I had never given much thought to America before, but the OP has made a strong case. I am especially impressed by “plants and birds and things” What the hell, they couldn’t think of a single other fucking noun that might be in the desert so they defaulted to the generic THINGS? What about rocks and sky and sand and bugs and lizards … alligator lizards … in the air … AAAAAAAGH! THEY’VE GOT ME DOING IT!!!
Do you suppose the Taliban doesn’t really hate the U.S., they’ve just got us confused with the musical group?
I’d like to see what he’d make of “Busy Child,” a great song nonetheless by The Crystal Method:
I guess I didn’t know.
I guess I didn’t know.
Get Busy Child.
Get Busy Child.
Get Busy Child.
Get Busy Child.
Get Busy Child.
Get Busy Child.
Get Busy Child.
Get Busy Child, get busy, get busy…
(I guess I did-…), get busy, get busy, get busy, get busy…
(I guess I did-…), get busy, get busy, get busy, get, get
(I guess I did-…), get, get, get, get, get, get, get busy.
Get, get, get, get, (I guess I did-…) get, get,
ge-ge-ge-ge-ge-ge-ge-ge-ge-ge-get Busy Child.
I guess I didn’t know.
Get Busy Child.
I guess I did-
Get Busy Child.
I guess I didn’t know.
Get Busy Child.
I guess I did-
I guess I didn’t know.
I guess I did- I guess I did- I guess I did- I guess I didn’t know.
Get busy child.
I guess I did- I guess I did- I guess I didn’t know.
Get Busy Child.
I guess I did- I guess I did- I guess I didn’t know.
Get Busy Child.
Get Busy Child.
Get Busy Child.
Get Busy Child.
Get Busy Child.
Get Busy Child.
Get Busy Child.
Get Busy Child.
Get Busy Child.
I guess I didn’t know.
Get Busy Child.
Get busy.
I guess I didn’t know.
Get busy.
Get busy, get, (I guess I didn’t know…) get, get busy.
Get, get, get, get, get, get, get, get, get, get, get, ge-ge-ge-ge-ge-ge-ge-ge-ge-ge-ge-ge-
ge-ge-ge-ge-ge-ge-ge-ge-ge-ge-get Busy Child.
Get Busy Child.
Get Busy Child.
I guess I didn’t know.
I guess I didn’t know.
Get Busy Child.
I guess I didn’t know.
I guess I didn’t know.
I guess I didn’t know.
I guess I didn’t know.
I guess I didn’t know.
I guess I didn’t know.
I guess I didn’t know.
I guess I did- I guess I didn’t know.
I guess I did- I guess I did- I guess I did- I guess I did- I guess I did- I guess I didn’t know.
I guess I didn’t know.
I guess I didn’t know.
I guess I didn’t know.
I guess I didn’t know.
Get Busy Child.
I guess I didn’t know.
I guess I didn’t know.
Get Busy Child.
I guess I didn’t know.
I guess I didn’t know.
Get Busy Child.
I guess I didn’t know.
I guess I didn’t know.
Get Busy Child.
I guess I didn’t know.
I guess I didn’t know.
I guess I didn’t know.
I guess I didn’t know.
I guess I didn’t know.
I guess I didn’t know.
If Google were really my friend, it’d explain what that picture has to do with anything. I see that it’s of an alligator lizard, but as far as I can tell, it’s just sitting there on a tree. It doesn’t look particularly vaporous, or capable of flight. How could it be in the air? In the air?
I get that if you’re writing a song, and you’re stupid, you have to put a lot of work into getting the words to scan and rhyme. But he could’ve said “alligator lizards everywhere” and it would’ve worked just as well. A more interesting image, too, if you ask me – all along the shoulders of the freeway, it’s lizards a-poppin’. None of them flying and shit, they’re all just starin’ at you. Tripping or not, that’s a cool song. And it took me all of 10 seconds to come up with that lyric. Shame on you, America!
No you didn’t just compare America to Monet! Or even Bernie Taupin, for that matter! I’m all for impressionistic lyrics, when they’re done well – for instance, Paul Simon is a genius at it; he’s written tons of brilliant lines like “he ducked back down the alley with some roly-poly little bat-faced girl.”
America’s lyrics do provoke an impression, the impression of a guy who’s creatively dead (and likely stoned out of his gourd) and can’t come up with anything genuinely clever, so says nothing and tries to pass it off as being worthwhile. Not to keep harping on it, but the moment you write a lyric like “there were plants and birds and rocks and things”, you cross it out furiously and throw the paper away, you don’t release it. Even if every single other word that flows from your pen is pure genius, a lyric that insipid invalidates everything.
And again: Muskrat Love. I mean, the evidence is overwhelming.
The most heartbreaking part is that the songwriter actually put some effort into writing the lyrics; it’s not like he wrote “Good Morning Starshine” and can just claim that he was tripping or he meant the whole thing as a goof.
Bring it!
I don’t listen to 99% of today’s popular music; as soon as I started getting gray hairs in my beard I realized that I just don’t “get” 99% of today’s popular music, what with all the Flashlight 592’s and Sphericals and Ambivalent Plankton Farms and whatever it is the kids are listening to these days. Get off my lawn!
Of course there are stupid songs released constantly. I like a lot of them. But the salient points are:
99% of today’s popular music is meant to disposable. 30 years from now, you’re not going to find people putting “Milkshake” on mix-CD’s or the future equivalent. The band America should’ve been an embarrassing footnote to musical history. They should not still be getting airtime.
Even dumb songs manage to get a good image in there every once in a while. “Shake it like a Polaroid picture” is a neat image, and it makes sense. “Hey mama, it’s that shit that makes you groove, mama, get on the floor and move your booty mama” is a sentiment I can get behind. America is consistently stupid. You can forgive one or two stupid songs, but they were repeat offenders.
We’re not just talking vapid here, we’re talking actively, offensively stupid. The mental equivalent of celery – you actually lose IQ points even just processing the lyrics. Even Jim Morrison, who brought us the immortal words “Hello, I love you, can I jump in your game?”, still followed the law of averages and came up with a good line every once in a while.
And whoever mentioned that “Hook” song by Blues Traveller and got it stuck in my head: you’re going to have a lot to answer for when the hammer comes down.
When posters mentioned impressionistic lyrics, I knew I was forgetting something: Soul Coughing, who had probably the most brilliant songs released in the 1990’s and are tragically defunct while for some reason Smashmouth is still recording.
from “Blue-eyed Devil”
from “Disseminated”
from “Rolling”
See, those are mostly incoherent words that still manage to create images, and sound interesting regardless. Note the difference between that and “plants and rocks and things.”
They spend the whole damn song singing about the flower girl, but she doesn’t make it into the title! I hope the flower girl didn’t let any of them touch her boobies.
OK – if you’re gonna make fun of America, can someone explain these Doors lyrics to me:
Come on, come on, come on
Now touch me Babe
And let me see
that I am not afraid
What was that promise that you made?
Why won’t you tell me what She said?
What was that promise that you made?
Oh,
I’m Gonna love you
'til the heavens (something) the rain…
I think America are stupid. Among my favourite artists are Death Cab For Cutie and Jay-Z. Fell free to ridicule the lyrics of songs that I like. Good luck in finding anything as stupid as “plants and birds and rocks and things.”
I know that I’m lyric-challenged. I frequently can’t make out what the lyrics are, if I had to save my life. Even when I can hear the lyrics, I can’t make any sense out of them.
Who is SHE?
What Promise are they talking about?
What’s going on?
At least in “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron” I know that the story’s supposed to be.
You mean starting with their name? “Death Cab for Cutie”? Did they get that name from a Dave Barry column?
I’ve just read through a bunch of Death Cab lyrics (I’ve never heard them), and without the music, it’s so much pretentious, angsty pseudo-poetry.
I mean, WTF?
“Weights down so that you could move forwards
Pinch to snub that restless nerve
And knock the wind from one last urge
With two fingers a rock glass,
Time passed and that was that”
And I’m thinking that metaphors such as
"Your heart is a river that flows from your chest through every organ
And your brain is the dam and I am the fish who can’t reach the core"
aren’t going to stand the test of time.
I stand by my claim. Without the music, and without context, the lyrics of almost any artist sound like the random dribblings of some addled opium eater.
I woke up this morning,
And I got myself a beer!
I woke up this morning,
And I got myself a beer!
The future’s uncertain,
And the end is always near.
Whenever I saw one of those pretentious “Jim Morrison - American Poet” posters in the dorm as college, I amused myself imagining Steve Allen delivering the quoted bit of the Morrison oeuvre.
You know I never really analyzed those lyrics. As a matter of fact I always thought I was just mis-hearing them and he wasn’t really saying “alligator lizards in the air”, it just sounded that way and must really be something that makes more sense. Every time I heard the song I would think “I should look that up and find out what he’s really saying.”
For the longest time I thought that Aerosmith song was “Lovin’ an Alligator”, when I found out it was supposed to be “Love in an Elevator” it did make more sense but I just can’t get “Lovin’ an Alligator” out of my head.
Oh, and chocodiles are tasty!
Hmm … there’s a definite reptilian theme here.
Um …
Er … yeah, so I guess the OP was right about the lyrics making you stupider.
They got their name from a song by '60s group Bonza Dog Doo-Dah Band. you should know that an obscure reference is cool. Your criticicism isn’t valid here.
I would’t say angsty. There isn’t much angst there. Despondency, perhaps. Do you call Morrisey angsty? And I don’t see how pretention is a criticism. Pretension, in rock n roll, can be magnificent.
Yeah, it doesn’t make direct sense. Good example of impressionist lyrics. But you notice that unlike America, there lyrics have some awareness of the qualities of language, using the sounds of the words so that when combined with music they carry emotional weight. Put this up against “Wishin’ on a falling star/ Watchin’ for the early train/ Sorry boy, but I’ve been hit by/ Purple rain,” and DCFC is a clear winner. They use the sounds of the words to enhance the song. America wish they’d taken LSD.
It’s an… unusual metaphor. It is still light years ahead of the America quoted in this thread.
I am disappointed. I thought you could do much better. Whereas Solgrundy managed to deconstruct every couple of lines of Horse With No Name, you could only manage a few, isolated examples. Even these are fairly reasonable lyrics, and you ignored the ability Ben Gibbard has to paint a complete picture or tell a story, as seen in songs like Photobooth, Why You’d Want To Live Here or Title Track. And no mention of Jay-Z in your post. A poor effort.
I guess that’s the point. If you’d started a thread saying how stupid DCFC’s lyrics were, I could offer many examples proving you wrong. I’ve seen no examples of quality lyrics offered to counter the OP’s premise, and if a band’s fans are unable to do that, then the band has a serious deficiency. When the band is such uninventive dreck as America, then you know that deficiency is serious.
You’re not being consistent here. You criticize America for their meaningless lyrics, but somehow DCFC is cool because they took their bandname from a 60’s group with meaningless lyrics (and a bizarre name).
I’d say “angsty”. And I’d say Morrisey is big on angst.
Chacun a son gout. I think it’s stupid, you think America is stupid. We’re gonna just have to agree to disagree here.
Dude, I’m scanning DCFC lyrics while taking a break from coding and debugging. I’m not working for Rolling Stone. You want a thorough trashing of Death Cab for Cutie, then drag your CDs out of the closet 20 years from now and let your kids listen to them.
Yet somehow, 30 years later, they still get airtime. How mysterious is that? Tell you what, if Death Cab and Jay-Z are still on the radio 20 years from now, then I’ll entertain the notion that it’s not just ephemeral crap.
