Day 5- All These Things That I've Done

The Killers are a band that I actually like a lot.  They are one of the classic examples though of a group that has great music, but often truly awful and pointless lyrics.  I actually have a soft spot in my heart for one of their dumber songs "Human," even though the main chorus "Are we human or are we dancer?" makes absolutely no sense.  The music to that is just so good that I think it actually, in a very rare instance of this, overwhelms the nonsensical lyrics.

But it doesn't for one of their first huge hits, All These Things That I've Done.  Again, great melody and singing, but then we get to the main refrain, which is...

I've got soul but I'm not a soldier.

Honestly, this just makes me mad.  What the hell does this even mean?  Is it trying to be deep?  Cause if it is, it's failing so miserably it's kinda painful to even think about.  If it isn't and it's trying to be funny, well....it's also failing miserably.  It certainly isn't sung like a joke in the song.  But it's also a sing-along song (this refrain is repeated, believe it or not, ten friggin times in the song), and when you sing those lyrics, I don't know, I feel like something dies inside of me every time.  This is just so vapid and annoying, because it feels like the band wants us to believe this, and to treat it as a rallying cry.  Personally, if William Wallace had chanted this as a lead into battle, or if the dude from 300 had yelled it to me as a Spartan fighting Xerxes, I would have just stood there and said "Wha?"  I probably would say that because I actually was a soldier in both cases, but I would also just get demoralized and run away.  Sigh.

Day 4- Popcorn

OK, I lied.  I was going to do the whole famous singer-songwriters writing bad lyrics theme this week, but you know what?  I'm too tired this week.  Don't worry, we'll get to them.  For now though, let's do something easy.  Something that is inarguably awful.  Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you....NEW EDITION!

Ah... "P" is for her personality
I said the "O" is for originality
And the other "P" is for the perfect love she gives to me
The "C" is just 'cause she loves me
And the "O" means she's the only love I got
And the "R" and the "N", our love will never end

Um.  Wow.  I don't know where to begin.  It's funny though.  Most of the lines are just dumb, but the last line is what stands out to me.  You can just see the thought process: 

Hey, let's ape off of James Brown's excellent funk song Popcorn. 
How are we going to do it? 
Oh I know, by making each letter stand for something. 
Yeah, let's do it!

Some time later...

OK, what about the R and the N? 
Um.......
Damn.

And that is likely a whole bunch of lyric sessions summed up in eight lines.

Day 3- Original Of The Species

This week is going to have a mini-theme, namely excellent songwriters/bands that are prolific, and therefore have a ton of good songs and, thankfully for this blog, a ton of crap.  I'm going to try to only highlight songs that were hits for the band, since random b-sides aren't really worthy of mockery, since they wouldn't be known by most people and weren't exactly intended for major release.

All right, with all that said, we begin with one of my favorite bands, U2.  At one point in my life, U2 were my favorite band ever, and I still think their output from War through even Pop is pretty outstanding (I'm a firm believer that Pop is one of the most underrated albums of all time).  I love The Joshua Tree in particular, which is simply one of the great rock albums ever released, no questions asked. However, their output this decade has been remarkably spotty, and it seems increasingly clear that Bono is just running out of ideas.  The danger of being a poetic lyricist is that your lyrics can soar and they can crash into the ground, and Bono has had both things happen a lot. 

The lyric I'm going to highlight today is from their album How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, which starts off really well (Miracle Drug, Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own, City of Blinding Lights), but then like much of their output this decade, spirals down quickly in quality in the second half.  The song Original Of The Species, the penultimate song on the album, has a number of idiotic lyrics, and yes, was a single.  The worst is this refrain, which is repeated and serves as kind of the beginning of the chorus:

I'll give you everything you want
Except the thing that you want
You are the first one of your kind

And in case you think I'm quoting this out of context and therefore being unfair, I'm not.  This is the entire thing.  If anyone has any idea what this is supposed to mean, please.  I'm all eyes on the comment page.  The first two lines in particular are just eye-rollers; it's a classic example of something that is supposed to sound deep, but means absolutely nothing.  This song also has an utterly random "bridge" that features the made-up word "didit" repeated about twenty times.  Yes, it's a truly bizarre song, even though the melody is nice, if not generic U2 anthem music.  I may well update this entry periodically, by the by.

Day 2- MacArthur Park

This one hurts for me to do.  Jimmy Webb, the guy that wrote this, is one of the great songwriters of all time.  By The Time I Get To Phoenix?  Ace.  Wichita Lineman?  Galveston?  All I Know?  All wonderful, deep, complex, beautiful songs.  And then we have MacArthur Park, which is one of his biggest hits, famously recorded by Donna Summer among others.  And while the music is great, the lyrics....oh my lord, are they awful.  The metaphors make so little sense it's almost painful, the song is barely coherent, and no one even knows why the hell it's called MacArthur Park.  Well, maybe they do, but you've sure got me.  I think it's supposed to be a lament to a lost love, but when you have lyrics like what I'm going to highlight below, it could really be about anything.  Well, anything that sucks, that is.

Mac Arthur's Park is melting in the dark
all the sweet green icing flowing down
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
Oh, nooo!

And yes, that "Oh, nooo!" is accurate; the line is sung with very unnecessary passion.

So where to begin?  I don't even know if I can.  That whole section about how the guy can't take it, and it took so long to bake it, is just so horrible it makes me cringe every time I hear/read it.  I mean, come on, there HAS to be a better metaphor than someone leaving a friggin cake out in the rain and not having the recipe again for losing love.  It's just so extended and painfully awkward.  Look, I'm a college admissions counselor at a school that highly favors writing, and if this was sent in as a writing sample, guess what would happen?  DENY!  OK, fine, I'd look at his grades too, but still...

The worst part of all of this is that I had the opportunity to see Jimmy Webb perform his own music live in New York, and it is easily in my top ten concerts all-time.  He was warm, personable, was in great form on the piano, played fantastic songs all night, Chris Noth was in the audience, it was all good....until the final song, which was of course MacArthur Park.  I had to stifle my laughter as he passionately sang these lyrics, and it honestly soured the concert a little bit for me, as I was dreading the song's appearance.  Let this be a lesson to us all; even the greats can have sucky songs.

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.

Introduction

Welcome, one and all, to Sucky Lyrics!  There are lots and lots of songs out there, and thus, lots and lots of lyrics.  Many songs these days are so overproduced and overwhelmingly loud that the lyrics are sometimes lost in the din.  And often that's a good thing, because there are a LOT of terrible, wretched, misinformed, decrepit, pretentious, overwrought, soul-crushing pieces of prose embedded within perfectly serviceable, pleasant melodies.  In other words, there's a lot of crap. 

This blog is going to highlight one bad lyric every weekday; it could be a whole song, a single verse, a terrible rhyme etc.  Also, every so often I'll feature good lyrics.  That's right, they do exist! 

Of course, this is all subjective, but I think I have both pretty good taste in music and can recognize terrible writing when I see it.  You may totally disagree, but then I just won't trust your judgment. :)

All right, let's do this.