Day 1- A Horse With No Name

We begin with the song lyric that inspired this blog in the first place.  It is a line that has bothered many over the years, and it still strikes me as the worst kind of bad lyric: a lazy lyric.  It is, of course, from America's A Horse With No Name....

"There were plants and birds and rocks and things...."

Even typing that made me think to myself, "You have GOT to be friggin kidding me."  And THINGS?!  Why not try, oh, I don't know, dust?  How bout some bugs?  Dirt maybe?  Oh wait, I have one, clouds!  Notice also that all of the words I just mentioned have one syllable, just like that brilliant word "things."  And guess how long it took me to come up with those?  Twenty seconds at most.  Now, admittedly, I have the advantage of not being stoned out of my mind like I'm sure America were when they wrote this, but still, c'mon guys.  Seriously. 

Now, I MIGHT cut them a tiny bit of slack if there was some brilliant rhyme that only worked with "things."  I do crosswords, I know how sometimes you have to put in a little bit of crap to make everything work right or to get one great line.  So what line follows "There were plants and birds and rocks and things?" 

There was sand and hills and rings....

I just involuntarily shook my head and silently cursed.  It's almost worse than "plants and birds and rocks and things."  Rings?!  What the hell are rings in the desert?  How is this better than dirt or clouds in any way?  Look, I'm not saying that it's easy to rhyme the whole plants and birds and rocks and things line, but you know what you do when you can't come up with a better rhyme than "things" and "rings?"  YOU REWRITE THE FRIGGIN VERSE.  Yeah, you heard me.  Rewrite that bad boy. 

The rest of the song is pretty horrendous too, but those two lines are the worst.  And to top it all off, they sing these two lines TWICE!!!  Yeah, you heard me.  There are TWO verses that basically start with these lines.  Man.  And to think this was the first song I learned to play on guitar.