Lyrics that just don’t add up
It has been claimed that writing about music is like dancing about architecture – an exercise that makes very little sense. Yet I’ve managed to make a living out of it. And in case you’re interested, I also on occasion do the jitterbug in tribute to Norman Foster’s majestic ‘gherkin’ building, and indeed a slightly dejected tango as a means of expressing my disappointment at the linear shape and neo-brutalist style of the Centre Point building just off London’s Oxford Street.
Likewise, the language of pop music is full of sentences and statements that are absurd and nonsensical, but like a speech by John Prescott, it’s often only when we look at them written down that we realise the full extent of their abuse of common sense, scientific fact, and the natural order of things.
OASIS
A perfect example of a song whose words sound pretty good … until you actually listen to them. The protagonist of this song is, after all, slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball. I know Oasis never made any secret of their liking for drugs, but this sounds suspiciously like the time-warping effects of Chris Morris’s spoof drug ‘Cake’ from Brass …ye, which made unsuspecting pill-poppers believe they had a month to cross the road. Could being chained to the mirror and the razor blade have had an effect on Noel Gallagher’s Shatner’s Bassoon?
We are later assured that someday, we will find our increasingly unreliable narrator caught beneath the landslide in a champagne supernova in the sky. Now that image throws up so many profound questions. Do they have landslides in the sky? And where exactly is the singer, Liam Gallagher, positioned if he’s beneath the landslide, but ‘in’ a champagne supernova?
A supernova is defined on Wikipedia as ‘a stellar explosion that creates an extremely luminous object’. Just imagine an exploding, luminous Liam Gallagher in the sky. As Patrick Moore gazes through his telescope one night, he suddenly sees bits of snorkel parka, a haircut that Paul Weller gave to charity in 1994, six days’ stubble and a couple of legs still stuck in the familiar baboon-shuffle position slowly floating across the stars. Then picture a champagne version of that – sticky, loud and endlessly bloody annoying. As for the position of the landslide in all this … well maybe it’s not such a bad idea. After all, if you were stuck in space with Liam Gallagher for company, you’d want to bury him too.
TAKE THAT
Picture the scene. You’ve had a row with your partner after some unspecified heinous crime on your part. They’re clearly very angry – they’ve stormed out, and if this was …ast…nders, the ‘Boof! Boof! Boof!’ drums that precede the end credits would undoubtedly start to sound.
So you’re begging for forgiveness, but there’s a problem. However carefully you compose and rehearse your speech to win them back, your own feeble, stuttering words are not strong enough to adequately convey your feelings.
Then you hit on an idea. How wonderfully romantic would it be to use a famous line from a classic pop ballad? Yes! That’s got to be a winner. So, without really thinking twice, you blurt it out.
‘The thing is, darling … whatever I said, whatever I did, I didn’t mean it. I just want you back for good.’
If it was my girlfriend, I think I can have an educated guess at the likely response.
Girlfriend: You what?! You … Oh. My. God. You are incredible. Unbelievable. (Insert look of contempt normally seen on the mother of a murdered teenager staring across the dock at the accused)
HOW CAN YOU SAY YOU DIDN’T M…AN IT IF YOU DON’T …V…N KNOW WHAT YOU DID, AND YOU DON’T …V…N KNOW WHAT YOU SAID?!
Me: Erm … yeah, fair point. Look, anyway, I’ve brought you some flowers.
Girlfriend: Yeah? Well, you know where you can stick them. And don’t you ever, ever quote Take That lyrics to me again. I was always an East Seventeeny. (Storms out)
AMERICA
Musically, this Anglo-American trio’s 1971 chart-topper is a thing of rare beauty, with wonderfully trippy folk-rock harmonies married to a lazy, clip-clopping tempo. Yet the only excuse they could possibly make for the accompanying words is that they were still suffering the effects of the brown acid at Woodstock1.
The first of many questionable claims is the narrator’s central statement that he has been through the desert on a horse with no name, it felt good to be out of the rain. While many of us would step indoors to get out of the rain, he has somehow managed to find himself in a desert, on a horse with no name, one which presumably has many camel-like qualities to stop it dying of thirst.
He then observes, in the desert, you can remember your name, for there ain’t no one for to give you no pain. That’s got to be the first and last time that anyone has suggested that several days’ horse ride through a desert could serve as a cure for amnesia. But if he’s feeling that inspired, couldn’t he have got round to naming the horse? Even if he just decided to start calling it ‘Dobbin’, I doubt anyone would be running across the sand waving its birth certificate to tell him otherwise.
Among other curious phenomena the singer reports is the startling revelation that the heat was hot.
The plot thickens further when he sings, After two days in the desert sun, my skin began to turn red. Which begs the question – just how ‘hot’ was this ‘heat’, and where exactly was this desert? On the outskirts of Glasgow? Somewhere in central Finland? After all, you’d have thought even the most modest desert sun would have rosed him up a treat long before the 48-hour mark, especially back in 1971 when this song was written, a time when ‘sunblock’ meant a knotted hanky on your head. Perhaps the desert was actually somewhere off the M25, since although the band is called America, this song was written by their British singer Dewey Bunnell, a man with little or no knowledge of deserts. He later admitted he had written the song as something of a fantasy as he sat in his London flat staring out at the rain.
But we digress. He continues the story, relating how after nine days, I let the horse run free’cos the desert had turned to sea. There were plants and birds and rocks and things …
And ‘things’? What things? Come on, you can do better than that! And hang on – plants and birds and rocks? And as for the horse, how could the poor nag run anywhere after nine days in the desert? So many questions. Then we are informed that the ocean is a desert with its life underground and the perfect disguise above.
OK, so the ocean is a desert, except for the major defining feature of a desert, which is an almost total lack of water, or fish.
What a fertile imagination Mr Bunnell has, quite apart from believing he’s from America. But we should perhaps point out at this point that the word ‘horse’ is a popular slang name for heroin.
It just goes to reinforce a couple of well-known nuggets of advice: Namely, ‘Write about what you know’, and ‘Just say no, kids’.
RICHARD HARRIS / DONNA SUMMER ET AL
In any realm of the written word, extending metaphors is a perilous business. Like running with scissors, it’s always likely to end in tears and possible injury, if not to the person then certainly to the reputation.
So it proved in the memorable chorus of this lachrymose 1968 lament, written by the usually peerless Jimmy Webb and popularised by Richard Harris and later Donna Summer. It begins with the abstruse observation that someone left the cake out in the rain. They sound particularly devastated about the demise of this cake, perhaps more devastated than any sane human being should ever get about a cake. In fact, they admit that I don’t think that I can take it,’cos it took so long to bake it, and I’ll never have that recipe again! Oh no!
I’m assuming they’re actually referring, however obliquely, to a relationship. But maybe it’s just me. Maybe you can easily visualise this common scenario. You’ve baked a cake, hoping to seduce that special someone with it. You’ve given it to this mysterious ‘someone’ to look after, though God knows why if you care about it that much. Maybe they’ve promised to put some extra-special icing on it, and were just bringing it back when they got distracted by a rare butterfly fluttering through the area, left the cake on a bench, then realised they’d left their hair-straighteners on, and dashed straight back home, completely forgetting about the cake. Then wouldn’t you just know it, it bloomin’ well goes and rains!
It wouldn’t be such a disaster, but the recipe, written on a piece of paper, was also sticking out of it, and the rain made all the ink run, so it’s now illegible. And you can never get another recipe because … well, maybe it was given to you by someone who is now dead, or by a stranger who then left without leaving even so much as a name to look up on Facebook. And while you may make other cakes in the future, you’ll never be able to bake one with the seductive powers that one had.
It’s so easy to think it’ll never happen to you.
1. BROWN GIRL IN THE MERINGUE
2. UNBREAK MY TART
3. TAKE ME DANCING CAKE-ED IN THE RAIN
4. I WANT TO CAKE UP WITH YOU
5. RUNAROUND SOUFFLE
6. THANK YOU FOR SENDING ME AN ANGEL CAKE
7. LIFE ON MARZIPAN
8. SWISS ROLL WITH IT
9. FEAR OF A BLACK FOREST GATEAU PLANET
10. STOP KICKING MY TART AROUND
EVERYTHING BUT THE GIRL
The words to this song have gently plucked the heart strings (does the heart have strings? That’s another book entirely) of many millions of music lovers since its release in 1994, so we do feel a little churlish questioning Tracey Thorn’s claim that I miss you like the deserts miss the rain. But we simply have to ask one simple, penetrating question:
Do the deserts miss the rain?
It’s a tough one. After all, deserts experience so little rain that you could leave Richard Harris’s cake out in most of them for weeks or months on end without any soggy metaphors turning up to spoil it.
And yet we all want the one we can’t have, so maybe the deserts are harbouring desperate desires for the rain based on the brief, tantalising encounters they have with it.
But surely, if you’re a desert, you would grow up from an early age knowing that your life was pretty much mapped out for you in terms of rain, or lack of it, and if you spent your life pining for the few spots that occasionally fell on you, you’d be one terminally miserable desert. After all, the most you’d ever get would be an occasional one-night stand or the equivalent of a quick knee trembler behind the youth club disco.
Even if a desert who was missing the rain went to the most sympathetic therapist they could find – say, Dr Miriam Stoppard – she’d still feel duty bound to say, ‘Listen Sandy, you’ve got to move on. The rain has, believe me.’
BUSTED
In this once-ubiquitous 2003 hit, the boy band trio, who specialised in what you might call ‘trainer punk’ (energetic guitar pop serving the same purpose as a trainer bra, and aimed at roughly the same demographic), claimed to have been to the year 3000, courtesy of a ‘flux capacitor’ as featured in the time-travel movie Back To The Future, and reported that not much has changed but they live underwater. Unlikely, you might think, but who are we to argue, without access to their boy band Tardis? More alarmingly, especially for any parents who happened to bend an ear to what little Holly was listening to so obsessively, they also made approving reference to three-breasted women swimming around naked. Could they be entertaining dark groupie fantasies indulging all three band members indulging in some depraved soggy suckle-fest? Or is that just my own sick imagination? Then equally unlikely news comes in their boast that someone’s great-great-great-granddaughter is pretty fine.
Clearly, female life expectancy and the average age of motherhood is going to shoot up in the next 991 years, if Busted are to be believed. If a teenage girl’s future great-great-great-granddaughter was of a similar age in 3000, then she and her next four female antecedents would be giving birth to daughters at an average age of somewhere around the age of 197. Still, who knows what the future holds? Not Busted, who claimed elsewhere in this song they would be releasing their seventh album by this point, clearly anticipating Blue Nile-like gaps of around 140 years between releases.
They were either confident of eluding the ageing process or were dabbling in some of the Gallaghers’ time-bending substances. Either way, within two years they’d split up, and their Hitler-esque dreams of a 1000-year reign lay in tatters.
KAISER CHIEFS
Rock stars may be wealthy, worshipped and sexually irresistible, but that doesn’t mean they don’t feel the pain of you, the little people whose honest travails help pay for their quad bikes, designer sunglasses and divorce settlements. They understand only too well how you work in a shirt with your name tag on it, drifting apart like a plate tectonic. Or rather, they would, if they knew what a ‘plate tectonic’ was. Because even if we disregard the ear-chafing way they have made a Yoda-like word reversal of the more familiar geographical term, we have to ask: Does a tectonic plate drift apart, or do tectonic plates drift apart from each other? And when tectonic plates are most often in the news, during an earthquake, don’t they push together?
They go on to empathise further with the bovine proles whose disposable income has made them millionaires. They depict the subject of the song settling down in your early twenties, sucked more blood than a back street dentist.
‘Back street dentist’. The phrase rings a bell. Oh yes, that must be the equivalent of a ‘back street abortionist’, the oft-used term for an illegal, unqualified and quite possibly dangerous practitioner of pregnancy terminations, the kind which are common in countries where legal abortions are either difficult or impossible to come by.
Dentistry, at the time of going to press, isn’t illegal anywhere in the world, and therefore you would have thought the ‘back street’ variety wouldn’t be quite as in demand as their abortionist counterparts. Or even exist, in fact. Mind you, with our name-tag bound McJobs, I suppose we would be looking for an NHS dentist, and given their much publicised scarcity in recent years, perhaps a lucrative trade in unlicensed molar manglers really has sprung up.
But as for blood sucking – are vampire tendencies really that widespread in their industry? Injections, reclining chairs and Heart FM perhaps, but blood sucking?
Oh well, let’s give them a break. Coming up with a rhyme for ‘twenties’ must have been very difficult. Like pulling teeth, in fact.
INNER CIRCLE
Many proud boasts have been made by musicians in the pursuit of provoking musical or sexual abandon (or preferably both) in the listener. So at first glance, this Jamaican reggae band’s promise that girl, I’m gonna make you sweat, sweat’til you can’t sweat no more is a fairly orthodox statement of intent.
But on further consideration, this actually sounds faintly sinister. I mean, if she actually did sweat until she could sweat no more, wouldn’t she be in a very alarming, life-threatening state of dehydration which would require hospitalisation? And you’re saying you can ‘make’ her this way? Well, maybe you could offer your music to an establishment where such effects might be more welcome. It’s called Guantanamo Bay.
THIN LIZZY
Tonight, announced Phil Lynott in this song’s opening salvo, there’s going to be a jailbreak, somewhere in this town.
I’m not the first person to point out that there’s a prime candidate for the likely location of this jailbreak – the jail.
But that’s assuming it’s not a very large town. After all, if he was talking about London, the mass escape could take place at Wandsworth, Holloway, Wormwood Scrubs, Pentonville, Belmarsh or Brixton. Still, a few extra guards on duty on the night in question should nip the uprising in the bud, surely? Especially now you’ve blown the gaff and told everyone about it, Lynott, you slag!
TOTO
This unforgettable early-80s gem is invariably included on softrock compilations, but it also has won a place on many a list of lyrical misadventures, chiefly due to the bit where they observe that as sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti, I need to cure what’s deep inside.
Many of you will have learned about similes and metaphors during secondary school English lessons. To recap for those whose attention may have wandered, a metaphor is when you compare two things by replacing one with something else (e.g. Toto were giant bepermed love panthers bestriding the world of FM rock), a simile is when you say one thing is like something else (e.g. Toto looked like the queue for post-op counselling at a gender realignment clinic).
This line almost falls into the latter category, were it not for one important error. Even if you didn’t listen, and think Simile is Chelsea’s latest Italian transfer target, you will know that to say, as Toto have done, that Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus, is to say that a mountain rises like … a mountain. It defeats the object somewhat.
We can only shudder at the thought of how different some great works of literature would have turned out if previous writers had taken this resolutely unimaginative approach to comparisons.
‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? No, thou art more like a dead-fit lass who I’d really like to get into the pants of.’
It’s just lacking something, isn’t it?
THE POLICE
When Sting, The Police’s chief lyricist, imagined walking on the moon, and opined that I hope my legs don’t break, walking on the moon, we had to wonder why such a self-styled intellectual would be worried. Of all the ailments that might possibly befall an astronaut, you’d have thought that broken limbs would be pretty far down the list. After all, with only a fraction of the gravity to deal with and pretty advanced footwear, padding and a spacesuit to protect you, there should be few such problems. Even an impromptu game of space football with a very unruly team of Clangers would be unlikely to pose any dangers in that department, since sudden movements would be so difficult to execute in that atmosphere.
So all things considered, don’t worry about your legs, Sting – maybe just brush up on your knowledge of rudimentary astrophysics.
SHAKIRA
This fragrant Colombian introduced herself to the world with a feisty statement of intent, in which she noted that it is lucky that my breasts are small and humble so you don’t confuse them with mountains.
Is that really likely? Mountains, breasts … breasts, mountains. Apart from sharing a vague resemblance in shape, they really don’t have a massive amount in common, do they?
Or could this be a Colombian thing? Have there been well-publicised incidents in her home country where hikers have set out to conquer one of the Andes, and accidentally climbed up a woman’s outsized breasts? Could she be making a wry reference to that incident? Or is she just making a really, really rubbish joke?
ALANIS MORISSETTE
Sooner or later, most successful performers end up having mixed feelings about their best-loved songs. They may have paid for three houses and a decade’s supply of chang, but having to play them at every single show you ever do for the rest of your career, and have people singing them across the road at you while you’re trying to buy tampons, can grate a little. Alanis Morrissette must be the ultimate example of that syndrome – she writes a bunch of songs as a teenager about having one hand in her pocket and the other one going down on someone in a theatre – or something along those lines – and 30 million records and 15 years later, people are still taking the piss.
Top of the ridicule charts from that album is this 1994 hit. It hardly feels necessary for me to point out its main fault, since I’m sure there are Japanese soldiers hiding out in foxholes, unsure if World War Two is over, who nevertheless know that ‘Ironic’ by Alanis Morissette is not very ironic. As many before me have noted, most of its observations are merely annoying, or frustrating, in a wait-half-an-hour-for-a-bus-and- three-come-at-once kind of way. But let’s consider how we could potentially remix this lyric, to ‘ironicise’ it, if you will. So how about…
1) It’s like rain on your wedding day when you’re the Managing Director of ‘Weddings In The Sun – making dream days the weather can’t spoil!’
2) It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife and you are the inventor of the ‘spife’, a special multi-purpose eating utensil that doubles up as both spoon and knife?
3) A traffic jam when you’re already late for a meeting about the importance of timekeeping in the town planning industry?
4) It’s a no-smoking sign on your cigarette break at a laboratory which tests out cigarettes’ harmful effects on poor defenceless bunny rabbits?
I could go on. But the quality control might dip a little, and we wouldn’t want poor-quality spoof lyrics in a book about crap lyrics, now would we? That really would be … annoying.
MORRISSEY
Anyone reasonably well acquainted with his output to date will know that, contrary to his reputation as the messiah of miserablism, Morrissey does possess a healthy sense of humour. But everyone tells a duff gag now and again, and on this 1991 song, he left everyone smiling politely, repressing a groan and shuffling slowly away when he sang, Your boyfriend he went down on one knee. Well could it be, he’s only got one knee?
No, it couldn’t, Moz. If he only had one knee, he would have quite a bit of trouble going down on it, and even if he could that would make him an amputee and disabled jokes are kind of … actually, on second thoughts, I suspect the ever mischievous Morrissey may well have been attempting not just a joke, but a double entendre, in the style of his beloved Carry On films, albeit one that is so creaky it has surely already snapped in two. Was he, perchance, hoping listeners would get the cheeky, ‘oo er missus’ double meaning of ‘went down’? How queer!
Anyway, I say, I say, I say! My wife went to the West Indies!
THE CLASH
As we saw in Thin Lizzy’s talk of jailbreaks, some problems posed in song are more easily solved than others. Let us conclude this chapter with the conundrum offered by Mick Jones of The Clash, when he sang about a problematic relationship. Should I stay or should I go now? he asks. If I go there will be trouble, he confesses, but if I stay it will be double.
OK, let’s weigh up the options …
Go = trouble.
Stay = double the trouble.
So go then. Doh!
What is it good for? Well, historically it’s been quite effective for imposing your country’s will on another, but as a topic for a song, it’s increasingly hopeless. Maybe in the 60s it seemed like quite a radical statement to highlight the futility of war, but in this day and age it sounds more akin to advising people that it’s best to look both ways before crossing the road. If you can avoid sounding either over-earnest, patronising, morbid (yes, death metallers who write songs about people getting their limbs blown off, that means you), or hopelessly naive, then you’re probably writing about something entirely different.
See: The Cranberries – ‘Bosnia’, Black Eyed Peas – ‘Where Is The Love?’
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1 At some point at the legendary free hippy festival, an announcement was made from the stage to warn people against taking ‘the brown acid’ that was circulating, since there were reports of some users experiencing bad trips from it. Whereas any other tab of unspecified substance bought from a shifty-looking black marketeer who you didn’t know from Charles Manson was bound to be perfectly safe, right?