The worst song lyrics in the world … ever!
It had to happen. Just as surely as ‘alright’ follows ‘Saturday night’, I was destined to sum up this book by picking a list of my worst ever lyrics. While I would love to arrange a phone poll for which all you gullible rubes would ring a premium-rate line 50 times in a day just to ensure that ‘Rhythm Is A Dancer’ grabs the top spot, I am just doing this out of the sourness of my own heart. And to get a bit of publicity for the book from whining Bob Dylan fans who want to burn me at the stake for dissing Rock’s own poet laureate.
I made a half-arsed attempt at making this scientific by working out how many different kinds of lyrical crime these songs could be accused of, and adding them in brackets, but then I’ve mostly ignored that and just put it in whichever order I feel like. To give this an element of surprise I’ll announce my findings in reverse order, notwithstanding the fact that you’ll only have to glance at the opposite page to find out what’s number one.
(Bad rhyming, inappropriate sentiments, nonsense, illogical, uninspired)
A link between cancer and dancing is suggested with the kind of crude insensitivity that even The Daily Mail would baulk at. I won’t say any more – or he will attack, and we don’t want that.
(inappropriate sentiments, illogical)
Avoids a bottom-five finish due to the singularity of its offence, but nonetheless, this is a lyric jaw-dropping enough to make any self-respecting female throw themselves in front of a racehorse in protest.
(bad rhymes, inappropriate sentiments, well meaning but still rubbish)
Imagine world events reduced to the equivalent of the conveyor belt memory test on The Generation Game. While it was comforting to know that Billy Joel was not responsible for the invention of the Hydrogen bomb or the Belgian intervention in the Congo, he perhaps bit off more than he could chew by trying to cover half a century in the space of five minutes. And he forgot the fondue set and cuddly toy.
(innuendo, bad rhymes, nonsense)
Food sex with Def Leppard anyone? You’ve got the peaches, they’ve got the cream. And the courts have got a restraining order ready to go, just press that panic button if they come within 200 yards.
(bad rhymes, illogical, nonsense, obscure)
Another lyric which fell spectacularly off the surrealist tightrope. It does, however, retain a certain kitsch charm, unlike most other songs in this list. Why, who hasn’t felt themselves ‘pressed in love’s hot, fevered iron like a striped pair of pants’ from time to time?
(bad rhymes, obscure, nonsense, illogical)
‘Don’t criticise what you can’t understand’ he once said. So that means no one on planet earth has the right to have a pop at this rampant tosh – Idi Amin couldn’t have justified it better, Bob. But traditionalist as this view may be, I do hold that no good can come from writing a lyric that reads like The Times cryptic crossword.
A throat-borrowing sword swallower in high heels, contacts with the lumberjacks, a ‘cow’-shouting one-eyed midget and tax deductible charity organisations – what can it all mean? Could the Dylan who wrote this song be a surrealist relative of Chauncey Gardiner from The Peter Sellers film Being There? Full of mysterious statements which no-one, least of all Mr Jones, understands, but wishfully imbues with great significance? Or is he just having a laugh at our expense?
(bad rhymes, nonsense, illogical, well-meaning but still rubbish)
A song about the death of an icon by the woman who gave us ‘Zombie’ and ‘Bosnia was so unkind’? We had instinctively known it wouldn’t be nice.
You’ve heard of the tribute song, now welcome to the insult song. An impossibly clumsy Irish jig on the great man’s grave.
(bad rhymes, illogical, uninspired, obscure)
Heat that was ‘hot’ but only produced mild suntans, anonymous equines with supernatural endurance, plants and rocks and things, and oceans like deserts. A horse with no name, and a song making no sense. Avoids the number one spot due to a jolly nice tune.
(bad rhymes, innuendo, bullshit, nonsense, inappropriate sentiments)
A quick trawl of the world wide web reveals Mr Miller took most of the toe-gnawing phrases from this song from his own previous compositions. That’s right, Space cowboy, Gangster of love, ‘Maureeeece’ (cue guitar wolf-whistle that makes you want to bite down on a grenade) – he’s so proud of them he sampled himself. Then he made up the word ‘pompatus of love’ just to throw some repetition and farcical gibberish into the mix. Then even when he nicked the peaches, tree shaking, and lovey dovey from an old doo-wop song, he sounded as seductive as a fat tramp pleasuring himself in a bush. Truly foul.
(bad rhymes, innuendo, bullshit, nonsense, inappropriate sentiments)
A teacher friend of mine recently invited a class of 11-year-olds to invent a dance to a song of their choice, which they would perform in front of the school. They chose this funky little number, and proceeded to bump, grind, grab their nonexistent ‘humps’ and generally make an entire school feel like swallowing itself with embarrassment. As for the rest of us, well, we still can’t even look at cocoa puffs without shuddering in disgust. Shame on a nuclear scale.