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A Down and Dusky Blonde wrote:

Aren't songs just poetry set to music.

I think the debate about giving the Nobel Prize for Literature to a musician centres around the extent to which the words rely on the music. The fact that they're set to music means that (in most cases, at least) they take on a completely different structure and form - e.g. often more repetition, rhyming in a way that might seem overdone in a poem - so that if you took the words away from the music, they wouldn't be half as effective.

I think awarding literary prizes for a work which is both poetic and musical is perfectly fine. I'd consider it a separate form from poetry, but still a valid literary form.

Panther wrote:

I am thinking especially of hip hop. I am no expert in the genre, and only listen to it peripherally, but I dabble here and there. For my money, the very best of hip hop is at least as lyrically rich as a Dylan song, and is unparalleled among popular music in that regard. There is just so much creative word play and intricate rhyme schemes and lyrical rhythm on display there. For a genre so often obsessed with bravado and aggressive masculinity, the artists within it often play with language so virtuosically as to rival many 19th century aesthetes.

I have to admit I really don't know any hip hop, would you mind linking an example of what you were thinking of?