Art & Creativity Quote by Ira Gershwin

Gershwin lands the joke with a chemist's precision: take away the O and you don't get some purer, minimalist essence of water - you get something else entirely. It's a one-line defense of craft, aimed at any era's temptation to over-intellectualize songwriting into something that can be separated into respectable parts: lyrics here, melody over there, as if the "song" lives mainly on the page.

The wit works because it flatters and undercuts at once. On the surface it's a playful swipe at lyric-as-literature. Underneath it's a claim about collaboration and embodiment. Ira Gershwin, famous as the wordman in a family-and-Broadway ecosystem of composers, is quietly insisting that lyrics are not meant to stand alone like poems that happen to be singable. They are designed to be metabolized by rhythm, harmony, breath, and performance. Without that oxygen, the hydrogen of language becomes volatile: it can sound earnest, overclever, or simply unfinished.

There's also a professional politics here. In the American popular-song tradition Gershwin helped define, the "song" is a unit of entertainment, not a text for solitary contemplation. The line is a preemptive rebuttal to critics who treat show tunes as lesser art unless the words can survive extraction and anthologizing. He doesn't deny the value of lyrics; he denies the fantasy of lyrics without music being the same thing, just in a different container.