Steve Miller stole a particularly famous song lyric, in a particularly bad (and well plagiarized) song, I might add.
Oh, he will if you ask.
My end is usually Rush:
Totem: Vishnu and Gaia, Aztec and Maya.
Dog Years: Galapagos
Alien Shore: Chromosome
You Bet Your Life: reactionary revisionist evolutionist minimal expressionist post-modern neo-symbolist existentialist deconstruction
Neurotica: Exotica
Heresy: ideology
Roll the Bones parallax polyester gluteus interaction abstraction
Anagram: merchandise
Superconductor: persona superconductor orchestrate
Presto: proportion improvising sympathizing
Chain Lightning: contagious gravitation lunar synchronous infectious resonate epidemic optimism
That’s just a few albums, too. Nerd rock rules.
Dork.
George Harrison manages to reference the Nikkei, Dow Jones, the FTSE, and Nasdaq in “Brainwashed”; I thought that was pretty unique. Then, too, there’s the Radiohead song “Myxomatosis.”
“Salamander”
Paul McCartney in “Getting Closer” -
Say you don’t love him, my Salamander
Frank Black, in one song, uses the words ballyhoos, tritons, pelagic, and choragic. A lot of the words mentioned in this thread are fairly uncommon in popular music, but pelagic sent me to the dictionary.
On the same album, in “St. Francis Dam Disaster,” he rhymes metropolis with apocalypse, which I thought was cool because I’d never noticed that you could rhyme them before.
Previously used by T-Rex in “Left Hand Luke and the Beggar Boys” from Tanx.
Peter Hammill, “Faint Heart and the Sermon”: cenotaph
I can recall only one word in a rock song that sent me to a dictionary, but the song contains several unusual words: Blue Oyster Cult’s Workshop of Telescopes:
Scritti Politti, from “Lover to Fall”: “I’ve got a new hermeneutic/I’ve got a new paradigm”.
And speaking of Blue Oyster Cult, from ETI: “Ascension/and that’s all they said”.
You sure? I don’t hear “sycophants” in there.
I thought you were saying it was a different unique word, not a different word for the same thing. Anyway…
Didn’t Cecil write a column about the phrase “The Pompatus of love”?
Anyhow, the musical Wicked has two great examples:
“Since folks round here to an absurd degree
Seem fixated on your verdigris”
and
“Don’t be offended by my frank analysis
Think of it as personality dialysis”
But the king has to be Flanders and Swann, with lyrics such as
“Then there flashed through her mind what her mother had said with her antepenultimate breath” and “oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling columbine”.
Possibly my favorite Springsteen lyric:
There were two specific songs, “In Quintessence” by Squeeze and “Synchronicity” by the Police, that definitely made me think “Oh great, that guy learned a new word.”
Grandmaster Flash broke his sacroiliac in “The Message.”
Sting has some winners. When I was a kid, I had to look up “alabaster” after I heard “Wrapped Around Your Finger.” (As well as Scylla and Charybdis.)
“Invisible Sun” has “Armalite” and “acetylene” in it.
“Russians” was probably the first pop song to namecheck Oppenheimer, Khrushchev, and Reagan.
“Seven Days” has “Neanderthal.” Pronounced “ne-and-er-tal,” the erudite way.
Another fave of mine is Andy Partridge of XTC. Not to be outdone by Sting’s “Nabokov” reference, he drops “Chekov” in “Garden of Earthly Delights.” He also mentions “navvies” and calls London by its Roman name “Londinium” in “Towers of London.”
Swotty guys, those Englishmen.
I also should point out that I’ve learned most of what I know about Australian history and the plight of Aborigines from Midnight Oil lyrics.
First time I heard “Mining for Gold” by Cowboy Junkies (although lyrics are credited as ‘Traditional’)…
Two years and the silicosis takes hold
and I feel like I’m dying from mining for gold
…I thought “Don’t hear many songs about silicosis.”
Well, Jethro Tull have a song called Salamander
mmm, speaking of the 'Tull, are there many other songs that mention “the Suffolk, the clydesdale, the Percheron”, like Heavy Horses does?
Or galliards, like Songs from the Woods
Oh, and for the sycophant fans, there’s The Smiths, Paint A Vulgar Picture:
‘the sycophantic slags all say: “I knew him first, and I knew him well”’
Sloan was always good for a few unusual words:
There’s Coax Me, which contains the chorus “Coax me, cajole me”.
…and I’m up too late. I’m sure there’s more, sure of it. But I’m sleepy now.
Billy Bragg uses that one a bit, as you’d expect. He even has a song titled Ideology, that also contains the only usage of careerist in a lyric I’ve ever seen.
How about The Clash, with minarets and Casbah