Well-meaning words, rubbish lyrics
I once had a lecturer at college who was blind. He was, however, determined to live as normal a life as possible, and he invariably walked around the campus with neither white stick, nor guide dog or human assistance to guide him. Most of the time he coped admirably, but I cannot forget the one occasion when he came a cropper.
Venturing outside during a lunch break, he seemed to lose his usually reliable bearings, and walked straight into a bike rack. He sprawled headlong over some panniers as bystanders rushed to assist him. I was initially one of the rescue party, but after an instinctive move towards him, I turned away, because I couldn’t stifle my giggles in the face of such priceless slapstick.
I still feel bad about that, but they do say comedy is tragedy plus time. About four seconds, in that particular case. Likewise, when musicians insist on using their chosen medium to impart a serious message, and then deliver it with all the skill and effectiveness of Cristiano Ronaldo taking an air swipe at the ball and falling on his perfectly formed behind, they can hardly blame us for enjoying the action replay. I think the technical term is ‘bathos’.
Similarly, the following examples of well-meaning polemic fall somewhat short of their noble aims. I’m sure they’ll forgive us if we enjoy those moments again in glorious slow motion. With extra analysis from the studio.
JEWEL
On the title track of her multimillion-selling debut album, this ultra-liberal American singer and poetess took bigotry of every variety to task, and asked searching questions such as You say he’s a Jew – does it mean that he’s tight? You say he’s a Jew – do you want to hurt his kids tonight? She goes on to mention his ‘funny hat’ and then concludes with the words, Oh Jew, oh Jew, do you hate him,’cos he’s pieces of you?
We know what she’s driving at, and we sympathise but … but … did you ever see Rick in The Young Ones dreaming about being The People’s Poet? (‘Oh cliff … sometimes it must feel like you really are a cliff, when fascists try to push you … over the edge’). This is a marginally higher standard of verse, but there’s something about the banality of the poetry juxtaposed with the blunt violence of the language just tickles you, like a puppy being squashed by a piano.
Just kidding.
THE CRANBERRIES
Around the same mid-90s era, Ireland’s own answer to Jewel was The Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan. It was the wrong answer, delivered with an insufferable yodelling voice reminiscent of Dana choking to death on a boiled sweet, but that didn’t stop her alerting us to the ills of her homeland, as if two decades of news headlines wasn’t enough. However, the impact of her response to ‘the troubles’ was slightly dampened by lyrics like with their tanks and their bombs, and their bombs and their guns, in your head, in your head!
You can imagine Martin McGuinness himself taking a moment to reflect, can’t you? He probably thought, ‘Why does she repeat the line about bombs? Are we using twice as many bombs as guns and tanks? Surely that’s a serious strategic issue we need to be addressing.’
And she’s not finished yet.
They are dying, she pleads, in your head, in your head, Zombie! Zombie! Zombie!
Not quite Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have A Dream’, but I guess we get the general thrust of the argument. Then again, why is this ‘in your head’? Is she suggesting the entire history of the troubles of Northern Ireland are the product of someone’s fevered imagination? And where do zombies come into it? Are they a previously little-known splinter group of paramilitaries drawn from the living dead? Do they have a political wing?
It’s very confusing.
THE CRANBERRIES
By the time of The Cranberries 1996 album To The Faithful Departed, Ms O’Riordan was feeling sufficiently fired up to address numerous global issues, from Bosnia (‘Bosnia was so unkind’) to war (‘We should mind the war child’), to drugs (‘To all those kids with heroin eyes, don’t do it’ – looks like they already have, Dol). But she excelled herself on this account of John Lennon’s assassination. It was the fearful night of December eighth, he was returning home from the studio late. Fearful? I remember it being quite a balmy evening, actually, but on you go … He had perceptively known that it wouldn’t be nice, she observes, and in 1980 he paid the price. The price for what, exactly? The price for knowing ‘it’ wouldn’t be nice? That seems expensive to me. Anyway … With a Smith & Wesson 38, John Lennon’s life was no longer a debate.
Debate? What debate? Oh, of course, only weeks beforehand, the Oxford Union was discussing the proposition: ‘This house holds that John Lennon is not really alive, he’s just a hologram, and while we’re about it, isn’t it possible that we are all actually just avatars in a giant computer program, have no free-will, and don’t ultimately exist in any physical sense?’
PAUL MCCARTNEY & STEVIE WONDER
On this famous plea to end world racism, the former Beatle and his illustrious collaborator made a touching comparison between black and white people, and black and white keys on a piano. The key message was, of course, Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony. Side by side on my piano keyboard, oh Lord, why don’t we?
It’s one to ponder, isn’t it? In fact, where do we start? I suppose we could begin by pointing out that piano keys generally have no problem ‘living’ next door to each other because they are, by their very nature, pieces of ebony and ivory, and are therefore not sentient beings with brains, emotions, or free will. Therefore they don’t feel racial prejudice towards other materials, or anything else for that matter. Once we’ve established that fact, we realise that in fact there’s not a great deal of valid comparison to be made between piano keys and human beings.
But if Macca really is asking why we, black and white people, don’t live together in harmony, you have to delve deeper. You could look back to the natural tendency mammals have for forming tribal groups, and their self-preservatory fear of anyone or anything they consider to be ‘different’ from them, then you could perhaps touch on the socio-economic divisions first established between races through the slave trade, and then you could look at the history of economic migration and consider how politicians have used notions of racial and national identity as a means to divide and rule, and then … D’you know what? I’m thinking this might be too big a subject to tackle even in a weighty intellectual tome like this, let alone a few lines of a pop song. Best leave it well alone. Mr McCartney, sir, can I direct you to a chorus of frogs currently gathered by the garden pond?
NICKELBACK
This heartfelt and thought-provoking plea for universal love and understanding presents the myriad of possibilities for the human race ‘if everyone cared’.
If everyone cared, and nobody cried, he argues, and if everyone loved and nobody lied, then, it logically follows, according to lyricist Chad Kroeger, we’d see the day when nobody died.
Let’s take that statement one sentence at a time.
Granted, it would be nice if everyone cared – the kind of bold, cut-the-crap statement that Jewel and Dolores would surely endorse. But no one crying? Isn’t it universally accepted by doctors and psychologists as an important stress reliever and coping mechanism, without which our mental health could potentially suffer? And surely the world’s greengrocers would be up in arms after the eradication of the onion from this brave new weep-free world?
Quite apart from that, does he have any scientific research to show how love, caring and the eradication of lachrymosity will eradicate death? Is he saying it will extend human longevity indefinitely, succeeding where many thousands of mad scientists, vampires and Michael Jackson have failed?
More importantly, would that be a remotely agreeable state of affairs? I feel confident in saying that if nobody died, within a fairly short space of time the world’s over-population problems would reach such a crisis point that governments would have to implement radical, Logan’s Run-style measures to keep the numbers down. If nobody died, they’d have to be killed. Unless, of course, Chad has further plans to give the human race a bit more ‘Lebensraum’1 and has another song up his sleeve called ‘If We Could Then Go On To Colonise Mars’.
MEL C
The Spice Girls were never widely noted for their social conscience, and perhaps it’s for the best that they preferred taboo-shattering statements such as ‘Friendship never ends’ and ‘Mama, I love you’ to broaching thorny subjects such as homelessness. However, as a solo artist Mel C evidently felt she was old and wise enough to put herself in the place of a destitute rough sleeper, and attempt to empathise with their plight. She felt moved to ask the question, is it lonely where you are, sleeping in between parked cars?
If Mel’s vision is to be taken at face value, then homeless people’s nocturnal habits have more in common with cats than human beings. It’s a miracle that none of them have been run over by cars reversing out of parking spots oblivious of the homeless person sleeping inches away from them.
What’s more, the neighbourhood of which you speak must be an area with a pretty anarchic approach to parking restrictions. I feel pretty confident that if I even so much as knelt down for 20 seconds in between cars to look for a lost contact lens, I’d be clamped by a ruthless team of tool-wielding council sub-contractors and my next of kin would be sent a demand to pay £50 to have me released on pain of a custodial sentence.
And would you do so much as a benefit gig to publicise my plight, Mel? Would you heck as like.
BLUE MINK
For most of the 20th century, the debate about the ethics of genetic engineering has been raging. There has always been the fear that if the technology to alter the racial make-up of the globe became widely available, it could be used for practices such as eugenics, which the Nazis were once fond of in Germany.
These distinctly hippyish Californians clearly planned to use it to more benevolent ends, however. They suggested we take a pinch of white man, wrap it up in black skin.
They went on to coo over the prospect of curly Latin kinkies, mixed with yellow chinkies. A brave plan, but you have to wonder how everyone of East Asian origin would feel about being lumped together among the label of ‘yellow chinkies’? And just what are ‘curly Latin kinkies’ when they’re at home? Are all Latins curly? Or kinky, come to that, given the popularity of Roman Catholicism in such countries?
But hey, maybe we should just chill out. They later assure us that their racial mix (also including ‘Red Indian boy’ and ‘blue blood’ apparently) would mean you’ve got a recipe for a get-along scene. Au contraire, my friends, I think your programme of enforced inter-breeding would be a recipe for a series of nationalist uprisings, possibly culminating in a Third World War.
Stick that in your pot and stir it, you flower-haired fools!
CULTURE CLUB
This is surely political pop boiled down to its supremely banal bones. As if we could ever forget the thunderous message of this 1982 anthem, it told us War, war is stupid, and people are stupid, and love means nothing in some strange quarters. That’s right. All the thousands of years that people have fought over territory, religion, or to defend their land from invaders, they were just being ‘stupid’. He may have a point in some cases but might I suggest he’s being a touch simplistic in his appraisal? And as for the ‘people’ part of the equation, isn’t that another slightly sweeping statement? Can he expand on it? Well, he does talk about people who ‘fill the world with narrow confidence’, whatever that is, and then mentions how we’re ‘fighting in the street, won’t somebody help me?’
Well, probably not, possibly because they don’t want to fight, because war is stupid. Twat.
THE JAM
In stark contrast to his modern-day image as a happy-go-lucky, twinkle-toed family entertainer and chat-show raconteur, the teenage Paul Weller was a pretty po-faced fella. The trouble was, sometimes he couldn’t quite articulate his rage as eloquently as he might have liked.
For instance, on this tune from The Jam’s debut album In The City, he sneers, Whatcha trying to say that haven’t tried to say before? You’re just another red balloon with a lot of hot gas. Why don’t you fuck off?
No point beating around the bush, I guess. Later he takes another pot shot at this unspecified enemy. What happened to the great empire? You bastards have turned it into manure.
Well, I know parts of India are very smelly, but it’s also very beautiful …
If we built this city on rock’n’roll, then several hundred bricks must have been consistuted from positive emotions associated with weekend leisure activities. Friday and Saturday nights, or indeed, ‘tonight’ in general, are almost invariably going to involve feeling ‘alright’. But rarely any better than that.
‘Alright’ is such a resolutely underwhelming word. It’s a real pity that we can’t popularise an alternative couplet to express the fantastic feeling of a highly enjoyable experience during the hours of darkness. Personally, I’d like to see someone predict that ‘on Friday evening we’ll feel so good we’ll be disbelieving’ or ‘By Midnight Friday we’ll be getting slippy and slidey’. Any takers?
See also: Tight, bright, out of sight
You’d think that when songwriters imagine flying, a whole universe of opportunities would present themselves. So why is by far the most popular imaginary destination for songwriters, simply ‘in the sky’?
I mean, it’s nice and quiet and all, but there’s not a great deal there. A few birds, some clouds, maybe an electrical storm if you’re really lucky.
Wouldn’t it be more fun to, say, fly down the stairs so the cat thinks you’re a giant pterodactyl? Or up to the 21st floor of your old office to appear at the window of your old office like Banquo’s ghost, and then rub your nose on the window to leave a mark, just in case they thought you were merely an celestial body or a terrifying hallucination.
At least Lenny Kravitz wished that he could fly ‘High up in the sky just like a dragonfly’, so presumably he could at least catch a few lesser insects to eat. As if there weren’t enough in his hair already.
See also: High, why, my
We know that it is impossible to wave your hands in the air, while also appearing to care. No, you must wave them like you just don’t care. The song you’re listening to is so powerful that you could throw yourself gleefully into some helicopter blades any moment, or try to eat your own knees. While saying ‘oh yeah’.
It really is a wonder that there aren’t more horrific accidents due to the care-free atmosphere at pop concerts.
See also: There, dare, hair
People in songs always ‘call you on the phone’. As opposed to calling you via a skype video conferencing facility or by use of a series of whistled morse code signals.
Once they’ve done that, they’re bound to find that you either aren’t home, are ‘alone’ or, indeed, are ‘not alone’. Couldn’t they give us some more illuminating detail, and get offended at the fact you were eating a SCONE while talking to them? Or perhaps drama could ensue when they misinterpret your strident TONE, because they’ve been sitting around getting STONED all evening.
There, you can have those ideas ON LOAN.
See also: on your own, ignite your bones
‘She said “come on let’s dance”,’ wrote Hard-fi in ‘Hard To Beat’, “we’ve got to take our chance”
Take our chance? Why, was she about to turn into a pumpkin? Or were they at some strange church dance where you were restricted to a five minute period of dancing per evening, outside which you were not allowed to interact with the opposite sex?
Singer Richard Archer later tells us ‘That girl you saw round town, well now she’s going down’. Honestly, Rich, what price a little ‘Romaaance’? Chris De Burgh used it to woo his Lady In Red, and he’s up to the back wheels in crimson-coloured action these days.
See also: Circumstance, hot pants
MANIC STREET PREACHERS
These Welsh firebrands have often made Weller look like Leo Sayer in the chirpy stakes, and their third album The Holy Bible may be the most mercilessly bleak record you will ever hear, unless you manage to track down the Cheeky Girls’ sophomore effort in a charity shop at some point. And thrilling though it was at times to hear them, as one sample on this album put it, ‘rub the human face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror’, they didn’t half spout some cobblers in the process.
They set their stall out on the opening track, in which they observe, In these plagued streets of pity you can buy anything, for $200 anyone can conceive a God on video. He’s a boy, you want a girl so cut off his cock. Tie his hair in bunches, fuck him, call him Rita if you want.
Now, I know there were plenty of very bad things happening in the world in 1994, but I find it hard to believe that this was one of them. Maybe the Manics had been consuming news sources of a more unreliable variety to me, but even in Amnesty International’s most harrowing reports, I have yet to hear of any countries where it has ever been common practice to perform DIY sex changes on your own children, even without combining it with rape and incest. Moreover, mutilating children would surely lead to major complications such as, well, death from blood loss or infection, which would surely defeat the object of the exercise, unless there are many hundreds of surgeons prepared to attempt this exceptionally rare form of gender realignment surgery for the kind of bargain prices the song suggests.
And as for calling your child Rita – surely no sane individual would want to do something as sick as that?
BILLY BRAGG
Some people say you should keep pop and politics apart. I’d beg to differ. Popular music would surely be a poorer place without ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ if not The Family Cat’s 1993 less successful polemic ‘Bring Me The Head Of Michael Portillo’.
But mixing sex and politics? Well, you’re on shaky ground. Billy Bragg almost would have got away with it on this cuddly 1990 hit if it hadn’t been for an unfortunate juxtaposition. Sexuality! went the anthemic chorus, Strong and warm and wild and free! Sexuality! Your laws do not apply to me! A nuclear submarine sinks off the coast of Sweden …
Ouch. Just when we were getting our juices flowing with all that rugged talk of wildness, freedom and breaking the law, someone mentions nuclear submarines. What a passion killer. It’s like you’re just reaching second base with that special someone and they decide to switch off Barry White and turn on Channel 4 News.
As John Lennon so wisely put it, ‘If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow’.
BILLY JOEL
It was always likely to be a thankless task attempting to shoehorn half a century of world history into a four-and-a-half-minute pop song. And Billy Joel resolutely failed to do it on this bewildering list of post-war world events.
The song basically amounts to a rapid-fire list of buzzwords, as if he’s grabbed a bag of those fridge magnets with world events on, stuck them on the door, and listed what came out. And when he makes bedfellows, of Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo, or indeed Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California Baseball, you’re left wondering if his list is any more profound than me listing things I did today.
How about picked my nose, fed the cat, watched Cash In The Attic and had a difficult crap?
Or Bit my nails, bread’s gone stale, Insulted a man in telesales?
All of which are accurate glimpses into my daily existence, but perhaps don’t offer much wider insight into the human condition.
The limits of this approach to history are summed up when he bellows JFK! Blown away! What else do I have to say?!
Well, a fair amount, Billy, since you ask. I mean, why no mention of the civil rights movement? The advent of the European Economic Community? Mark Spitz’s unprecedented seven gold medals at the 1972 Olympics? Supersonic passenger flights? Matt Bianco getting called ‘wankers’ on Saturday Superstore?
Come to that, I know the 1970s are best forgotten but was it wise to cover the entire decade in the space of about eight words?
Apparently they sometimes play this record in secondary school history lessons. And they wonder why educational standards are going through the floor.
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1 Lebensraum, literally meaning ‘living room’, was Adolf Hitler’s plan to invade foreign territories in order to make room for the expanding Master Race. Any relation between him and the singer from Nickelback is purely coincidental. Although they did both have highly identifiable facial hair.