I like to distinguish between lyrics where the bad grammar is essential to the song and those where the songwriter is just lazy or incompetent. Old Man River is an example of the former - in Show Boat the subject is an uneducated laborer lamenting his fate. Other examples where bad grammar is essential include Dylan’s Lay, Lady, Lay:
Lay, lady, lay,
Lay across my big brass bed.
With proper grammar it would be:
Lie, lady, lie,
Lie across my big brass bed.
This loses the alliteration, and also the double-meaning of “lay.”
Or consider Paul Simon’s Kodachrome:
When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school,
It’s a wonder I can think at all.
And though my lack of education hasn’t hurt me none,
I can read the writing on the wall.
The bad grammar of “hasn’t hurt me none” underscores the subject’s lack of education.
I would put A Horse with No Name in the lazy, incompetent category. The whole song feels to me like it was slapped together - the lyrics don’t flow, and much of the melody consists of two notes. The song isn’t crafted well enough for me to believe the bad grammar was chosen for effect.
In the vein of the OP, I think of the Cop Shoot Cop lyric: “And the roaches won’t do my laundry no more (/and the rats refuse to fix the hole in the floor)”
Other grammar problems… KISS’s “Goin’ Blind”:
It should be “different from me”. And “so much different” sounds weird to me.
This one is shameful because Sting used to be an English teacher – from “Island of Souls” and repeated in “The Soul Cages”:
Fine, it’s clear he just needed a rhyme, but oh, for shame.
How about the chorus to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.”? This is my number one contender for greatest concentration of grammatical errors in one location.
“And I’m proud to be an American
Where at least I know I’m free
And I won’t forget the men who died
Who gave that right to me
And I gladly stand up next to you
And defend her still today
'Cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land
God Bless the U.S.A.”
How many can you spot? Here’s my list. (Admittedly some of these are nitpicky, but the first two really bug me.)
“an American” is not a place.
What right?
Should be “I’d gladly”. (Maybe it really is, and the lyrics sites I looked at are wrong.)
“Ain’t no doubt”. Forgivable because this is, after all, a country song.
Run-on sentence; too many ands (or too many sentences starting with “and”).
John Mellencamp wants a lover that won’t drive him crazy, so he wants to love an inanimate object? Would he prefer a lover who wouldn’t drive him crazy?
