Whenever I hear, “There were plants and birds and rocks and things”, I have to wonder if the America guys had just given up.
What lyrics trigger you as lazy lyrics?
The Turtles were in a dispute with their record label, which led to the deliberately pop-sugary Elenore which included memorably forgettable lines like
Your looks intoxicate me
Even though your folks hate me
I really think you’re groovy
Let’s go out to a movie
and the never to be topped
Elenore, gee, I think you’re swell
And you really do me well
You’re my pride and joy, et cetera
If you’ve seen The Beatles “Let It Be” on Disney+ (highly recommended BTW), when they come up with songs on the fly, which they do a lot, these types of lyrics are used constantly. They just don’t make it into the final versions.
The wild dogs cry out in the night
As they grow restless longing for some solitary company…
I know that I must do what’s right
Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti…
This seems like a good time to complain about what I think is one of the most overused cliches in music.
“Build my world around you”. It’s meaningless pablum that appears in a LOT of songs (many with slight variations).
If you rhyme party with Bacardi.
Neil Young has written some of the best lyrics, and his “Cortez the Killer” is, yeah, a killer song.
Do you remember how it ends, though?
Cortez, Cortez
What a killer
I was under the impression he was going for a bit of shock value by just laying it out straight. There was no sugarcoating what he thought of him.
Neil Young has some doozies.
“Got mashed potato
Ain’t got no T-Bone”
That’s not two selected lines from a song. Those are the only - heavily repeated - lyrics to the whole song.
And Sugar Mountain has the lines
“Now you’re underneath the stairs
And you’re giving back some glares”
which Neil has admitted in concert to being total shit that he put in as a point of reference to show how bad lyrics could be.
She opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the 13 the century
I always hated that one.
Anything with Eagles Flying.
I love those two. How about “Oh Pretty Woman”?
Pretty woman, yeah, yeah, yeah
Pretty woman, look my way
Pretty woman, say you’ll stay with me
ETA: or the laziest line ever, from Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline”, a lesson of tautology:
Good times never seemed so good
Unless they do. Unless I’m misremembering, “The movement you need is on your shoulder” from “Hey Jude” is a placeholder lyric that John liked enough that he convinced Paul to leave it in.
Every day a little sadder
A little madder
Someone get me a ladder
Any lyric that rhymes the same word.
And Neil Young really hated his audience, didn’t he? Well, Neil, despite your best efforts, I still like your music. So there!
You gotta start from the start…
and
Only time will tell if we stand the test of time
In this ever-changing world in which we live in
ETA: I still maintain that he sings in which we’re living, but no one else seems to agree with me.
I’ve always been impressed by “we can’t even think of a word that rhymes” from School’s Out by Alice Cooper.
Tattoo by the Who, a fairly obscure song about two teen brothers getting tattooed to the consternation of their parents, ends on this;
Now I’m older
I’m tattooed all over
My wife is tattoed too
A rooty-toot-toot
Rooty-tootle-toot-toot
Rooty-tootle-tootle
Tattoo too
To you
On one of Pete Townshend’s live albums where he played a solo acoustic version of this song, he explained to the audience that he threw in the rooty-toot-toots as filler when recording the demo because he hadn’t come up with a closing line yet, and then just decided to leave it as is because it was just there to fill time on the LP and wasn’t ever going to get airplay.
I kinda assumed that line was in reference to the implied necrophilia in the song.
Wouldn’t ‘if’ be the first word there?
You may hate the lyric, but no thinking person would call it lazy songwriting.
mmm