Personally, I always hated that song because of the “best soy latte that you ever had, and me.” line.
What about the only radio hit to mention afterbirth, Live’s **Lightning Crashes ** with:
“Lightning crashes, a new mother cries,
her placenta falls to the floor.”
I know it fits into the meaning of the song, but I don’t want to hear about people’s pla-cen-tas falling to the floor.
This lyric is so silly we quote it when someone does something singularly stupid in my house (at least the last sentence.)
Smashmouth’s All Star
Did it make sense not to live for fun?
Your brain gets smart but your head gets dumb.
Then again a good lyric can be one that lives on after the song has disappeared.
Here’s a stupid one, though it’s not a “rock & roll” song. I hate America’s song “Wildfire,” about the ghost of a woman mourning the loss of her pony and haunting the singer, but this verse is just wrong:
“Oh they say she died one winter
When there came a killing frost
And the pony she named Wildfire
Busted down his stall
In a blizzard he was lost”
Hello? There is a big, big difference between a “killing frost” (oh oh, better cover those rosebushes!) and a blizzard. Why the hell would a decent frost make a pony/horse/whichever break out of its stall and bolt? A blizzard might panic a horse, sure, but some cold weather wouldn’t.
Oh, and an adult woman shouldn’t be riding ponies, to the best of my knowledge.
OK, now that I see this thread is not restricted to the OP concerning WORST lyrics, but is open to comments about silly lyrics in songs we may in fact love, I will propose Blinded By the Light. Written by The Boss (Bruce Springsteen)(SP!?)but made a classic by Manfred Man and the Earth Band in 1976. Hope nobody thinks I am criticizing, I love the song. I cut out alot to avoid violating SDMB policy, inserted many lines from memory and listened to the disk, I do not think I am violating any laws or policies, I attributed both the writer and the artist. But this great big ol goofy song is just too full of silliness to limit it to just one verse.
Blinded by the light,
revved up like a deuce,
another runner in the night
Madman drummers bummers,
Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat
In the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps his way into his hat
With a boulder on my shoulder, feelin’ kinda older,
I tripped the merry-go-round
With this very unpleasin’, sneezin’ and wheezin,
the calliope crashed to the ground
…
But she was…
Blinded by the light,
revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night
…
Some silicone sister with a manager mister told me I go what it takes
She said “I’ll turn you on sonny to something strong,
play the song with the funky break”
And go-cart Mozart was checkin’ out the weather chart to see if it was safe outside
And little Early-Pearly came by in his curly-wurly and asked me if I needed a ride
Asked me if I needed a ride
But she was…
Blinded by the light,
revved up like a deuce,
…
Mama always told me not to look into the eye’s of the sun
But mama, that’s where the fun is
Some brimstone baritone anticyclone rolling stone preacher from the east
Says, “Dethrone the dictaphone, hit it in it’s funny bone,
that’s where they expect it least”
And some new-mown chaperone was standin’ in the corner,
watching the young girls dance
And some fresh-sown moonstone was messin’ with his frozen zone, reminding him of romance
The calliope crashed to the ground
…
Now Scott with a slingshot finially found a tender spot and throws his lover in the sand
And some bloodshot forget-me-not said daddy’s within earshot save the buckshot, turn up the band
Again GFS (Great Song) but man if anyone can make heads or tails of it please let me know. It has baffeled me since it was released when I was in JR. High and thought it was saying “Wrapped up like a deuche, you know the runner in the knight” whatever that means. 
I always heard this as “And little Earl E. Burly gave my anus curly-whirly, and…” - I thought it was a metaphor for prison rape.
Tom Petty’s “Mind with a Heart of its Own” is pretty bad:
“I’ve been to Booker, and I’ve been to Micanope,
I been to St. Louis, too: I been all around the world.
I been over to your house, and you been over sometimes to my house.
I slept in your treehouse; my middle name is Earl.”
and of course Scandal’s “Goodbye to You,” which features a rhythmic structure that makes it painful to hear such predictable rhymes as:
“Could I ever love someone like the one I see in you (huh?)?
I remember the good times baby yeah (pregnant pause - Wait for it…)
and the bad times too.”
That said, both of the songs above are amazingly catchy and I love to sing along with them, precisely because they make so little sense.
I like Steve Miller, even many of the lines cited above… but the one that really burns my cheese every time I hear it is this one: “hhhhhhh”.
You know what I’m talking about:
Leavin’ home, hhhhhh
Out on a road, hhhhhh
I’ve been down before, hhhhhh
Geez, Steve, get a damper for that mic, you can afford it buddy.
And John Fogerty, whaddya mean “the old mane is down the road”?
Your confusion is fair enough. The Perfect Master declined to wade in too far on this one.
I’m fond of ABC’s lyric:
Can’t complain
Mustn’t grumble
Have another piece
Of apple crumble
Tried to post to this thread and had problems - will try again…
Archive Guy hit on a favorite target of mine = Sting. It wouldn’t be so bad if Mr. Sumner wasn’t so pretentious…
“Wet bus stop; she’s waiting; he starts to shake and cough. Just like that old man in that book by Nabokov” - okay, you’ve read Lolita, yay. Could this be any less rock n’ roll?! The song is good, but that line is pathetic over-reaching.
“I will see your face turn to alabaster/ when you see your servant is your master” - again, using a forced rhyme to sound sophisticated - ugh. And this one is a lousy, elevator music song.
What’s so funny/ironic/paradoxical is that there are so many lyrics that are nonsensical or even out-and-out stoopid, but the songs work as great rock songs - for instance:
Pretty much any song by the Ramones - not just the Gabba Gabba Hey shout-outs, more like the “living out in Queens, eating refried beans” or “5th rule is: eat fried salami” type of stupidity that still works. THAT is they mark of great rock n’ roll.
“A-whomp-bama-loo-bomp-a-whomp-bam-boom!”
“An albino, a mosquito, a mulatto, palomino - a denial, a denial…” - makes no sense whatsoever, yet is a great rock lyric in a perfect rock song…
oh wait - forgot a classic “lyrics that work vs. ones that don’t” comparison I have used in the past:
Sting’s (the Police’s) “King of Pain” vs. The Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes”:
King of Pain - pretentious, self-serving, martyrdom-embracing slop - “There’s a king on a throne with his eyes torn out/there’s a blind man looking for a shadow of a doubt” with the Greek-chorus background of “That’s my soul up there” - he sounds like a college professor trying to sound overly profound and suffering to get into the panties of a coed. What crap.
Behind Blue Eyes - “But my dreams they aren’t as empty/as my conscious seems to be/I have hours, only lonely/my love is vengeance/that’s never free”. The real deal - teen angst and emotion.
That’s “the old man is down the road.” I always pictured a crotchety old guy who’s continually yelling at kids to get off his lawn.
I still say no one can top the sheer lyrical brilliance of . . .
Elenore gee I think you’re swell,
And you really do me well,
You’re my pride and joy, et cetera . . .
As if that weren’t enough to make you swoon, a little later we get:
I* really think you’re groovy
Let’s go out to a movie
What do ya say now, Elenore can we?*
It just saps you of all will to live, doesn’t it?
Just about anything Bob Dylan writes is lyric dreck. Diplomats and siamese cats? WTF?
I happen to be a big parrothead, and even Jimmy Buffett drops a turd into the punchbowl with Come Monday : “Remember that night in Montana when we said there’d be no room for doubt?”
Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits occasionally wrote crap. On Brothers in Arms is Your Latest Trick. The first time I heard it I thought it was a Bob Dylan tune.
Well, most of them are forgiveable if the tunes are good (it’s rock, it’s poetry, it’s allowed to be corny, to conjure up an image without being grammatically or syntactically correct, etc), and yeah, it’s shooting fishies in a barrel for sure…but can I play anyhow?
in the Good Lyricists Not at their Best category:
"Hey, hey, mama, what’s the matter here
You didn’t have to make me a total disgrace
You didn’t have to leave me with that beer in my face " – Led Zep
“Gone with the wind
And the rain, on an airplane.
Owning a home
With no silver spoon,
I’m drinking champagne
Like a good tycoon.” – Pink Floyd
“I never thought I’d get to be a million
I never thought I’d get to be the thing
That all these other children see
Look at me” – Moody Blues
I have two nominees:
1st:
Jump by Van Halen:
Aaa-ohh Hey you ! How said that ?
Baby how you been ?
You say you don’t know, you won’t know
until we begin.
2nd:
Outshined by Soundgarden:
I just looked in the mirror
Things aren’t looking so good
I’m looking California
And feeling Minnesota
Both so horibble, both so banal, I can’t decide which is worse.
Another Sting(ker) from The Police
De do do do, de da da da
Is all I want to say to you
De do do do, de da da da
They’re meaningless and all that’s true
Gee… thanks for wasting our time.
Here’s my favorite(?) from Kool & The Gang’s tepid “Cherish”:
I hope and pray before I lay down by your side
If you receive your calling
Before I awake
Could I make it through the night?
Whaa? If you die before I wake up, could I keep from being awake? Huh?
Man if you had just added Prine and the Greatful Dead to your stupid list I would have gone apoplectic! I guess we are going to have to agree to disagree when it comes to music. IMHO both Bobby D. and Jimmy B. are consumate artists, you are free to criticize them but to me it just indicates that you do not understand them.
No insult intended to you, but many of the songs I love have been mentioned here, I can’t understand most of the criticism. Most of seems to be along the lines of:
what a stupid name, who ever heard of a girl named “Be Bop A Loo La” and it is redundant to say “She’s my baby, and I don’t mean maybe…” (that was sarcasm)
I know this is not the pit and I have been biting my tongue. Everyone is certainly entitled to his or her opinion. But crap to say all Dylan songs are crap is tantamount to saying “I Am Too Stupid To Breath” And you certainly ain’t a Parrot Head if you do not like “Come Monday”. So there, you big meanie… 
:rolleyes: 
:mad: 
There was a thread abuot how bad America’s lyrics are a couple of weeks ago, and they made a strong case for the stinkiest lyrics ever. From the same song:
“There were plants and birds and rocks and things”
Things? Do tell, there were “things” in the desert? What sort of things? Big orange things with purple polka dots? Things with tentacles and gaping maws? Things? Are “plants” and “birds” the only “things” you know of that might be found in a desert, you brainless lump?
Yeah. America. Bad lyrics. Really.
Yeah, but the thing that really puts the song in the realm of Total Awfulness is right after “recipe again” when Richard Harris reprises “Again” and reaches for that high note that he can’t even come close to getting so he stretches it out as best he can until you wonder what parts of him they are squeezing to get those sounds out of him. I figure he sang it during the filming of “A Man Called Horse.”
Yeah, let’s not turn this into the pit. Everybody’s got a different take, and there’s stuff I actually like that’s been hung out to dry, but it’s all in good fun.
I’m surprised no one sniped me for citing Jim Morrison. <Pokes head above foxhole, removes helmet> Cause I do like the guy, and people who say I don’t are a liar. 
But Robert Plant, a good lyricist? C’mon – guy admitted to making a career out of writing pure nonsense.
I saw a lion, he was standing alone
with a tadpole in a jar.
Uh huh…