Ponderables #3

December 27th, 2004

Filed under: General

Are there any song lines that you find particularly irritating? It could be a poor choice of words, horrible grammar, bad rhyming or anything that just rubs you wrong. I’m not talking about songs that are themselves annoying, but particular lines within songs.

Here are the two song lines that probably annoy me the most.

  • First, from Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the U.S.A. is this clunker of a line:

    There ain’t no doubt I love this land

    Not only does it commit the grammatical carnal sin of using the word ain’t, but it includes it within a double negative. Once, this was a good song with expressive imagery, but now it is so diluted that it’s lost any power. Regardless, this line has always made me cringe.

  • Second, from the Uncle Kracker song Follow Me is a line that I find too descriptive:

    And swim through your veins like a fish in the sea

    Hearing this line causes me to picture tiny fish actually swimming through a person’s veins, like a bad science-fiction or horror movie. Frankly, it gives me the creeps. Otherwise, I like this song.

8 Responses to “ Ponderables #3 ”

  1. M
    December 28th, 2004 at 9:37 am

    My first thought isn’t so much a line as a shriek.

    The part of ‘Out Tonight’ in Rent where Mimi’s wolf-like howl goes too far gets out of control and screeches. I know it’s deliberate, I get the primal aspect of it and that while the actress playing her is a professional singer Mimi the character isn’t, … but it hurts.

  2. N
    December 28th, 2004 at 1:49 pm

    “You can take that cookie and shove it up your uh” – Limp bizkit. A cry for help — in the form of euthenasia, perhaps — if ever I heard one.

  3. Erich
    December 28th, 2004 at 9:36 pm

    I’ve always been bothered by one line from that holiday perennial, “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year”:

    There’ll be scary ghost stories
    And tales of the glories
    Of Christmases long, long ago

    I don’t know, maybe it IS a tradition in some households, but “scary ghost stroeies” have never figured into my Christmas celebrations. (Well, okay, there’s Dickens’ “Christmas Carol”…)

  4. tomthedog
    December 29th, 2004 at 11:30 am

    Many songs replace the grammatically correct subject “you and I” with the incorrect “you and me,” but Bryan Adams’ “Run to You” has always bothered me for being the one instance in which the gramatically correct object “you and me” is replaced with the incorrect “you and I” to fit the rhyme: “She says her love for me can never die/That’d change if she ever found out about you and I.” Sets my teeth on edge.

  5. Greg Burgas
    December 29th, 2004 at 2:47 pm

    The first line of Eddie Money’s “Take Me Home Tonight” is: “I feel the hunger; it’s the hunger. Really, Eddie? Fascinating. And at some point in Van Halen’s “Why Can’t This Be Love” (with no question mark, mind you) is the line: “Only time will tell if we stand the test of time.” That Sammy Hagar — what a philosopher!

  6. N
    December 30th, 2004 at 9:26 pm

    Tonight I’m gonna rock ya tonight! –Spinal Tap.

  7. Nevin
    January 1st, 2005 at 5:47 pm

    The worst rhyme of all time is found in the Steve Miller Band’s “Take the Money and Run”:
    “Billy Mac is a detective down in Texas/You know he knows just exactly what the facts is”
    The tortured grammar would be notable even if the lines did rhyme properly! To make things worse, it follows up with an attempt to rhyme those lines with “He makes his living off of the people’s taxes”. It still doesn’t quite rhyme, and the offhanded political commentary really annoys me. I’m happy to hear a reasoned libertarian/populist/whatever argument about funding law enforcement and the size of our taxes, but when the protagonists of the song robbed and killed a man for no reason, I can’t get upset over the fact that the detective is a government employee.

  8. Erich
    January 7th, 2005 at 1:21 am

    Another lyric that’s always bugged me: In one Stevie Wonder song (I believe it’s “I Was Made to Love Her”), Stevie recalls his childhood sweetheart: “I wore high-top shoes and shirttails/Janie was in pigtails.” I suppose it’s just the fact that I would’ve expected such a gifted songwriter to actually come up with a rhyme instead of repeating the word “tails.”

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