There were a lot of cringe lyrics in gangster rap songs, but the Dr. Dre song “Nuthin but a ‘G’ Thang” contains this bit of logic:
Never let me slip, ‘cause if I slip, then I’m slippin’
That one got quickly changed to “Let’s Get It Started.” The only reason I knew the first version existed was it playing early on in Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle.
I just want to say, for the record, that Shakira’s lyrics in Spanish are fucking brilliant. At least they were in her albums Pies Descalzos and ¿Dónde están los ladrones ?
The English songs are… yeah.
I’ll never hear “Bennie And The Jets” the same way again. I think it’s “electric BOOTS”, BTW.
Paul Anka:
Women generally don’t express opinions through their uterus. The rest of the song is just as bad. And if she’s pregnant and you’re not around, you probably don’t want to kmow what she’s thinking about you.
Speaking of cringey pregnancies. there’s ‘Cinderella’ by Firefall:
The song is supposedly about an old man thinking about the mistakes he made as a young man, but this is all he had to say about it:
So, he gets a woman pregnant, then indignantly kicks her out when she tells him, and as an old man the best he can muster is, “Hey, I wonder what happened to that kid I abandoned?”
Hmm, maybe Mrs Hatch was right to be upset with George Bailey:
Mrs. Hatch: Who is down there with you, Mary?
Mary It’s George Bailey, mother.
Mrs. Hatch): George Bailey? What does he want?
…
Mary [pause] He’s making violent love to me, mother!
This morning, heard Jimmy Buffet from a concert in the 1990s singing Livingston Saturday Night. Hearing someone in their 40s singing “Hittin’ on the honeys right out of high school.” is cringe-worthy enough, but the next lines are “15 will get you 20, but that’s alright, ‘cause we’ll be rockin’ and a-rollin’ on a Livingston Saturday night.”
“We Gotta’ Get You a Woman”
“Imagine”. A treacly song filled with trite ideas that, if implemented, would lead to widescale human misery.
“Imagine no possessions” - Don’t have to. It was already tried. Misery.
“Imagine no countries” - Yeah, imagine tyrants running everything.
On the other hand, the music stank.
Bitchin Camaro by The Dead Milkmen just popped up in the iPod. This makes me cringe:
Love me two times, 'cause I’ve got AIDS
In 1984 when the song was released, the epidemic had only been recognised a couple/few years before, and people were still making Gay jokes.
Has the entire oeuvre of Gary Puckett and the Union Gap been mentioned? 
Nevermind
That’s tasteless, but I never thought of it as being homophobic.
Another tasteless Doors takeoff from the Dead Milkmen:
You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a liar
If I was to say to you
I didn’t set your cat on fire
But again, we’re probably getting away from the OP here, as these are clearly aiming for cringy.
You’re right.
I haven’t been keeping up with my own thread, but early on it did seem that people were calling out songs that were intentionally made to be cringy. (Sublime songs come to mind) as opposed to songs that weren’t supposed to be cringy or (particularly) offensive like the two songs I mentioned in the OP. Looks like I fell into it too.
I guess my question is, at what point does being intentionally cringy make you legitimately cringy? I’m assuming you mean “intentionally causing discomfort in order to provoke thought.”
I’ve always liked Sublime and my favorite song is Wrong Way but what it reminds me of is good fiction where the characters are an accurate reflection of reality rather than sanitized for public approval. I don’t know if it’s based on actual events, but it seems honest to me in a way that pop songs often aren’t.
But how do you know the difference between “trying to make a point” and the writer just being a bad person? Is it inherently misogynistic to write from the POV of a misogynist, uncritically? I don’t know the answer but it gets to the heart of something I’ve always wrestled with in my own art.
If you’re intentionally being provocative, I think the point is that the listener (or watcher, or whatever) that you want the consumer to say ‘Ew! That’s just wrong!’ if they don’t say, ‘You know? That’s an accurate, unsanitised reflection of reality!’
I listened to a lot of Punk back in the day, and Punk was purposely confrontational and provocative. I mean, how can something like Fear’s Fuck Christmas not be?
It shouldn’t matter to the writer. In the case of confrontational or provocative lyrics, the writer is throwing out the lines (See what I did there? 
) and seeing if anyone bites the hooks. A lot of songs are trolling.
In the case of Wrong Way or Date Rape, these are depictions of real life. Little girls are forced into prostitution by their families, and men are raped in prisons. Stories like that may (or should) make people cringe, but they’re different from songs that depict things that were once commonplace or No Big Deal and are now creepy. Baby, It’s Cold Outside depicts actions that were common among men. Watch any James Bond movie. Today we see it as a guy coercing and manipulating a woman into spending the night with him. Or take Mickey Rooney in yellowface in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (or Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ ‘Chinese’ and ‘German’ vocalisations in I Love Paris). When the film and the song came out, people laughed because it was OK to laugh at such things. Today, making fun of how different languages sound is off-limits. And Rooney’s ‘I. Y. Yunioshi’ character? Aw, hell no! That portrayal is like a poster child for Thinks You Should Never Do.
If you’re being intentionally provocative, you have nothing to worry about. If you actually are the same as the character you’re portraying, and that bothers you, then that’s the point of transition.