:smack:
right - thanks
I might get some disagreements with this one, but Billy Joel’s “Bottle of red, bottle of white”, for some reason, just, sorta, skeeves me out a little.
I wouldn’t really classify doo-wop or doo-wop style vocalizations as “lyrics,” though. That’s kind of part and parcel of the genre.
Sounds like Elvin Bishop was trying to get a little big for his britches by bragging I must have been through about a million girls in “Fooled Around and Fell in Love”.
In Kiss’s “Firehouse”, Paul Stanley wows us with “She’ll adore you, and she’ll floor you”.
Whoa, Black Betty, bam-ba-lam
Whoa, Black Betty, bam-ba-lam.
Holy shit!!! Does it get any worse? I just heard this in a pub.
It’s an old field song from at least the early 1930s. Here’s the Leadbelly version from 1939. If we’re including those types of songs, I’m sure you can find many that are “bad” on the page, but work wonderfully in the folk tradition.
I did not know that.
ETA: That is wild and wacky stuff.
Here’s a fairly thorough article about the song on Wikipedia. I didn’t know it was a cover, either, until maybe five or ten years ago.
Annie’s twelve years old
In two more she’ll be a whore
-Sublime, “The Wrong Way”
(You’re) Having my baby
What a lovely way of saying
How much you love me.
I have hated this song ever since I had to sing it in junior high chorus ( :eek: ) a couple years after it was on the charts. Not really a song for tweens, if you think about it.
May I recommend the definitive scholarly work on this subject, Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs. It started as a survey of bad songs he did when he was a columnist for the Miami Herald that received such continuing overwhelming response that, well, it turned into a book.
Before the book even gets started, in the introduction and the pre-introductory warning about how these songs are going to get stuck in your head and you won’t be able to dislodge them with a crowbar, we are introduced to such gems as:
Martina McBride (and Lynn Anderson and many others) wailing the lyrics of “Rose Garden”:
I beg your PARdon,
I never promised you a rose GARden!
These aren’t the opening lyrics but I have to include them because they’re so priceless …
Neil Diamond, “I Am, I Said”:
I am, I said
To no one there
And no one heard at all
Not even the chair.
You gotta admit, there are few things as annoying as a chair that doesn’t listen when you’re pouring your heart out to it!
And of course “MacArthur Park”, which needs no further comment and was honored in Barry’s book by taking the #1 spot for “Worst songs ever written”:
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 the recipe agaaaaaaaain!
Oh, no!
Spring was never waiting for us, girl
It ran one step ahead
As we followed in the dance
Between the parted pages and were pressed
In love’s hot, fevered iron
Like a strip-ed pair of pants
If you can write a worst opening line then that…
We must forgive Joe South this indiscretion; he wrote so many works of genius.
Now that’s more like it! Have to look up what song this is, but this is pretty terrible!
ETA: Ah, it’s the much-ridiculed McArthur Park. I do know the song, but I had no memory of the opening line whatsoever. That’s a good thing, I think.
I warned you guys in Post 27. 
Hello Darlin’
How about the opening line to Careful with That Axe, Eugene ?
“Your butt is mine”
Michael Jackson. Bad
The lyrics that popped into my head when I saw the thread:
For the benefit of Mr. Kite
There will be a show tonight on trampoline
Most of those lyrics were taken directly from a poster Lennon found at an antique shop. I think the opening lyrics perfectly capture the Victorian feel they were going for.