[Blarg]

Yes, music has always been prepackaged to a great extent, but now it's even focus-grouped, and we're on a tighter level of corporate shaping and guidance than we've ever been. Going to popular music now to get exposed to the best of what's out there is pretty much like going to the Nielsen ratings to see what the best t.v. is. You might get something good slipping in, but that would be a big stroke of luck.

I see OP talks about his frame of reference being the 90's up, which throws things off a bit, as the people he is considering all made their names before, sometimes well before, the 90's and arguably did their best work then too.

If we broaden things up a little, we should consider people like Lennon, Springsteen, and David Byrne in his Talking Heads days.

I think, as a lyrics guy myself, that OP is also narrowing down his possibilities for appreciation of what lyrics do, and thus his chance to recognize great lyrics.

Some musicians have their music as a key, indispensable part of the overall effect of their songs, working in concert with the lyrics; others, like Dylan, have lyrics that stand out far above their playing and singing and could probably be plopped on top of completely different music and still come out whole and none the worse for it. Sometimes, to me at least, other musicians do much more with such music and lyrics than their author. For me, Hendrix's All Along the Watchtower is a perfect example of someone doing much more with a song than Dylan's indifferent and sometimes grating rendering. These latter are storytellers first and foremost. It is easy to understand the linear way their songs reveal themselves and the straightforward part lyrics play in the process.

The former are people like David Byrne, enormous talents whose lyrics are so particularly integrated in to the very particular type of music around them that they often could not be removed from the music without losing their whole point. A lot of the dialogue of the lyrics with the listener demands interplay and sometimes multiple counterpoints with the music they're a part of. At that, they're genius. Torn from it, they make a minimum of sense and tell only a small part of the song's story. The lyric that doesn't have a fixed, easy co-existence with a song's music may be very ambitious, clever, and funny, but it's much harder to recognize as such. It's a different kind of lyric for a different kind of music. And as a part of an integrated whole rather than almost a whole complete in and of itself, this kind of good lyric is harder to recognize and credit. But its virtues are still there.