Call me maybe
I'm not sure what the best rock lyric ever is ("wink of a young girl's eye"? "every cheap hood strikes a bargain with the world"?), but I've got a nomination for the worst: "nobody callin' on the phone, except for the Pope, maybe, in Rome."
I probably need to expand my time horizon.
posted by ColumbusGuy @ 6:03 AM
12 Comments:
"Dressed me up in women's clothes and messed around with gender roles..."
Zappa?
Seems a wordy way of saying "and so is Lola."
Also hints of normative judgment. Maybe feints instead of hints.
Laid by James [though I think its better known as "Pretty" after the chorus] It has a hook to die for and is clearly a young man singing about his sex crazed stalker girlfriend.
Been there, been there.
That's definitely high up on the list. The only line I can think of even worse is "I shouted out 'who killed the Kennedys?' when after all it was you and me," which manages to combine poor ideas, incoherent logic, inelegant expression, busted meter and fake rhyme.
And yet you are still talking about 35 years later.
Good case, but &#%!# Jagger gets a pass on everything.
Among the best: "Pull the plug on your digital clock, and it all goes dark and the bodies stop." "If you give this man a ride, sweet memory will die." And nearly every line in these two Crimson songs.
The worst? I can't beat your Joan Osborne suggestion, but almost as bad is "But when the taxman comes to the door, Lord, the house looks like a rummage sale, yeah." The rhyme and scan are awful, and do rummage sales and messy houses really look similar?
Don Henley said that the line "They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can't kill the beast" was originally going to include a shout-out to a band he really liked at the time: "They stab it with their steely dan, but they just can't kill the beast." Apparently "steely dan" was a secret phallic reference and Henley thought it would be funny. This might have ended up the worst line of all, unless the song had flopped as a result.
Ugh. I have to go commit suicide now. I screwed up my greatest lyric. Fixed it. Now looking up "rope" for disambiguation on wikipedia.
That line at the top sounds nothing like Zappa. You must know nothing of his music.
Also, there shouldn't be a single Springsteen line in the top hundred. He strains too hard, generally sounding like second-rate Dylan mixed with a touch of Van Morrison and Woody Guthrie. (Dylan was influence by Guthrie but that's a case of the student surpassing the master).
Sorry, I can't comment on my lack of knowledge of Zappa. I'm dead.
I misread it originally- I think the Joan Osborn line is one of the best lyrics ever. It consigns silliness to silliness
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