(FTR, I’m using “pop” in its loosest and most general sense; not limited to Britney Spears and ABBA, but including Metal, C&W, Jazz Standards, etc.)
Listening to Jo Carol Pierce recently, I came across one of my favorite lines:
Friends are great, but for a truly exciting life you must have strangers.
–and later, on the same album,
Men are a pack of animals, but you have to capture one to protect you from all the rest.
Now, strictly speaking, these aren’t lyrics; they’re spoken lines between songs. But it got me listing in my head some of my other favorites (which in turn led me to update my sig).
Another favorite:
Now I have to get off my knees because I have some shopping to do
—Diamanda Galas
And some just for the poetry:
My kingdom for a kiss upon the shoulder
—Jeff Buckley
. . . and of course that’s all I have for now, not having taken notes when I was thinking about it. I’ll return here to add them as they re-occur to me.
One of my favorite lines from a pop song is in Julieta Venegas’ ‘‘De Qué Me Sirve’’
‘‘Yo que pensaba que te perdia a ti
ahora ya lo entiendo, tu me perdiste a mi.’’
Roughly translated,
’‘I once thought that I had lost you
I now understand that you lost me.’'
I think it’s an inspiring line for anyone who’s endured a heartbreaking loss and learned to live again.
Madonna has so many lines I love it’d be hard to choose.
I guess if I had to go with just one, it’d be, from Human Nature:
**’‘I’m not your bitch, don’t hang your shit on me.’’ **
Steve Miller Band’s Wild Mountain Honey almost every other line of it would fit the bill:
*
You can only see the stars, After a setting sun* My fav lyric but it’s cliched.
*
Your end is the means, Dont trade your love and goodness, For the golden machine* - again same song, towards the end.
You run for the money, You dont even know about wild mountain honey *-final words of the song’s chorus.
That and the words from “Rock’N Me Baby” by SMB again.
These two sentences in particular:
*
Well, I aint superstitious, And I dont get suspicious, But my woman is a friend of mine.*
And I know that its true that all the things that I do, Will come back to me in my sweet time*
I thought I was the only one who knew that song, pre-American Pie. …a set of sad transparencies till no one could see through…
On the Amazon,
The prophylactics prowl
On the Amazon,
The hypodermics howl,
On the Amazon,
You’ll hear a scarab scowl and sting
Zodiacs on the wing…
(On the Amazon/Don McLean)
I played this for a Chinese roommate in college. He was a bit perplexed.
In the early 70’s, I gave a DJ friend a copy of the LP that this was on and asked her to play it on the radio please for me. The whole station was perplexed, and the phones rang off the hook asking about it.
She later gave me a pen-and-ink drawing of the lyrics. I wish I still had it.
Wild duodenum are lurking in the trees
And the jungle swarms with green apostrophes
I’ve used John Lennon’s “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans” many times–even used it on a university application essay once (and was accepted to that school, too).
