> I’ve got it! “Set Adrift On Memory Bliss” by PM Dawn
> contains this classic line:
>
> “Christina Applegay, you gotta put me on/
> Guess who’s piece of the cake was dropped on”
>
> I KNOW that’s exactly what he’s singing because I looked
> it up. Now my only question is: what the HELL is he
> talking about?
The second verse of Steve Miller’s “The Joker” one of the greatest songs ever written - is incredibly bad:
“You’re the cutest thing that I ever did see
I really love your peaches want to shake your tree.
Lovey-dovey, lovey-dovey all the time,
Oo-ooh baby, I could show you a good time”
—(written from memory, so please excuse any mistakes)
Plus the verse with the line “burn, burn like a wicker cabinet”
I keep thinking I like that song until I realize how awful the lyrics are. I’m really torn about that song. It’s really bad when you hear Limp Bizkit use the SAME line (“tender heart in a blender”) in “Nookie.”
Sheriff John Brown’s a detective down in Texas
You know he always knows exactly what the facts is
He ain’t gonna let those two escape justice
He makes his money off other people’s taxes.
I challenge anyone to come up with a worse attempt at rhyme scheme.
FWIW, this is one of the oldest blues lines ever. I always liked that line, then I married a blues musician. He played roughly, oh, a million songs with this line or some slight variation. It’s what’s known as a “floating” line, I think. The old blues players just picked up lines from each other, & used them over & over again. That’s why a lot of people think that all of the early blues tunes all sound the same.
One of my votes for the weirdest rhyme scheme has got to be Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Now, I positively adore this song, but he makes some really impossible rhymes there.
For instance:
“The legend lives on
from the Chippewa on down
to the big lake they call Gitchigumi
Superior it’s said
never gives up her dead
when the gales of November come early.”
Forgive the spelling of “Gitchigumi,” if it’s wrong. I never did learn how to spell it. Anyway, rhyming that word with “early” is darn near as weird as anything Steve Miller could come up with.
Whoops. Sorry, elelle! You shoulda heard me & Tim last night, though.
[begin hijack]
We went to Cedar Point (an amusement park in Ohio, for those of you that don’t know) yesterday. On the way home, we started talking about music, not unusual considering he’s a musician & stuff. We started talking about this very subject–bad lines & bad rhyme schemes. Tim brought up another Gordon Lightfoot tune, Sundown. I said “hey, that one’s not bad. You want a bad rhyme scheme, Edmund Fitzgerald takes the cake.” We spent at least an hour trying to remember all the words. Hey, Cedar Point is a good three-hour trip from Flint. It kept us awake for a while!
“She thinks that emptiness is a mat that lies in the doorway”
from matchbox20…
And this one from aerosmtih… I like this song alot, but this part is just silly… realize up until this part… its a pretty decent love ballady type song
“Its you thats in my dreams I’m beggin’ for/
but I woke up when someone slammed the door
so hard I fell outta bed/
singin’ momma’s little baby loves
shortenin’ bread/
and the moral of the story I can testify/
I get stoned on you girl… thats the best reason why”
OK, the “I get stoned on you girl” bit, I like that line… but the rest of that is all just so random and out of nowhere… it throws me off everytime I hear the song.
[hijack]
“Burn, burn Branson too, making it a big black hole.”
Whoa…you mean Branson isn’t already a big black hole?
Joke from National Geographic: What’s the difference between Jurassic Park and Branson? One’s a theme park about dinosaurs, the other’s a theme park for dinosaurs.
I have to nominate all the lines in the song “Return of the Postmoderns” by Better than Ezra. It’s a catchy song, but the lyrics are (intentionally) incomprehensible. This is just the last verse, for example:
Feeding line caught tuna
to a neutered Bodhisattva
Writhing peaches for the President
Out on the White House lawn
Beating Herbert Hoover
With a leather tipped pinata
Thorn and Katy drink the milk
tinted Amerasian Green
return, return, return
I love the song “Happy Together” by the Turtles, even if it is absurdly sappy, but the stupidest line in the world is in that song. At the end of the song, they sing:
So happy together
How is the weather?
So happy together
How is the weather??? Were they that desperate for a rhyme?
Great, great, GREAT song…Pink Floyd, wish you were here…but here’s the line I hate…“We’re just two lost souls, swimmin’ in a fish bowl, year after year…”
ugh…
and the entire refrain of Phish’s song, Tweezer. eeeek. it’s painful.
