Yeah, OK, I’ve got to admit I rank about five billionth in the world in my knowledge and understanding of the pop divas of today.
But from what little snippits I’ve heard, I’ve kinda liked Pink over Britney and Missy and Christina and Shakira and all the other ee’s and ay’s. Her songs have a good beat and you can dance to them.
But, hokey smokes, Rock. Her new song* has this for a chorus:
Rock is full of bad metaphors and similes, but can anyone top this for sheer dumbheadedness?
I don’t think it’s a particularly bad metaphore. I mean, if God is a DJ, then life is a dance floor. What else could it be?
Also, if you aint cool enough to be admitted entrance then life is the outside of the club where the mean bouncer guy tells you to take a hike. That applies to babies who get aborted.
None other than the Beatles once sang, “Life’s a birthday cake, so lets take a slice. But not too much!” If even the Fab Four could make a lyrical misstep like that, what hope do lesser lights like Pink have?
I think you’re confusing baby seals for aborted babies. It is a well known fact that aborted babies turn reptilian and go life in the sewers where they wait until an Australian celebrity comes to feed them chicken while hanging his baby from the balcony of a German hotel. Like, duh.
OK, so I haven’t heard Pink nor do I know much about her, however I have to take exception to this. In the first place, plenty of people who graduate and who go on college are bad at constructing metaphors. In the second place, how is pronouncing the ‘w’ in sword bad. I mean really, that’s how it’s spelled. But more to the point I have a CD with the blues song “Poison Ivy” from 1954 sung by Willie Mabon and he pronounces sword with the ‘w’.
It’s non-standard, but standard English isn’t the be all and end all. I think it’s perfectly acceptable to use a non-standard form in a pop song.
“My baby fits me like a flesh tuxedo, I want to sink her with my pink torpedo”
-Spinal Tap
Of course, if you want somebody who’s not fictional, I give you the chorus of Macarthur Park:
“MacArthur Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet, green icing flowing down
Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don’t think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it
And I’ll never have that recipe again
Oh, no!”
Also, though it’s not a metaphor or simile, the stupidest line of all time can be found in America’s Horse With No Name:
Oddly - well, maybe not so oddly - I was thinking of those two songs when I composed the OP. It’s all about context, though.
America’s lyrics were a deliberate attempt to be surrealistic. They missed by a mile in “Horse with No Name” but it’s still one of the great songs off one of the best and most underrated debut albums of the day.
And Relish - the album that “One of Us” is on - is a brilliant, fantastic album. One of my very favorites. Every other song on that album except “One of Us” is great music.
So they’re more examples of how even great artists can slip up occassionally. And the metaphor comes from a buried lyric, not from the heart of the song.
That goes for the Beatles, too. Look at the context of the song, “All Together Now,” although the correct lyric is:
Spinal Tap caught this perfectly in their parodies.
“Cause the free wind is blowin’ through your hair
And the days surround your daylight there
Seasons crying no despair
Alligator lizards in the air, in the air.”
Skillet38, you are so wrong. Just wrong. I’m even a little bit angry about it. It really isn’t worth getting worked up over, and I imagine you really didn’t mean any harm by it, but saying such a thing is really not very informed or very nice.
Maybe it’s the linguist in me, but statements that say non-standard pronunciation is “wrong” really bothers me.
Historically the ‘w’ was pronounced in English, so there is precedent for this pronunciation. I believe there are also dialects of English where the ‘w’ is still pronounced today (though I can’t tell you which ones). And if you look at my earlier post you’ll notice that there is a musical precedent for pronouncing the ‘w’. There are just so many reasons why saying sword with a ‘w’ is unobjectionable.
(I’d like to apologize for hijacking the thread with this diatribe. I hope it didn’t bother anyone. Also I don’t mean to jump on Skillet38 about what I presume was not meant to offend, sorry Skillet38. Like I said, this sort of thing really bothers me.)
people with different regional accents pronounce things differently from one another. This doesn’t mean they are wrong or uneducated, that’s just how they learned to speak. How Pink pronounces the word “sword” doesn’t say anything about her intelligence. And even if she was/is uneducated (I don’t know if she is or not) why should it matter? She’s a singer, not a teacher.
I don’t think that lyric is so bad. There have been much worse. Some of them are quoted in the other posts.
Alluding to God being a DJ and music being a religion is nothing new. Its kind of a cliche in the electronic music scene. There was an extremely popular track released several ears ago that has been sampled repeatedly.
Referring to the dancefloor thusly:
“This is my church. This is where I heal my hurt. God is a DJ.”