The HyperTexts

The Worst Song Lyrics Ever

by Michael R. Burch

I'm a "lyric man." I love good music, but bad lyrics can ruin any song, in my opinion. So here's my short list of the worst song lyrics of all time. If they don't make you cringe and want to puke, one of us may not be fully human, and I'm guessing it ain't me, babe.

Worst Line in a Great Song

This award goes to Simon and Garfunkel's classic "Bridge Over Troubled Water" for the line:

Sail on silver girl, sail on by ...

From what I've read, Paul Simon (a great songwriter penning one of his very best songs) allowed Art Garfunkel to contribute the line above. But Simon didn't care for it, and neither do I. It doesn't ruin the song, but it seems cutesy and out of place in a dark masterpiece, as if ET suddenly showed up peddling a bicycle across the moon during a performance of Hamlet.

John Cougar Mellencamp runs a close second with this line from "Jack and Diane":

Suckin' on a chili dog outside the Tasty Freeze ...

Who the hell sucks on a chili dog?

Bob Seger gets an ungolden star for comparing himself to a rock "chargin' from the gate" in "Like a Rock." All the rocks I have ever seen were inanimate objects ...

Most Blatantly Chauvinistic Song Lyrics of All Time

The clear winner in this category is the hard-drinking hillbilly hero, Hank Williams Jr., who brags:

I got girls that can cook, I got girls that can clean,
I got girls that can do anything in between ...

What Junior means is more than obvious: as long as he provides the machismo, testosterone, fame, booze and drugs, he can depend on "girls" to cook for him, clean for him, and "take care of him." Paul Anka runs a close second with:

Having my baby;
what a lovely way of saying that you're thinking of me ...

It would be much better for the world (and children) if people merely said what they thought, used birth control, and didn't have babies for preposterous reasons!

Worst Wedding Songs

This is a truly weird category, because people actually get married to these stalker "love" songs. The most famous stalker-love-song-cum-wedding-song is "Every Breath You Take" by Sting and the Police. Brides really should blush (as should grooms) if they get married to the strains of:

Every breath you take,
every move you make ...
I'll be watching you. 

Heart's "Alone" runs a close second, with these immortal stalker lines:

And now it chills me to the bone:
how do I get you alone?

Ironically, the rock song with perhaps the best lyrics of all time almost falls into this category, as couples often get married to U2's magnificent "One." While "One" is not a stalker song, it still defies logic that anyone can walk down the aisle to lyrics like:

Have you come here for forgiveness?
Have you come to raise the dead?
Have you come here to play Jesus
to the lepers in your head?

"One" is a song about a relationship on very dire rocks. The disgruntled speaker points out that he shouldn't be expected to go without sex just because his lover has given up on their love life:

Did I disappoint you,
or leave a bad taste in your mouth?
You act as if you never had love
and you want me to go without?

"One" isn't about couples walking down the aisle arm-in-arm, but one partner crawling abjectly to the other:

You say love is a temple;
love, a higher law ...
you ask me to enter,
but then you make me crawl ...

Worst Imitation of the Marquis de Sade:

This related and highly dubious award goes to "Your Body is a Wonderland"  by John Mayer:

You tell me where to go and
Though I might leave to find it
I'll never let your head hit the bed
Without my hand behind it

Worst Use of Mindless, Mind-Numbing Repetition

This is by far the easiest category to judge. Any song by K. C. and the Sunshine Band wins, hands down. Some rock bands have been accused of playing the same three chords over and over again. K. C. and the Sunshine Band elected to also drone the same three words over and over again, ad infinitum:

I'm your boogie-man ... I'm your boogie-man ... I'm your boogie-man ... I'm your boogie-man ... I'm your boogie-man ...
Get down tonight ... Get down tonight ... Get down tonight ... Get down tonight ... Get down tonight ... Get down tonight ...
Shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake your booty ... Shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake your booty ...

James Blunt gets an unhonorable mention for:

You're beautiful ... you're beautiful ... you're beautiful ... it's true ...

After you've told us something three times, over and over again, is it necessary to insist that what you told us is true?

Most Hideous Mangling of Grammar and Logic

This award goes without question to Paula Cole's stunningly terrible "I Don't Want to Wait." The song opens with lines so excruciatingly bad they are painful even to remember, much less consider or (pause to vomit) sing. A moment of silent sympathy please, as I summon up the courage to continue ...

So open up your morning light
And say a little prayer for I.
You know that if we are to stay alive
And see the peace in every eye ...
She had two babies
One was six months, one was three
In the war of '44 ...

First, how the hell does one "open up" a light? Second, it would be "say a little prayer for me." The improper use of "I" is absurdly and grotesquely bad. Third, lines three and four make absolutely no sense: if we are to stay alive and see the peace in every eye, what must we think or do? Fourth, the song is about World War II, in which millions of people were fighting and killing each other, so to "see the peace in every eye" seems like wild overstatement. Fifth, how can a mother have one baby that is six months old and another that is only three months old? Swine have a gestation period of three months; is the mother dropping human babies, or piglets? I suppose Cole may mean that one baby is six months old and the other is three years old, but at this early point in the song I'm so out of sorts that I have lost confidence in her ability to say what she means in decent English. Sixth, what is "the war of '44"? World War II began in 1939 and ended in 1945, so to call it the war of a particular year seems odd. But then the whole song is a logical and grammatical trainwreck.

Most Cliché-Ridden Monstrosity

I'm a Heart fan, but "All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You" makes me want to heave up the contents of my guts because it's constructed out of a relentless series of miserably bad clichés, and yet it still makes no sense. Why borrow other people's words only to mangle them?

So we found this hotel;
it was a place I knew well.
We made magic that night.
Oh, he did everything right!
He brought the woman out of me,
so many times, easily.
And in the morning when he woke
all I left him was a note:
I told him, "I am the flower;
you are the seed.
We walked in the garden;
we planted a tree.
Don’t try to find me,
please don’t you dare.
Just live in my memory,
you’ll always be there."

I have to believe that what the female speaker means to say is that she wrote her one-night stand a note, then left before he woke up and read it. And how on earth can a flower and a seed walk together in a garden and plant a tree? What she probably means to say is that she was the flower and her lover supplied the "pollen," which then resulted in a seed, which later grew into a new flowering tree (i.e., a child) somewhere in an Edenic garden. But the lyrics are so godawfully bad, stilted and prosaic, who can be bothered to muster the patience to decipher them?

Worst Mangling of Metaphor, Facts and/or Logic

While I like the song "Strawberry Wine," I grimace every time I hear the lines:

... green on the vine,
like strawberry wine.

Obviously, it is the strawberries that grow green on the vine, not the "wine." Sade runs a close second and is hardly a "smooth operator" with:

... coast to coast,
L.A. to Chicago ...

There are many cities and towns on the East Coast, so why not name one of them, rather than a city that lies several hundred miles inland?

Most Ostentatiously Overblown Lyrics Imaginable

"My Way" would be a good candidate, except that "McArthur Park" is so stunningly, badly and baldly overblown that no other song can possibly rival it:

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 striped pair of pants ...
MacArthur's 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!

Oh, no, indeed! If anyone thinks these are good lyrics, I have some stinky swampland to sell them at grossly inflated prices. Barry Manilow's pompous "I Write The Songs" is another ridiculously overblown song, as are Neal Diamond's "Longfellow Serenade" and "Forever in Blue Jeans," but they all pale in comparison to "McArthur Park," which gets my vote as the worst song of all time that still gets radio play, hands down.

Most Ego-Saturated Song Lyrics Ever Written

While I would again like to consider the haplessly and hopelessly egocentric "My Way" for some highly dubious honor, I'm afraid this one will have to be a tie between "Rico Suave" and "Ice, Ice Baby." But since the peculiarly pallid rapper known as "Vanilla Ice" plagiarized David Bowie's and Queen's "Under Pressure," let's make that the tiebreaker. And how can we possibly disagree with someone who confesses:

I'm killing your brain like a poisonous mushroom?

Indeed, he is! At least Sinatra and Elvis had talent to back up their outbursts of verbal bombast. Vanilla Ice managed to turn sheer hubristic verve into fifteen seconds of fame, to our eternal shame. I vote we all tell "Ice" to take a chill pill. Other candidates for this award include "Let's Wang Chung Tonight" and "I'm Too Sexy for My Shirt."

Most Blatantly Untrue Lyrics Ever Performed

On the subject of "things vanilla," as in white-washed over, how about "Girl, You Know It's True" by Milli Vanilli, the group that didn't really sing its own songs? But perhaps we should blame everything on the rain of lies. While other groups have been accused of lip-synching, Milli Vanilli took not singing to extraordinary new heights (er, depths). The lyrics should have been:

Girl, you know it's true
that when we "sing," we're lying through
our Ultra-Bright teeth to you!

Most Incomprehensible Lyrics of All Time

Here, the hands-down winner is the famously incomprehensible "Louie, Louie" by the Kingsmen. This is a song with lyrics so obscure the FBI tried to prosecute the group for obscenity, but after two years simply had to admit defeat. Why? Because to this day, no one has a clue what the song actually says, much less means. Who can properly interpret its half-mumbled, half-sung lyrics? The most comprehensible part of this alleged "song" remains its guitar solo. It might be an innocent song about "having to go" to Jamaica, or it might be an demonic call to destroy all that is innocent and holy. If anyone knows the truth, they are obviously not telling.

"In A Gadda Di Vida" by Iron Butterfly runs a close second in this category. As the story goes, the original lyric was "In the Garden of Eden," but lead singer Doug Ingle became so intoxicated that he slurred the words. The rest, as they say, is history. Steve Miller's "The Joker" comes in a strong third, with the supremely incomprehensible lines:

Some people call me Maurice
because I speak of the pompatous of love.

"Some people call me 'moron' because I sing gibberish" would be much more believable! "I Am the Walrus" receives an unhonorable mention but almost makes sense compared to the songs above it in this category.

Most Absurdly Sentimental Song Lyric

Poets and songwriters try to make us "tear up" over all sorts of things, but when the Beatles wept over an unswept floor, they lost all credibility. How can we do anything but laugh over:

I look at the floor and I see it needs sweeping.
Still my guitar gently weeps.

But perhaps the lyric can make us cry, after all ... if only because it's so wrenchingly bad. "Mrs. Robinson" by Simon and Garfunkel runs a close second, with the sickly-sweet lines:

Where have you go, Joe DiMaggio?
A nation turns its lonely eyes to you,
woo woo woo ...

Woo woo woo, indeed! The Yankee Clipper himself complained about the absurdity of the song, pointing out that he hadn't "gone" anywhere.

Third place goes to Neal Diamond for:

I am, I said
to no one there,
and no one heard at all,
not even the chair ...

Let's not get all weepy about chairs not hearing our egocentric complaints!

Most Pointlessly Obvious and Redundant Song Lyric

Van Halen wins this hotly-contested category for "Why Can't This Be Love," which breathlessly informs us that:

Only time will tell
if we stand the test of time.

So there you have it: the worst song lyrics of all time, according to me. Of course records are meant to be broken (please pardon the pun), so please stay tuned for more abysmally bad lyrics, which surely lie in waiting around the next bend ...

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