Modern Oxfords

As we celebrate the best lyricists in the music business over on Modern Shakespeares, I thought it only made sense to offer up a place to post the opposite end of the spectrum.  Here’s where you can post those lyrics that are so god-awfully bad that you can’t imagine someone had the cahones to write them down in the first place, let alone put them to music and shell out good money to turn them into a consumer product.

Names left out to protect the guilty (and because I’m too lazy to format this all nice and neat), but I think that if you’ve heard any of this songs you know who you want to strangle:

And I was like…
Baby, baby, baby oooh
Like baby, baby, baby nooo
Like baby, baby, baby oooh
I thought you’d always be mine (mine)

It’s not even the mindless repetition on that one that really puts me over the edge, it’s the casual “I was like..” at the beginning.  It’s bad enough that kids use it in casual rapidfire conversation, but to have sat down at a desk with all the time in the world and your entire vocabulary at your disposal, and to have selected that?  Brutal.

Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday
Today i-is Friday, Friday (Partyin’)
We-we-we so excited
We so excited
We gonna have a ball today

Tomorrow is Saturday
And Sunday comes after…wards
I don’t want this weekend to end

There are so many bad lyrics in that song it’s hard to pick the worst.  I think that “Yesterday was Thursday, today is Friday, tomorrow is Saturday and Sunday comes after…wards” has to win some sort of award, however.

I’m talking pedicures on our toes toes
Tryin on all our clothes clothes
Boys blowin up our phones phones

Remember kids, if you don’t have enough beats in a line, just go ahead and repeat words as often as needed. I’ve heard that Ke$ha is actually a fairly intelligent student of music and knows full well that she’s writing garbage, but she’s doing so on purpose because she knows what gets radio play. I’m not sure I believe that. Or maybe I just don’t want to.

And a special reference to this one, because I know somebody’s going to bring it up:

Hip Hop Marmalade spic And span,
Met you one summer and it all began
You’re the best girl that I ever did see,
The great Larry Bird Jersey 33
When you take a sip you buzz like a hornet
Billy Shakespeare wrote a whole bunch of sonnets

I really had to listen to the song for myself – the lyrics truly are that bad. He even manages to make that last one rhyme by calling them “sornets”.  I’m still trying to figure out what you take a sip of.

4 thoughts on “Modern Oxfords

  1. I'd forgotten about this gem from the Rocky Balboa soundtrack, which I have to admit is in my playlist 🙂 …

    See I'm the king of the ring ring Ring the bell and I'm comin out swing swing
    Swingin' left swingin' right till they ding ding
    He hit da ground bounce up like a spring spring
    Hit em again now like a birdie start to sing sing
    Bright lights cameras flashing like bling bling

    Students of the Ke$ha school of just repeating your word to get the right number of beats, I see. But did they not think that they could make "come out swinging" work? Come out swing swing? really?

    Although points for variety, managing to get, what, 6 different "-ing" words and even keep a certain amount of context?

  2. When a lyric is "bad" on purpose,
    can it sometimes become very
    good indeed…I think Electric
    Six have proven that beyond doubt
    with Danger High Voltage and
    Gay Bar in particular.
    If it isn't going against
    post protocol, here is a very
    funny short trailer for the BBC
    comedy duo Armstrong and Miller
    on this point:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2kD1YUtA5o

  3. I, I love you like a love song, baby
    I, I love you like a love song, baby
    I, I love you like a love song, baby

    And I keep hittin' re-peat-peat-peat-peat-peat

    This one annoys me because she repeats "love" in both halves of the simile, which surely must be a violation of some sort of basic literary rule.

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