I got something to say
I killed a baby today
- The Misfits, Last Caress
So what are some lyrical lines or phrases that you find stupid, off-putting or perhaps misplaced?
Quote from: Guybrush on Jul 25, 2023, 01:27 AMI got something to say
I killed a baby today
- The Misfits, Last Caress
I've never thought of those lyrics as dumb, just funny. :laughing:
Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don't think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it
And I'll never have that recipe again
—Richard Harris, "MacArthur Park"
I have probably complained about Rocket man om MB already, but it's worth mentioning again.
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids
In fact it's cold as hell
And there's no one there to raise them
If you did
- Elton John, Rocket Man
What exactly is the child rearing scenario that Elton imagines here, that you'd send your kids to Mars without joining them when there's noone else there? 🤔
I like the song, but get distracted by this silliness every time I hear it.
Quote from: Guybrush on Jul 26, 2023, 02:41 AMI have probably complained about Rocket man om MB already, but it's worth mentioning again.
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids
In fact it's cold as hell
And there's no one there to raise them
If you did
- Elton John, Rocket Man
What exactly is the child rearing scenario that Elton imagines here, that you'd send your kids to Mars without joining them when there's noone else there? 🤔
I like the song, but get distracted by this silliness every time I hear it.
That lyric always felt awkward to me as well. Like, if, as the third line says, no one is there to raise them, then who would be doing the hypothetical raising referenced in the first line? Very confusing.
One that's always bugged me, courtesy of Harry Nilsson:
"Two can be as bad as one, it's the loneliest number since the number one"
If there's one thing that really cheeses me off, it's rhyming a word with the same word.
Quote from: Guybrush on Jul 26, 2023, 02:41 AMI have probably complained about Rocket man om MB already, but it's worth mentioning again.
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids
In fact it's cold as hell
And there's no one there to raise them
If you did
- Elton John, Rocket Man
What exactly is the child rearing scenario that Elton imagines here, that you'd send your kids to Mars without joining them when there's noone else there? 🤔
I like the song, but get distracted by this silliness every time I hear it.
I agree. I've always thought Bernie Taupin was one of the luckiest people alive for making so much money off of such lame lyrics.
Quote from: Janszoon on Jul 25, 2023, 10:58 PMSomeone left the cake out in the rain
I don't think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it
And I'll never have that recipe again
—Richard Harris, "MacArthur Park"
I love this by the way, so melodramatic 😄
I recently saw Richard Harris in the Clint Eastwood movie Unforgiven. He was pretty good!
Quote from: Janszoon on Jul 26, 2023, 07:45 AMI agree. I've always thought Bernie Taupin was one of the luckiest people alive for making so much money off of such lame lyrics.
Yes, and he's not entirely incapable either. I like Indian Sunset f.ex. but he really dropped the ball on Rocket Man.
Quote from: Mrs. Waffles on Jul 26, 2023, 03:01 AMThat lyric always felt awkward to me as well. Like, if, as the third line says, no one is there to raise them, then who would be doing the hypothetical raising referenced in the first line? Very confusing.
One that's always bugged me, courtesy of Harry Nilsson:
"Two can be as bad as one, it's the loneliest number since the number one"
If there's one thing that really cheeses me off, it's rhyming a word with the same word.
I love me some Nilsson and have noticed the same 😄 we're also in agreement on rhyming words with itself as a special kind of lyrical laziness.
Which reminds me of:
Candy came from out on the Island
In the back room she was everybody's darling
But she never lost her head
Even when she was giving head
- Walk On The Wild Side, Lou ReedCome on, Lou!
"She got a big booty so I call her Big Booty"
- 2 Chainz
Anything by lil Wayne.
When my boyfriend and I started dating we would look up lil Wayne lyrics to laugh at when we were hungover 😂.
"I'm an extension cord, I'm a lightning rod
I'm a lion roar, I'm a dinosaur."
Oh man, Lil Wayne has so many awful ones, yeah. I think a lot of his are fun for a laugh but I'm definitely not laughing with him, haha. A lot of the time it feels like he just throws in a random word just because it rhymes and not because it makes any semblance of sense.
"Swagger tighter than a yeast infection, fly, go hard like geese erection"
Truly a wordsmith for the ages.
Oh lord I've not seen that one before. What the fuck 😂. I don't know if he's trying to be funny or not but if he is we are laughing at him not with him 😂😂.
I love The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCBIUK7s0MM) by Morrissey. It's one of his best songs. But it's also stupid, weird and rampantly narcissistic.
I will be on the bar
With my head on the bar
The point of the song is he's so irresistible that resistance to the attraction you might feel towards him is futile. Besides repeating the word "bar", I can't see why someone in a bar with his head on the bar is so charming. Wouldn't that be someone who's asleep or very drunk?
But if anyone can serve you up that sort of imagery of themselves and still creep into your thoughts like a bad debt that you can't pay.. well, it would be Morrissey.
I always found this one to be somewhat annoying:
In the desert you can't remember your name
'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain
- A Horse With No Name by America
They had to squeeze the extra "for" in there. That can't be right?
Hardly the worst offender that's been listed - but "Better Things" from Massive Attack's Protection. I love the song, love the group, and love the album, but these lines have always made me wince:
You say the magic's gone
Well i'm not a magician
You say the spark's gone
Well get an electrician
That silly Beach Boys song.
It should be Only God Knows!
'Slowly walking down the hall
Faster than a cannonball'
Oasis of course.
Quote from: jimmy jazz on Aug 31, 2023, 04:07 PM'Slowly walking down the hall
Faster than a cannonball'
Oasis of course.
Ya know, I never noticed how stupid that lyric was until I saw it written out like that, haha.
Quote from: Mrs. Waffles on Jul 31, 2023, 01:02 PM"She got a big booty so I call her Big Booty"
- 2 Chainz
:laughing: Yeah, that's just terrible, Mrs. Waffles !
Quote from: Guybrush on Aug 31, 2023, 02:45 PMI always found this one to be somewhat annoying:
In the desert you can't remember your name
'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain
- A Horse With No Name by America
They had to squeeze the extra "for" in there. That can't be right?
Yes, that's not right at all, Guybrush, and they have managed to squeeze three grammar errors into one line. But even so, that is just one example of a song that has plenty of other dumb lyrics:-
There were plants and birds and rocks and things
There was sand and hills and rings
....The heat was hot....
After two days in the desert sun
My skin began to turn red
And after three days in the desert fun
I was looking at a river bedIt still bugs me that this song was such a smash hit despite its childish, abysmal lyrics. :rage:
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I learnt a long time ago that the best way to enjoy an Oasis song is to pay as little attention as possible to the lyrics, but this "sister/blister" rhyme (from
She's Electric) is just too annoying to ignore:-
She's got a sister
And God only knows how I've missed her
And on the palm of her hand is a blister
And I need more timeEDIT: That's a real coincidence, jimmy jazz!! I was just writing my own post about Oasis, when you "ninja-ed" me with one of your own :laughing:
How odd that half a world apart, we are both getting annoyed about Oasis !
The thing that always kind of grated on me was like, why couldn't that dude just give the horse a name.
'Paradise is very nice'
Ll Cool J.
Surely he of all people is capable of better than that? A five year old could have written that.
@Lisnaholic that's another good one. Tbh you could post about fifty for Oasis. They've got some of the worst lyrics I've ever heard.
Oasis lyrics are absolutely terrible
The Beach Boys' lyrics have a kind of naive charm that makes them work imo
Quote from: jimmy jazz on Aug 31, 2023, 04:44 PM'Paradise is very nice'
Ll Cool J.
Surely he of all people is capable of better than that? A five year old could have written that.
That's like an even worse version of the similar part in Dana Carvey's "choppin' broccoli" sketch. :laughing:
Quote from: Janszoon on Jul 25, 2023, 10:58 PMSomeone left the cake out in the rain
I don't think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it
And I'll never have that recipe again
—Richard Harris, "MacArthur Park"
For me, this was a song where songwriter Jimmy Webb had some fabulous first lines that he didn't know how to follow up:
"MacArthur Park is melting in the dark..." = Not only a wonderful, surreal image, but a nice run of "ar-ar-ar" vowel sounds
"Someone left a cake out in the rain" = Another odd, melancholic snapshot, but Jimmy Webb didn't know where to take it, so the lyrics fall off pretty sharply, ultimately inviting Janszoon's disapproval - which is something no songwriter wants to incur ;)
Mind you, isn't it the case that our judgement on the lyrics is usually pre-empted by our judgement on the song ?
Like the song, and you'll tolerate the lyrics - which is how I feel about most Yes songs.
Don't like the song, and the lyrics will bug you each time you hear it - which is the case for me with Corporal Klegg. Although he improved later in life, here's Roger Waters demonstrating that he is no Syd Barratt:-
Corporal Clegg had a wooden leg
He won it in the war, in 1944
Corporal Clegg had a medal too
In orange, red, and blue
He found it in the zoo
Not necessarily a dumb lyric per se, but while we're on the subject of Oasis one of my personal least favorite lyrics:
"The sink is full of fishes, she's got dirty dishes on the brain".
Maybe it's just because it's too real for someone like me, but the last thing I want to think about when I'm listening to a song I enjoy is the imagery of a grimy sink full of fish, in any sense of what that could mean.
Not the worst Oasis lyric, but it sticks out like a sore thumb in what is otherwise one of my favorite songs of theirs.
I might have complained about this one before but I'd like to submit
the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face
in Bob Dylan's Visions of Johanna. What a twat.
Also in the same song:
He's sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all
Muttering small talk at the wall while I'm in the hall
I actually like the first line and then he just ruins it
Quote from: Marie Monday on Aug 31, 2023, 05:57 PMI might have complained about this one before but I'd like to submit
the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face
in Bob Dylan's Visions of Johanna. What a twat.
^ That's an interesting choice Marie Monday!
I used to think that that was a great line from Bob, and it was much admired at the time, I believe.
What, to me, is good about it: It was unlike anybody else's lyrics at that time. It's line with vivid language, even if it doesn't convey anything precise. In fact it seems to revel in the sound of words for their own sake, rather in the style of the writer he famously admired: Dylan Thomas
What's not so good: It is seriously overblown.
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Here's a lyric that I've hated for years, and so have probably mentioned before: Boney M's Rasputin:-
Ra ra Rasputin
Lover of the Russian queen
They didn't quit, they wanted his head
Ra ra Rasputin
Russia's greatest love machine
And so they shot him 'til he was deadThe main problem to me is the whole idea of choosing Rasputin as the subject for a dancey pop song, then tagging his name to "Rah! Rah!", like an American cheerleaders' chant.