Maker interview (cited on Wikipedia; I’m not that industrious) said that the lyrical goal was to “paint around subjects instead of focusing straight in on them.” That tracks with lyrics that definitely have a sensory component but we have no real description of the things.
And I see Elvis! And I hear God on the phone
Pornfest, pork fat, Jesus Christ night light
Elvis, fresh meat, a little whipped cream
Thirty thousand feet above the earth
You’re a beautiful thing
He’s clearly in real life, but everything is getting symbolized by the time we receive it.
The song also has a surprising coda right around 10 minutes, because why wouldn’t it?
“No Self Control” by Peter Gabriel (Music typing)
I first heard this when I was 14. It is one of the single most influential songs on me as an arranger and producer.
The first thing to know about Peter Gabriel’s third self-titled album (sometimes known as Melt) is that he kicked everything off with a Ti-style artistic rule: no hi-hats. That had a knock-on effect for the album’s composition. There’s a lot more space in the mix for other stuff. Various percussions are the usual substitute, which you get in the second part of this track. There’s this calm percussion with an active, quiet kick, but there’s some menace in both the lyrics and the guitars.
Then Phil Collins shows up for the chorus with some ferocious snare/tom drumming (again, no hi-hats). The chorus has a bizarre chord sequence, and then there’s a bridge where Kate Bush shows up for a few seconds, and then we go back to the percussion. Except…midway through, the kick drum fades in by itself. This orthogonal approach to layer use shows up in Underworld’s productions, and it shows up in this production as well. And I will never stop being influenced by it.
“Number Three” by They Might Be Giants (Lyric and music typing)
The third song on They Might Be Giants’ debut album, it is one of the only songs I know whose lyrics are specifically about that – having written your third song. It’s a structural kind of inspiration that (at least my) Ti soaks up. (Supposedly, it’s also the third song the band learned.) Why this is connected to an Americana vibe is something you’ll have to ask the band, but it exists all the same. A lot of TMBG lyrics are surprisingly like Underworld’s in how many fragments of phrases are in them, where you’ll understand them better if you’ve soaked in the same Si-cultural brine they did.
A rich man once told me, “Hey, life’s a funny thing”
A poor man once told me that he can’t afford to speak
The harmony vocals and country stomp is effective enough that it can take a bit to realize that half the lyrics don’t go with the genre.
This song is a major inspiration for my own song with INFP Nick Merchant, “Song One Is a Lie,” where we argue from Ti and Fi perspectives that the first song of an album should not be the one you preview if you consider buying the album.
Next part: ESFJ and ISFJ
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