Is it a horrendous song, or is it a good song with horrendous lyrics?
People, this isn’t a thread about listing horrible songs you hate that have horrible lyrics. This is a thread about music you think is great, but the lyrics are horrible.
Pure nonsense rama-lama-ding-dong type stuff doesn’t bother me much. It’s just treating the human voice as an instrument. Even Paul Simon style word salad thats just a bunch of non-sequitur images or references is fine. The song is trying to convey a sort of feeling, and if it works it works.
So we have pure non-word scat singing, word salad images, arcane/obscure, and pretentious/absurd. “I am the Walrus” is John Lennon just packing in pretentious absurd nonsense to troll the fanboys.
Adding the to list of categories of bad lyrics are hateful or immoral or disgusting lyrics. Sometimes these are intentionally supposed to be funny or goofy or over the top, and sometimes that works, and I don’t just mean in gangsta rap. I mean, there are all sorts of silver dagger folk songs about straight-up murdering a bitch. So is the song horrible because it celebrates murdering a bitch, or is the song about a horrible guy who murders a woman he thinks is a bitch, even though it’s sung from the point of view of the murderer?
Also add in lyrics that are cliched, boring and stupid, or feature horrible mangled rhymes.
I find that Beth’s words are actually words, and the words that are actually on lyrics sheets; however, they seem to be unnecessarily expanded in delivery. I think that some one syllable words, to normal people, seem to take up to 8 or nine syllables when she delivers them. To great effect.
Haha. Well actually there was a fourth category, songs about flying away: Fly Like an Eagle, Time for Me to Fly, Freebird, Fly Robin Fly, etc. Although maybe that’s a sub-category of Rambling.
I thought that the line was “rises like Olympus”. Which, of course, makes it even more stupid. “Let’s see…let’s get something poetic and allegorical to compare a mountain to…I know! A mountain! We’ll compare a mountain to a mountain! Damn, I’m good!”
My nominations Stairway To Heaven fun to play on guitar and some interesting stuff musically (even if it was ripped off.) Inna-Gadda- Da-Vida. Maybe not a “great” song but would have been immeasurably better with good lyrics.
[QUOTE=WordMan;18361711but I guess I have assumed that since the song was written about a heroin trip, this was a POV description of being completely zonked on “horse.”[/QUOTE]
The writer swears up and down that it’s not about heroin, but about when he was a kid he and his dad took a trip through the desert.
I haven’t seen much Family Guy, but when Stewie did that, I had no idea he was imitating Shatner. It was a few years after that I saw Shatner’s version.
Shatner has an album called, “The Transformed Man.” Several of those songs are on YouTube. Rhino Records has an album called, “Golden Throats,” that will put you on the floor or in the asylum, depending on your personal bent. Thrill to songs by such vocal stylists as Sebastian Cabot, Mae West, Eddie Albert, Bill Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and Jack “Soul” Webb. Not for the squeamish.
Yeah, I’ve heard some of that other stuff before. Like Leonard Nimoy’s “If I Had a Hammer”. And if this song was popular or considered good in 1960’s, then I think it could count for this thread.
I also like the song but this particularly bugs me - “The wild dogs cry out in the night, As they grow restless, longing for some solitary company”. What the heck is solitary company?
Just this morning, well every morning for about the last month actually, I was enjoying Walk the Moon’s Shut Up and Dance. What a fun, poppy, '80s style piece of ear candy it is if you can get past the drecky lyrics.
“A backless dress and some beat up sneaks,
My discothèque, Juliet teenage dream.
I felt it in my chest as she looked at me.
I knew we were bound to be together”
Egad. 1982 called and it does not want this back.
Here are the complete lyrics. I refrain from writing them here not because of copyright (copywrong ! ) issues but because I don’t want to relive them.
Two things: first, this part is where the song most thoroughly reeks of a certain 1980s sound. Second, is it possible to hear “this woman is my destiny” without thinking of George McFly in BTTF telling Lorraine “I am your density”?
But the 1980s-sound part means that this is really a bad song with bad lyrics, so I’ll shut up now.
Ha! You’ve just added another layer of cheesy. . . goodness(?)
The certain 1980 reek that you are detecting would be the same one which gives Starship’s We Built This City its malodorous quality. Not a bad song for simply bebopping around in the car but don’t listen to the words or you might get in a wreck.
