Lousy Lyrics Lambasted

And their lousy lyricists

Photo by Mike Tinnion on Unsplash

The revival of Oasis, that overblown Beatles tribute band, brings to mind their Nineties smasheroo, ‘Champagne Supernova’, in particular the line about ‘walkin’ slowly down the hall/Faster than a cannonball.’

For comparable word-blindness, one has to go back to Elton John’s ‘Lady Samantha’ in 1969 and ‘When the shrill winds are screaming and the evening is still/Lady Samantha rides over the hill.’

Here are more of the lousy song-lyrics that have lodged in my brain like tapeworm larvae during six decades of covering pop.

I don’t mean the small change of lazy or inept lyricists – ‘walk’ rhymed with ‘talk’, ‘kiss’ with ‘miss’ or ‘dawning’ with ‘yawning’ - but the clunkers that make your buttocks involuntarily contract and the fillings in your teeth hurt.

For me, the supreme example is ‘Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’ from the musical Evita by the supreme clunkmeister, Sir Tim Rice. 

The song is supposedly Eva Peron’s plea to the nation to forgive her sins although, as she points out, she’s ‘dressed up to the nines/At sixes and sevens with you.’  

Oh, for pity’s sake: would the amoral spouse of a South American dictator really use phrases straight out of Gilbert and Sullivan? 

And ‘I kept my promise, don’t keep your distance’? Torture!

Then how about Paul Anka’s leaden rhymes for ‘My Way’, that favourite eulogy for complete bastards: ‘each and every highway’ with ‘each careful step along the byway’ and – excruciatingly - ‘may I say not in a shy way?’

Or from the hippie era, George Harrison’s attempt to verbalise the famine and genocide in Bangladesh?

‘Bangladesh Bangladesh/Where so many people are dying fast/And it sure looks like a mess/I’ve never seen such distress’

Or Blue Mink’s ‘Melting Pot’, with its vision of humankind as ‘coffee-coloured people’ that today would get them deservedly cancelled by every venue in the world? 

‘Take a pinch of white man, wrap it up in black skin/Add a touch of blue blood/And a little-bitty but of Red Indian boy/ Curly Latin kinkies/mix with yellow Ch**kies/if you lump it all together/Well you gotta recipe for a get-along scene.’

The hallmark of dud versifying is ‘you’ paired with ‘the things you do,’ most wearisomely trotted out in David Essex’s ‘Hold Me Tight’ (1975):

‘And if that road gets tougher/Oh, I lu-uh-uv you/ No I’ll never make you suffer/’Cos I love the things that you do.’

What exactly are those ‘things’? Surely it’s time we were told.

The song frequently voted the worst ever recorded in the UK is Jess Conrad’s ‘This Pullover’ from 1961, sample:

‘This pullover I find very smart/For it tells me we will never part/And don’t you worry my lit-tle sweetheart/Just like you, dear, it’s closest to my heart.’

But badness at this level has a kind of sublimity. Besides, it’s impossible to dislike Conrad, who once sang his miss-terpiece to me live from an adjacent urinal in a London nightclub.

It least it lacks any pretension, unlike the supposedly cerebral Sting aspiring to the wisdom of a Bertrand Russell with ‘Spirits In The Material World’ from the Police’s Ghost In the Machine album.

Needing something to precede its most resounding phrase, ‘the rhetoric of failure’, he can think of nothing better than ‘with words they try to jail yer.’

Likewise the winces running through Leonard Cohen’s would-be Biblical ‘Hallelujah’ like the place-name through a stick of seaside rock: ‘But you don’t really care for music do ya?… Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya … And if I did, well, really, what’s it to ya?’ (that repetition of ‘really’ an additional clunk.)

But for tongue-twisting pretentiousness, nothing compares with Toto’s ‘Africa’ from 1982:

‘The wild dogs cry out in the night/As they grow restless for some solitary company/I know that I must do what’s right/Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti.’

Oasis, eat your hearts out. If you have any.

Please post your own nominations in the chat below. The two funniest (from UK-based) respondents will receive a signed advance copy of my George Harrison biography, to be published in paperback next month. 

The same goes for the next three upgraders from free to paid subscriber.

Thanks for reading, as ever.