Yeah, I can’t tell if kaylasdad is joking or not. I assumed he was, but maybe not. “Ain’t” is a prefect fine word for a song and reflects how people actually talk. Something like “I Can’t Get Any Satisfaction” just sounds so clunky and laughable to me versus the dialectal “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” Your “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby” example is perfect. Compare with “Are you or aren’t you my baby?” That ain’t hip, cat.
I prefer the lyric from north Detroit - Woodward Avenue, specifically.
Strangers racing
Up and down the boulevard
Their tires turning in the night
Streetlights turn green
Punch the gas and let 'er roll
Racing somewhere in the night
I want Elton John’s “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters” to go like this:
So unless they see the sky
But they can’t and that is why
They don’t know if it’s dark outside or light.
“know not” always struck me as stilted and annoying.
Also, the Indigo Girls could raise love to the power of two. The extra syllables in “multiply” are unnecessary to make the line scan.
Their degrees are in English and Religious Studies. They made a math error. It had nothing to do with the line scanning. They honestly thought they got the expression right.
Also, “by the power of two” makes their double-entendre a little clearer. “Raise love to the power of two” doesn’t quite communicate the “Two people” meaning. And when two people are loving one another, love sort of does multiply.
They just need an entirely new metaphor.
Their “Galileo” song is all screwed up too, because they seem unaware of the fact that Galileo eventually recanted. They come up with a lot of good ideas like that, that don’t quite match reality, but it doesn’t stop them.
Fleetwood Mac, “When the rain waSHEZZ you clean, you’ll know” (from Dreams).
Nothing rainy is necessary. How about something like this? (Feel free to come up with something better.)
Women, they will come and they will go
When you find yourSELF alone you’ll know
WasSHEZZ reminded me of a similar one.
I Just Died In Your Arms Tonight has a weird one. The lyric is “Her diary it sits on the bedside table” but the singer pronounces it like Ms Morgendorfer: “Her Daria sits by the bedside table”. Where the heck does he get that? “Diary it sits” as written doesn’t fit the meter - too many syllables. “Her diary sits” does, but that isn’t how he pronounciates it.
A Daisy a Day has this clunker: And the love that was more/than the clothes that they wore/could be seen in the gleam of his eye.
I can’t begin to tell you what is wrong with that.
And the love was more/than the life they adored/would live on when they both had died.
“When You Get to Asheville” by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell has this lyric:
She won’t sleep in the house now
She just listens for the sound
Of your old eighty-four Ford
Coming down the road
Even Edie Brickell can’t rescue the awful sound of three mis-accented syllables in a row. It should say:
Of your eighty-seven Ford
Louie Louie. This beloved song was dashed off in a hurry, and sounds it.
“Louie Louie, oh oh, me gotta go” - well it’s the “gotta” that’s gotta go - one too many syllables. Make it “and away I go”, and it fits and exudes oodles of cool.
Aside from that, one reason people thought the Kingsmen’s version was filthy-dirty is no doubt due to wishful thinking, because if you could make out the real words (clearly sung by Richard Berry in his original B-side) the are frankly just too lame. Stuff like “Me see Jamaica moon above, it won’t be long me see me love”, done it a fake Caribbean patois, are embarrassing to contemplate, and nobody should feel obligated to stick to them.
Iggy Pop had the right idea when he sang “she got a rag on, I move above, it won’t be long before I take it off … (garbled line about a rose or something) … her ass is black and her tits are bare”. Hey, that’s better. I bet you could make it even dirtier.
Did Douglas Adams ever find a fix for the ridiculous line in “Doe, a deer”: “La, a note that follows so”? I must admit I have tried and failed with that one.
Don’t you dare touch “Louie, Louie.” That song is perfect as it is and the quintessential rock song. 
I think it’s “La, a note to follow so: ti I drink with jam and bread”-- it’s actually a second play on “so” as a function word.
I dare touch Louie Louie.
I want the words to be as salacious as the tune suggests. “My little girl, she waits for me” is a good start. After that, all bets are off. It’s called the folk process. I don’t blame Richard Berry; he wrote a perfectly nice song in the doo-wop tradition with polite lyrics about a guy telling someone named Louie how much he misses his gal. He never expected it would take off among Seattle teens and get revved up by the likes of the Sonics and Paul Revere and the Raiders, and ultimately the Kingsmen whose distorted and slurred take became a national scandal. At which point it became something completely different, and I say anyone who dares is free to go full-on pornographic with it, just as long as you keep that dah dah dah, dah dah loud and strong.
Huh - I actually never noticed that before, thanks! Probably because that phrasing is not something you really hear in Britain. Perhaps Adams missed this as well, for the same reason. Regardless, I still think it’s a weak effort.
Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight”…
Someone saved my life tonight, sugar bear
should be
Someone saved my life tonight… should’ve they
I dunno. I like the percussive consonants of “me gotta go” vs the quiet “and away I go.” Much stronger in rhythm and sound to me, at any rate.
Hee. I’ve mentioned this here; back before you could easily find song lyrics and before I learned who “sugar bear” is I always *heard *it as “sugar bear” but couldn’t believe that was actually what he’s singing because ya know, it’s stupid. I decided he was singing “someone saved my life tonight . . .didn’t ya, dear?” and convinced probably half the kids in my elementary school. Ditto Steve Miller’s “*pompatus *of love” which I decided must actually be “properties of love”. I think my revisions are an improvement.
Much as I love Billy Joel’s Piano Man, I wish he had used the A-B-C-C-B rhyme scheme in all his lyrics, so I did it:
It’s 9:00 on a Saturday
The regular crowd shuffles in.
There’s a old man
With a glass in his hand.
Getting drunk on his tonic and gin
He says “Bill, I believe this is killing me.”
As the smile ran away from his face.
“If I could leave this bar
I’d be a big star.
Why can’t I get the hell out of this place?”
And the waitress is practicing politics
As the businessmen slowly get stoned.
Yes, they drink to excess
And to loneliness…
But it’s better than drinking alone.
Just listened to Julie Andrews sing it, and I really don’t think so. My suggestion there is “La, which barristers must know”.
“Till the stars fall from the sky for you and I”.
Needlessly ungrammatical. Why not “till the fish leap from the sea for you and me”?
“What’s love but a second-hand emotion?”
Do you mean “second-rate”? After all, your love may be second-hand, but that doesn’t mean mine is (of course, it doesn’t mean it isn’t).
From a more recent song (I assume), part of the rotation at my local McDonald’s: “You always want to come but you never want to leave”.
No paradox there, so “but” is out of place. A simple “and” would suffice, though admittedly it’s an uninspiring line.
“Your words poetic are not pathetic. On the other hand, boy, you shine”.
Again, “on the other hand” usually means one thing is bad, but another thing is good. Here, two things are good, or at least ok. I suggest “as a matter of fact” instead.
In Joan Baez’s cover of Bob Dylan’s A Simple Twist of Fate, she sings
People tell me it’s a crime
To feel too much
At any one time
All it cost me was a dime
But the bells refuse to ring
I sing:
People tell me it’s a crime
To feel too much
At any one time
I still want to hear a chime
But the bells refuse to ring