Worst Song Lyrics Poll

[Red Poppy]

I think the joke has...wooooorn ...out

[Tchocolatl]

(...)
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul
When they said DOO WAH DIDDY DIDDY DUM
I wonder what they meant
(...)

First Price.

[Teratogen]

Nice one, echoes!!! This is fun...

Because of a few songs
Wherein I spoke of their mystery,
Women have been
Exceptionally kind
to my old age.
They make a secret place
In their busy lives
And they take me there.
They become naked
In their different ways
and they say,
"Doo-wah-diddy, diddy-dum diddy-doo."
Then they bend over the bed
And cover me up
Like a baby that is shivering.

[Rob]

"But no you cannot see
she said no you cannot see
no you cannot seeeeeeeee
my doo-wah-diddy"

Rob.

[echoes]

Because of a few songs
Wherein I spoke of their mystery,
Women have been
Exceptionally kind
to my old age.
They make a secret place
In their busy lives
And they take me there.
They become naked
In their different ways
and they say,
"Doo-wah-diddy, diddy-dum diddy-doo."
Then they bend over the bed
And cover me up
Like a baby that is shivering.

that's just fitting perfectly, Teratogen!


This fooling around is sometimes hard to stop, don't you think...
...
(Oh friends, .. don't matter if you're a man or a woman. If you're in love
with somebody, these are the words that you got to learn to say. Now
listen carefully. Here it comes...)
Doo-wah-diddy, diddy-dum...

best wishes
Manuel

[Teratogen]

This fooling around is sometimes hard to stop, don't you think...

(Oh friends, .. don't matter if you're a man or a woman. If you're in love
with somebody, these are the words that you got to learn to say. Now
listen carefully. Here it comes...)
Doo-wah-diddy, diddy-dum...

Here here! Another great one, echoes! And again I have found another:

Ah but you got away, didn't you babe,
you just turned your back on the crowd,
you got away, I never once heard you say,
"Doo-wah-diddy, diddy-dum, diddy-doo,"
and all of that jiving around.

[tomsakic]

I think the joke has...wooooorn ...out

I sometimes feel that some lines are, well, too simple.

In link that Partisan posted, it says:

And I met a girl/ She asked me my name/ I told her what it was

We can compare this to a line from one of my favourite LC songs:

Then I came back from where I’d been.

Well, I spent long nights wondering about this place. (Although, I admit, I doubted he refers to Mt Baldy. But it doesn't change its deepness.)


The most crazy one is, after all, aline from Nick Cave's Halleujah. He is, btw, also one of my fav. artists.

We need context for that line (in red), as the song itself is great. But that line is stupid.

On the first day of May I took to the road
I'd been staring out the window most of the morning
I'd watched the rain claw at the glass
And a vicious wind blew hard and fast
I should have taken it as a warning
As a warning

I'd given my nurse the weekend off
My meals were ill prepared
My typewriter had turned mute as a tomb
And my piano crouched in the corner of my room
With all its teeth bared
All its teeth bared.

Hallelujah Hallelujah

I left my house without my coat
Something my nurse would not have allowed
And I took the small roads out of town
And I passed a cow and the cow was brown
And my pyjamas clung to me like a shroud
Like a shroud

There rose before me a little house
With all hope and dreams kept within
A woman's voice close to my ear
Said, "Why don't you come in here?"
"You looked soaked to the skin"
Soaked to the skin

Hallelujah Hallelujah

I turned to the woman and the woman was young
I extended a hearty salutation
But I knew if my nurse had been here
She would never in a thousand years
Permit me to accept that invitation
That invitation

Now, you might think it wise to risk it all
Throw caution to the reckless wind
But with her hot cocoa and her medication
My nurse had been my one salvation
So I turned back home
I turned back home I turned back home
Singing my song

Hallelujah

I passed the cow and the cow was brown?

Jees.

[John Etherington]

Last words (hopefully!) from Dylan:

Wiggle till your high
Wiggle till you're higher
Wiggle till you vomit fire

("Wiggle Wiggle" from "Under the Red Sky")

[Tchocolatl]

To whom it may concern :

[~greg]

the song itself is great. But that line is stupid.
--- ...
--- And I passed a cow and the cow was brown
--- ...
--- I turned back home I turned back home
--- Singing my song
---
--- Hallelujah

Nick Cave always sounds like someone else to me.

I just listened to "Hallelujah Hallelujah", for the first time,
and he sounds like Bob Seger, in the beginning of it.

~

I don't know much about Nick Cave, but I know
that he does a lot of different things with his voice.

And this song sounds autobiographical.

So, on a hunch, I looked for some biography:

--- His father Colin was an English teacher and administrator,
--- with a love of literature, and his mother was a librarian.
--- Raised as an Anglican, Cave sang in the boys choir at Wangaratta Cathedral.

Which suggests to me that elocution -- as in "elocution lessons" --
was an issue in his up bringing.

Or, in other words, ...

How now brown cow

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_now_brown_cow

[Teratogen]

Well as it seems no one finds any more fun in adding "doo-wah-diddy, diddy-dum, diddy-doo" into Cohen lyrics and the subject has shifted to other artists who have written some terrible lines, I must point direction towards one of my favorite bands, KISS, who have had their share of complete crap lyrics. Here are a few examples:

First verse from "Little Caesar":

"Ten million stories in the city, ten million backs against the wall
Desperation's out tonight, you can cut it with a knife
Everybody wants to have it all
Well they tell you that the world is rough
But they never rocked it hard enough"

I always laugh when I hear the last two lines, especially in the context of this song, which is basically summed up in the first verse. My understanding is that what the author is saying (which I believe is Gene Simmons in this case) is that people who are down on their luck are that way because they didn't rock hard enough.

Here's another gem from otherwise a great song, "C'mon and Love Me":

"I'm a man, I'm no baby
And you're lookin' every inch a lady
You're good lookin' and you're lookin' like you should be good"

This one can be blamed on Paul Stanley. It's mostly the last line that is so terrible and makes no sense. It's just redundant. As you can see the rhyme scheme is A-A-B, and the last three lines (wihch are not represented here) are supposed to be C-C-B so that it keeps with the pattern, but the last word in the last line is "hand," which doesn't even come close to "good." It's a great rockin' song, one of my favorites from Dressed to Kill, but those lines are just so bad.

I'm sure there are plenty others to choose from, but those two always stuck out to me. Of course, this reminds of me the whole album of Unmasked, which is one of the worst recordings ever made. Only "Shandi" off that album meant anything, as it was a huge hit in Australia. But here's one great example from that album that I shouldn't even have to explain:

From "She's So European" (Gene Simmons):

"She's so European, she's one of a kind, one of a kind
She's so European, she's one of a kind, all in her mind
And she's so European, I found out today

She still speaks with an accent from a week in San Tropez
She makes love on her brass bed 'cause her parents are still away
Well you oughtta see her, countin' the stars in her eyes
You'd never believe her, she's got a well-planned coverless smile"

Just nonsensical...

[johnny7moons]

i for one am still chuckling over the inserting-doo-wa-diddy-into-lc-lyrics game, teratogen, though the best i've been able to come up with in the last couple of days is this:

between the windmill and the grain
between the sundial and the chain
between the doo-wa-diddy and the dum-diddy-doo...

- which i think you'll agree is a rather second-rate effort.

alas, my favourite bad lyric didn't get onto the guardian's top ten list - the old iron maiden song ('quest for fire'?) which starts with the line 'in an age when dinosaurs ruled the earth... '. surely the most embarrassing first line in any song ever.

today i'm also chuckling about a lyric from a kaiser chiefs song i heard on the radio this morning: 'everything is average nowadays'. i know what they mean, i sometimes feel that way too, but it makes me chuckle because there is surely nothing on earth more mind-boggling average than a kaiser chiefs song.

[Manna]

We old timers have a few things that don't really count as lyrics, since these tunes have no words, but here are some funked-out titles:

1. Push that Pig's Foot a Little Farther into the Fire
2. Nail that Catfish to a Tree
3. Hey Little Girl Don't Fly so High, We Just Might See Your Butterfly (This one is actually a song, but no one has ever been willing to sing it to me.)
4. Indian Ate a Woodchuck
5. Bonaparte in a Mexican Restaurant

[lizzytysh]

- which i think you'll agree is a rather second-rate effort.

I don't know why you say that, Johnny. Personally, I find it top rate, as it doesn't seem laboured at all . It divides the refrain in perfectly natural form and is totally consistent with the concept of the previous lines and the division you've made looks and feels natural. It precludes someone having to bear out the refrain, uninterrupted, even to the edge of doom.

alas, my favourite bad lyric didn't get onto the guardian's top ten list - the old iron maiden song ('quest for fire'?) which starts with the line 'in an age when dinosaurs ruled the earth... '. surely the most embarrassing first line in any song ever.

I know my taste can be one-off, but I'm curious why you say that's an embarrassing line? When one thinks of dinosaurs, they think of their gargantuan and inhibiting size as being greater than all other creatures. When one thinks of the 'beginning' with life-inhabited earth [beyond the Adam and Eve visions], dinosaurs almost [if not totally] automatically come to mind. I'm not familiar with the rest of the lyrics of Quest for Fire, but did they relate to man's 'evolution' on earth, prior to 'his' discovery of flame and fire?

Thanks.


~ Lizzy

[david birkett]

The entire lyrical content of "I've Never Been to Me".

Can't remember the singer, but I'm sure it was a disguised alien creature sent to drain the moral and spirtual fibre out of every human being on Earth.

Also "No Milk Today".

Going away to scream now.


David