Most annoying and/or insipid song lyrics?

**it starts off with this solo…

“Wherever you are my love will keep you safe
My heart will build a bridge of light across both time and space”

and a couple of lines after…

“Wherever I am I will love you day by day
I will keep you safe, cling on to faith, along the dark, dark way”

nice sentiment but a bit unlikely in a hail of bullets**

In its defense, it did lead to the classic “I like to rock and roll all night and part of every day. I usually have errands… I can only rock from like 1-3.”

And I adore Springsteen as much as the next person but I have to cringe at “I swear I’d drive all night again/just to buy you some shoes/and to taste your tender charms”.

And “nuns run bald through Vatican halls, pregnant, pleading Immaculate Conception” is annoying simply because if anyone knows what the Immaculate Conception is, it would be nuns for heaven’s sake!

My vote for the worst lyrics ever written:

Note: this thread is 10 years old. I’ll spare you the stupid zombie jokes.

I will not miss an opportunity, zombie or no, to trash the song I hate most in the world.

According to the billboards, Kool and the Gang is still working the casinos on the Redneck Riviera. So, for going on 40 years they’ve been singing:
“That’s the way, uh huh uh huh, I like it uh huh uh huh!”

I’ll not torture you with lyrics, but for your consideration, I submit:
Old Shep by Red Foley
Phantom 309 and Teddy Bear by Red Sovine.

Unless Kool and the Gang did a cover version, that song is by K.C. and the Sunshine Band. Were they ones at the casino?

Anyway, it’s been nine years since this thread has been active. Two of the artists mentioned–Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston–have passed on. We need some newer crappy songs to name and shame here! There’s been a lot since 2003.

“What’s your name, who’s your daddy,
Is he rich (is he rich) like me?”

and

“Tell her no, no, no, no, no-no-no-no-no, no, no…”
mmm

I hate that I know this, but I heard it on the radio, and it was so insipid that I had to Google it in order to hate it by name.

Remember only God can judge us / Forget the haters cause somebody loves ya

  • Miley Cyrus

It’s 2013, you’re really going to sing that - possibly the least original lyric and sentiment I’ve heard this century.

“We live in a world, a world on two different axles”

  • Kendrick Lamar, Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe

“It’s our God-forsaken right to be loved”
Jason Mraz, i’m Yours

“New York, concrete jungle where dreams are made of”
Alicia Keys/Jay-Z (though I strongly suspect it was Jay-Z who came up with this particular atrocity), Empire State of Mind

:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

Crimeney! Isn’t there anyone anywhere in the recording process with the education and standing to say to these knobs: “Those words don’t mean what you think they mean”?

That’s “Shame On the Moon”. And in looking it up, I realized that it and “Against the Wind” are effectively the same song. “Still the Same” indeed.

The first one that comes to mind is Cibo Matto’s “Know Your Chicken”. It’s awful.

Another one that comes to mind immediately is “If” by David Gates & Bread. It’s often sung at weddings, and every couple I’ve known who had it sung at theirs got divorced.

A song with lyrics that DO make sense, but is NOT appropriate for weddings even though it’s often sung at them, is Extreme’s megahit “More Than Words”. It’s a guy telling his girlfriend that she’s history unless she has sex with him. :smack:

And as many of you have already figured out, I’m a huge R.E.M. fan and have been almost from day one, and some of their early songs have no set lyrics. There was an alt-rock band that had some success in the late 1980s and early 1990s called the Cocteau Twins where nobody was any good at writing lyrics, so they just came up with syllables that matched the music, and that’s what was sung. I also remember hearing about a thrash-metal band called Obituary that could not provide a lyric sheet for the same reason. :stuck_out_tongue:

This song was getting pretty old even when this thread was new, but I’d like to nominate “Love a Rainy Night” by Eddie Rabbit, which included these amazingly creative lyrics:

'Cause I love a rainy night
Yeah, I love a rainy night
Ooh, I love a rainy night
Yeah, I love a rainy night
Showers washed
All my cares away
I wake up to a sunny day
'Cause I love a rainy night
Yeah, I love a rainy night
Well, I love a rainy night
I love a rainy night
Well, I love a rainy night
You can see it in my eyes
Yeah, I love a rainy night
Well, it makes me high
Ooh, I love a rainy night

Incorrect. That song is great. :slight_smile:

SO many to choose from:

“MacArthur Park”
Someone left the cake out in the rain
and I don’t think I can take it
'cause it took so long to bake it
and I’ll never have that recipe again.

“Watching Scotty Grow”
Disgust disallows me from going there.

“Christmas Shoes”
I wanna’ buy these shoes
for my mama please
it’s Christmas Eve and these shoes are just her size
Could you hurry sir, daddy says there’s not much time…blah blah blah blah blah

And of course there’s always the default to THIS PABLUM:

1-877-KARS 4 KIDS (yeah you know the rest; sorry for getting it stuck in everybody’s head)

'Don’t you remember you told me you love me, baby?
You said you’d be coming back this way again, baby?
Baby, baby, baby, baby, oh, baby!
I love you, I really do!"

  • “Superstar” by Karen Carpenter (It’s the “baby baby baby baby” line that really puts this over the top)
    “Who let the dogs out?
    Who let the dogs out?
    Who let the dogs out?
    Who let the dogs out?
    Who let the dogs out?
    (etc.)”
  • by someone whose name I can’t remember and refuse to google.

Most of these are just bad songs. I offer “Horse With No Name”. As a song (or at least as a record, a performance) I rather like it, but the lyrics!
There were plants and birds. and rocks and things,
There was sand and hills and rings.
The first thing I met, was a fly with a buzz,
And the sky, with no clouds.
The heat was hot, and the ground was dry,
But the air was full of sound.
So, there were things were there? Interesting. And the heat, you would really describe that as being hot?

The plants, birds, things, sand, hills, and rings (rings?:confused:) all reappear in a later verse. I mean, you wouldn’t expect him to manage different imagery at this poetic level for each verse, would you? This time he is describing the seashore rather than the desert. Who would have thought that both things and rings would be characteristic of two such very different environments?

An older one that I’ve been hearing a lot lately due to the Backstreet Boys getting back together or celebrating 20 years together or whatever they’ve got going on right now—

I don’t care who you are
where you’re from
what you did
as long as you love me

Really? So a 350 pound grizzly guy, who just got out of prison for rape and murder has a chance, as long as he’s into you?

:dubious:

This will piss off a lot of people, but my entry today is the same as it would have been ten years ago: “Imagine.”