On bad lyrics October 4, 2007 ~ 10:21 am
Posted by Julie in : Random Insanity , trackbackI have many pet peeves, as you have no doubt noticed if you’ve been reading this blog for longer than say, five minutes. One of my big pet peeves pops up every day since I listen to the radio at work: crap lyrics. If you are going to write a song, I think you should make sure it has good lyrics. It’s the least you can do, because your fellow man is going to be singing these lyrics when the song makes the Top 40, and then the entire country will be subject to your stupidity. Unless you just wanted to see if you could get the entire country to sing along to a rubbish song you wrote in five minutes while seated on the toilet, scratching your ass. In that case, more power to you because you have just made the entire nation and possibly more than one nation (depending on the size of your hit) look like morons and that, my friends, is funny. (May I remind you that snark is my super power? It is.)
If, however, you really poured your heart into those lyrics and you still came up with crap, the kind of crap that would have gone nowhere if you didn’t have a kickass publicist and a huge record company backing you and you weren’t sleeping with someone from A&R? I hate you. I hate your song. I will curse you every time I am forced to listen to it. Even if I previously liked your band, I will shake my head ruefully every time I listen to the crap song and say something disparaging like “Oh, Journey.”
First example of piss-poor lyrics, Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page”: “Most times you can’t hear ‘em talk, other times you can.” Well, yes, Bob, those are the two options you have, hearing or not hearing. And when I first heard this song and was drunk off my ass, that was deep. But every time since, when I’ve been sober? I think “What the fuck, Bob? What the fuck were you on?” I now cannot stand this song as a direct result of this lyric.
Second example (and a fine example of me shaking my head and saying “Oh, Jon”), Bon Jovi’s “Bed of Roses”: “I wanna be just as close as the Holy Ghost is.” Do you know what that is? That’s called “reaching.” The Bob Seger Honorable Mention also goes to this song for the lyric “With an ironclad fist, I wake up and french kiss the morning.” WTF?
Third example, Def Leppard’s “Animal.” It pains me to mention this one, because I love this song. But at the same time, I always stumble over the lyrics because they make no sense. “And like the drivin’ rain, yeah, like the restless rust, I never sleep.” To that I reply, “Oh, Joe. The start of a good simile gone horribly, horribly wrong.”
I could go on and include every single song ever made by Britney Spears and any boy band ever (you know I’m right), but I’ll spare you. But if you feel so inclined, leave examples in the comments of lyrics that irk your taters.
Comments
Absolute WORST MOST JUVENILE lyric I’ve ever heard was in Lita Ford’s “Kiss Me Deadly” - “Came home late again last night, didn’t get laid, I got in a fight”. I’m sorry, when I was in high school I wrote something just as lame and immediately threw out the paper I put the words on.
A whole song that makes me cringe, even though I LOVE the artist, is Michael Sweet’s “Ain’t No Safe Way”. It’s bad enough that its a song about abstinence that’s just way too preachy. Here’s the chorus:
Ain’t no safe way anymore
You got people with one, two, three and four
Abstinence rules, playin’ is for fools
The one who abstains is the one who’s cool
There’s no safe way
People with numbers? What the hell is he talking about? And regardless of what I think about pre-marital sex, in high school, getting laid is cool. Sorry man.
Vince, that one song turned me off of Lita Ford forver. I can’t think off the top of my head of a song lyric that irks me. I tend to just change the lyrics and sing them my way. Then I forget why they were so horrible to begin with.
I’m with you on that. I hate bad lyrics and also bad arrangements (e.g., everything is sung in unison, with no harmony). I guess that’s the pain of being both a musician and a writer…