You ever listen to a song, and you get to a lyric where you’re just “Wait, what?” Not necessarily songs that are bad or even ones you don’t like, just where you find particular lyrical choices that got under your skin for some reason.
My favorite example of this is from the Beatles song “Come Together”.
“He’s got feet, down, below his knees…”
Now, I know this song isn’t strictly supposed to make any sense, but… he’s got feet down below his knees? Where the hell else would he keep them?!
Totally off topic (in my own thread, even), but I just wanted to say: After posting this, I realized I had no idea what forum I had posted it into. Fortunately I seem to have picked the right one by pure chance.
Honestly, when I posted this, I expected the first reply to be someone complaining about a Train song. It’s kind of like mentioning Everybody Loves Raymond and starting your stopwatch to time how many seconds it takes for someone to mention how much they hate that show.
But yes, more to the point, I think it quickly becomes obvious that this is a love song from a man suffering from tachycardia who is in love with a zombie.
Back in the '50s there was a popular song in which a very pedantic man was writing a love letter to his girlfriend, writing it in “perfect” English. It began “Sweetheart semi-colon I love you exclamation point Some day comma in the future comma can we go steady question mark” It used to drive me crazy because the songwriter, obviously in over his head when it came to punctuation, incorrectly used a semi-colon. A comma is called for where he had a semi-colon. This misuse of a semi-colon invalidates the whole premise of the song.
And for me, it’s “Hot, sweet cherries on the vine” from Sammy Hagar. While I’m not a botanist, my brain does know cherries do not grow on trees, and it bugs me.
Into the West from the LotR movies is the one I hate the most.
“Across the sea
A pale moon rises
The ships have come to carry you home”
No Goddamit.
The moon rises in the east. Even in Middle Earth the moon rises in the east. If you are standing on the *western *shore, watching ships coming to take you into the west, then you can not see a pale moon rising across the sea.
You can see a pale moon rising over the mountains. You can see a pale moon setting across the sea. From the Grey Havens you can not possibly see a pale moon rising across the sea.
This one crappy lyric totally ruined a good song for me. I was listening to the music in the theatre after the movie ended and I was really enjoying the song, then I heard the jarring lyric and it totally fucked it up.