That’s funny; I never noticed the pronunciation but I would *definitely *call it a bad rhyme. What the hell is it even supposed to mean in this context? Assuming he’s not speaking of an actual feline in a crib I can only conclude that he just picked a random word to rhyme with table, which of course cradle does not :smack:
The whole song is odd, though I do like it.
“Go Back” by Crabby Appleton is one of my favorite songs from 1970. But it does contain this one bit of poetic license:
*Now you look good to me
Still, I can’t help but see
You’ve been thinking of him all the time
And you know it’s not right
When you kiss me tonight
You’re pretending his lips are mine*
No, you’re pretending my lips are his.
All of Steve Miller’s lyrics sound like they were written by a particularly unimaginative 2nd grader. And they didn’t improve with time, either; the lyrics from his latest stuff are just as trite and vapid as from his earliest work.
There’s a different category of bad lyric: the not enough words spread over too much song syndrome. Best example I can think of is Chicago’s “Beginnings.” I actually like this song a lot, but the lyrics do not pull their weight. Consider these lines:
When I kiss you
I feel a thousand different feelings.
The color of chills
All over my body
Leaving aside whatever “color of chills” are, there is so much room in the arrangement that Robert Lamm has to stretch these words to ridiculous length; a transcription for how he sings that last “body” might go something like “BAH-day, ay, ay, AY, ay-ye-ay, ay-ye-ay, ay-ye-ay.” That’s fourteen syllables if you’re counting. For gods sake, think of some more words.
I also love “You Make Me Feel So Good” by the Zombies, but the bridge goes like this:
So good, so good, don’t have to justify why
I feel so good, so good, so good
Never thought could be so good to me
Yeah, “never thought could be so good to me”. Oh well.
Then there’s Dylan’s “You Ain’t Going Nowhere”. The chorus ends with the line “Down in the easy chair”, and every verse ends with “You ain’t going nowhere” – except the last verse:
Now Ghengis Kahn he could not keep
All his kings supplied with sleep
We’ll climb that hill no matter how steep
When we get up to it
Why not “When we get up there”, which would have rhymed with every other last line in the song? Just being Dylan, I guess.
Can’t blame Sheryl Crowe for this one – she famously found the lyrics to the song while browsing through a used book store. And “blowing and cursing them out” probably falls on the side of “clever” rather than “awkward”, as it slightly violates the reader’s/listener’s expectations. Or maybe she just sang the lyrics wrong, I dunno.
One thing that’s becoming clear in this thread is that there’s a fair amount of “chacun a son gout” (literally, “each to his own goo”) to lyrics. For some people, a given lyric is like a poke to the eye while other people either don’t mind it or actually think it works.
Bruce Springsteen is an all american boy from New Jersey and should know his baseball terms.
Almost any type of pitch you can think of, fast-ball, curve-ball, screw-ball, would work in that line but Bruce has his friend throwing drugs at batters? 
I always heard that line as “before blowing and crushing them out.”
Actually, it sounds like he’s blowing out his fingers, since *them *is a plural pronoun and every match and oversized pack are both singular. The only plural noun in there is fingers.
Them has been used as a singular pronoun since Shakespeare. It’s time to accept it.
Well, you may give him a pass for that one, but I’m not so charitable with this one from Play Me:
Song she sang to me
Song she brang to me
Brang. BRANG???
Look, I know he was looking for a rhyme with the next two lines:
Words that rang in me,
Rhyme that sprang from me
But that doesn’t earn a pardon from me.
He could have done:
Song she’d sing to me
Song she’d bring to me
Or:
Song she taught to me
Song she brought to me
Or even:
Song she’d sung to me
Song she’d brung to me
…and then reworked the rest of rhyme scheme.
Yeah, I looked it up and there are references to Old English, and such.
But, to my ears, the only context where that word would fit is something like:
“Woman, brang me a beer.”
On the other hand, I will excuse the entirety of MacArthur Park because: drugs.
In the ChiLites “Have You Seen Her?”
Why, oh, why did she have to leave and go away
See, I could take her leaving. But, why did she have to leave AND go away?
He doesn’t know much about cars, either. From Racing in the Streets:
I got a sixty-nine Chevy with a 396
Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor
“Fuelie” heads are small block heads, so named because they came on fuel injected Vettes. They won’t in any way shape or form fit a 396 big block.
Unless…he’s saying he has the heads on the floor…like as ballast. 
…but…but…Baby, Im-a want you. Baby, Im-a need you!
Is this the published lyrics? It’s not the most distinct, but I can’t hear anything other than “Charybdis”.
This is a Biblical reference, specifically to a quote that appears in Luke & Matthew.
Which is itself echoing the book of Jeremiah, in which God warns that he will destroy Jerusalem for not listening to him. Since God is so often portrayed as a male figure, ‘father hen’ makes sense, though it is a bit abstruse.
I had totally forgotten about that little gem. Thannnnnnnks Typo, that’ll be a fun ear worm to have. :dubious:
Not when it’s not clear what you’re referring to.
Yep, it’s String trying to show off his erudition.
Could he say “rock and a hard place” instead? Sure, but it’s not as high brow. More like something the Rolling Stones would use. And I bet they never used “Mephistopheles” or “alabaster” in their lyrics!
“Once Upon A Time” has the following lyric that’s interesting:
Once upon a hill
We sat beneath a willow tree
Counting all the stars and waiting for the dawn
But that was once upon a time
Now the tree is gone.
Willows don’t grow up on hills. They grow down by the water.
Maybe it was a rooster named Sue, and he’s confused.