Many Metallica lyrics are pretty silly / naïve, but I think the cake goes to Eye of the beholder :
Do you choose what I choose?
More alternatives
Energy derives from both the plus and negative
I’d say this is true as a generalization, but not as an absolute. For example, if you reduce Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” to just its melody and chords, it feels like you’re being attacked by a piano-shaped jackhammer. That’s a song that is all about its lyrics (and consciously so, I would say).
The thing is that it’s not a great song, but a weak rip-off of R.E.M.'s “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It”.
The Beatles - I Want You (She’s So Heavy): -
I want you
I want you so bad
I want you
I want you so bad
It’s driving me mad
It’s driving me mad
Etc etc etc etc etc. And that’s it.
Great song… not so great lyrics.
I can find no evidence for this. Link. Link2. And many other cites.
There are many cites claiming it is slang for vulva or sexual intercourse. But that doesn’t really fit in the song.
I’m sure I’ve read in an interview with Morrison that it not a reference to drugs.
I’m sticking with he needed a rhyme for “soul”, but who knows.
ETA: I found this:
The song is about an experience Morrison had when he was 12 years old. After a day of fishing outside a village named Ballystockart in his native Ireland, Morrison and his friends stopped in one of the village’s houses, where they saw an old man sitting inside. In Steven Turner’s Van Morrison: Too Late to Stop Now, Morrison describes him as “dark weather-beaten.”
Morrison and his friends asked the man for water, and he gave them some he’d gotten from a nearby stream. As Morrison drank the stream water he slipped into mystical experience. “Time stood still,” he says in Too Late to Stop Now. "For five minutes everything was really quiet and I was in this other dimension. “That’s what the song is about.”
Given that, jelly roll makes no sense - to me, anyway
Love that guy, I used to have that album and I’d play the hell out of that song.
I’ve been there and I remember the lyrics running through my head.
Odd lyrics that actually work from Wrapped Around Your Finger:
You consider me the young apprentice;
Caught between the Scylla and Charybdis
I remember some commercial with a young woman in her apartment staring dreamily at the man in his apartment across the way and the narrator listing all his flaws. Then finishing with “…but he knows all the words to the greatest rock & roll song ever” as he sings Cheap Trick’s “I Want You To Want Me”
Immediately my outraged brain thought “There’s only, like, twenty words in that song over and over! It’s not like the guy memorized American Pie!”
Strange, you’re right, I can also only find references to sexual practices but not to drugs. I remember to have learned it in a book about music years ago, so either I’m misremembering or my source was wrong.
ETA: at least it was known that Jelly Roll Morton had a liking for marijuana, maybe that’s what Van Morrison alluded at.
Supposedly Stevie Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen” is about grief and loss, and was inspired by the murder of John Lennon and the death of Nicks’ uncle within a few days of each other. If I had 100 years I never would have guessed that based on the lyrics:
The clouds never expect it when it rains
But the sea changes colours
But the sea does not change
So with the slow, graceful flow of age
I went forth with an age old desire to please
On the edge of seventeen
So … the sea changes colors, but it doesn’t. And she goes out with the graceful flow of age with an age-old desire. Gotcha.
It doesn’t help that for literally YEARS I heard the chorus talking about a “one-winged dove.” It wasn’t until I was an adult that it occurred to me singing about a one-winged dove doesn’t make sense and I really focused on the song to understand what she was saying.
The old, old song “Body And Soul” is one of my favorites as an instrumental, but ruined when the lyrics are sung.
Funny. I remember in school when Joe Cocker’s You Are So Beautiful To Me came out, the big things was how few unique words were in the song.
Most KISS songs, I would say.
… or Led Zep
Let’s be fair, the lyrics to a lot of there songs were stolen. ;~)
Let’s also pay tribute to Cheap Trick’s signature song, “Surrender.” The lyrics (which rarely even rhyme) sound like a monologue from someone going senile:
Father says, "Your mother’s right
She’s really up on things
Before we married, Mommy served
In the WACs in the Philippines”
Now, I had heard the WACs recruited
Old maids for the war
But mommy isn’t one of those
I’ve known her all these years
The bass line of Captain Sensible’s “Wot?” is jaw-dropping. This song would be a legend as an instrumental. But it’s got some of the most inane lyrics out there.
He said ‘Captain’, I said ‘Wot?’
He said ‘Captain’, I said ‘Wot?’
Over and over and over …
So, you see, they were right. Kilimanjaro rises above the Serengeti in exactly the same way as Olympus.
I mentioned The Sandman in another thread. “He flies the skies like an eagle in the eye of a hurricane that’s abandoned.”. I have no idea WTF an abandoned hurricane is, but I do know that an eagle in the eye of a hurricane is one deeply fucked eagle.