Here are a few terrible lines from otherwise good songs:
- Not to mention fishing poles - Van Morrison, And it stoned me.
- I look at the floor and I see it needs sweeping - Beatles, While My Guitar Gently Weeps
- Is there gas in the car? Yes there's gas in the car - Steely Dan, Kid Charlemagne
- Generals gathered in their masses, just like witches at black masses, Black Sabbath, war Pigs
- Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak, somewhere in this town - Thin Lizzy, Jailbreak
What are your favorites?
The Jailbreak line is one of my faves.
The execrable Eddie Money: I’ve got a hunger/It’s a hunger
Or is that, “I’ve got a hunger; it’s a hunger”
“The execrable Eddie Money”, love it.
Ladies and gentlemen, all the way from… I dunno, New Jersey? It’s the execrable Eddie Money !
yay
Not to nitpick, and I do agree that Eddie Money is execrable, but isn’t the point that the rest of the song should be pretty good?
Oh, yes. I see that now. In my haste to unburden myself of that line I failed to read carefully.
Not a great song but a terrible lyric I just heard on my drive home from Green Day’s ‘East Jesus Nowhere’ You’re a sacrificial suicide, like a dog that’s been sodomised.
A dog that’s been buggered. What a charming thought.
Also, don’t know if I agree about the Beatles line. Seems to go in pretty well with the point of the song. Not that there weren’t plenty of Beatles lines that would fit well in this category, of course, with my favorite example being the entire lyrical content of “Fool on the Hill,” which are — individually and as a whole — laughably drug-addled and stupid. And yet . . . and yet . . . pretty damn good song.
Others:
“His rival it seems had broken his dreams/ By stealing the girl of his fancy.
Her name was McGill and she called herself Lil/ But everyone knew her as Nancy.”
From Rocky Raccoon. Just seems like lazy couplet-filler.
“She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh.
I told her I didn’t and crawled off to sleep in the bath.”
From Norwegian Wood. Very forced rhyme.
“I know that she’s no peasant.”
I think of lyrics on a cartesian graph (I feel I have written this here before, but I am on vicodin so I’m a little muzzy) with meaning on one axis and euphony on another.
So, country music, which is often plainly narrative would occupy one quadrant and these guys would occupy the quadrant diagonal to that.
and Bob Dylan sits in a totally different corner
Yes! Exactly! I was inspired to think of the graph because I was wrestling with Dylan’s style and what to make of it.
I think Dylan has a lot of potential entries to this list. Most of them, however, are bad because they sound like someone trying to hard to come up with a line that sounds like Bob Dylan. Like — “I must admit, I felt a little uneasy/When she bent down to tie the laces of my shoes” — from Tangled Up In Blue. It’s especially bad because it comes after a very well done, visually evocative sequence, and pretty much ruins it.
Also from Tangled Up In Blue (which is one of my favorite songs ever, I should say) is the high-school-sophomore-discovering-Plath level embarrassment of “Every one of them words rang true/And glowed like burning coal/Pouring off of every page/ Like it was written in my soul from me to you.”
And while we’re at it:
“You said you’d never compromise/ With the mystery tramp, but know you realize/ He’s not selling any alibis” Like A Rolling Stone
“Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter/ Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley.” Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall. Poor sad clown.
Word. You can’t beclown your own song. After that, everyone’s just thinking of clowns!
this one might not qualify as a great song, though it’s a popular one: America’s “Tin Man”. and it features the immortal line:
and it goes downhill from there.
WTF
“the switch broke cause it’s old”
Elvis C. Radio Radio
EC is the master, for me, because of his ability to frame his great lines (which are some of the best rock n roll lines ever) with just plain old rock lyric writing.
Some of my friends sit around every evening…
“The pump don’t work cause the vandals took the handles” will seem like a pretty weak ending to an otherwise-stellar song until you look at it a little more closely and under the influence.
“Someone get me a ladder” — ELP, Still You Turn Me On
“I eat at Chez-Nouz” — Yes, “Love Will Find a Way”
“We come in to your town, we help you party down” — BTO, American Band
“Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto” — Styx
Many, many more. Lyrics are stupid.
“I eat at Chez-Nouz” — Yes, “Love Will Find a Way”
ow. yeah, that once always makes me wince.