The 10 worst lyrics by great songwriters
Not every rock star is looking to rewrite Shakespeare every time they try to write a song. There are some great poets in the field, to be sure, but the lion’s share of great rock lyrics end up coming from artists who just want to write songs that give people a feeling rather than make them think. It makes you appreciate the Bob Dylans of the world even more, but oftentimes, the greatest artists of all time tend to write a fair bit of clunkers.
Although every songwriter has off moments, not all of them are what many would call bad. By the standards of most songwriters, some of them would be at the upper echelon of their catalogue, but for the artists in question, it’s a far cry from what they are usually working with, either trying to squeak by on easy mode or trading in their impressive chops for a bunch of nonsense syllables.
Even when looking at them next to the greatest of all time, there are more than a few head-scratching moments here. Compared to the spellbinding lyrics that made people pour over their every word back in the day, this is where you start seriously wondering what the hell these guys were thinking when they showed up and introduced these songs to their bandmates.
Whereas most artists might rely on their tongue to get them out of a few subpar tunes, this is a case where the music is doing the heavy lifting throughout the entire track. Lyrics can be written and poured over for years trying to dissect their meaning, but something definitely went wrong at the quality inspection when these tracks were ready to go.
10 worst lyrics by great songwriters:
10. ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’ – Radiohead
“I want to be in a band when I get to heaven
Anyone can play guitar and they won’t be a nothing anymore“.
Radiohead have always been the ones carrying the torch for songwriting ever since the 1990s. While every generation usually has one or two intellectual bands trying to expand the listener’s mind, Radiohead are the kind of band that makes abstract works of art and then lets you make of it what you will half the time. Not so much with their debut, though, and ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’ might be the worst offender of their naivety.
As opposed to writing songs more in line with ‘Creep’, the crux of this song boils down to a guy who wants to be in a band and then imagining a fantasy scenario where he gets to heaven, and everyone plays rock and roll as loud as possible. You can make the case that the song is more about the cheap rock and roll songs that people used to write in the 1970s if you wanted to, but other than a few half-decent lines, there’s not much difference between this and the daydream that many wannabe rockstars have in the middle of math class in the eighth grade.
9. ‘Dirty Punk’ – The Clash
“I’m gonna get me a big, big, big
Great big car
Then I’m gonna drive, drive, drive
That car so far
Up your boulevard“.
The Clash always seemed to thrive on Joe Strummer and Mick Jones working off each other. Even if Strummer wasn’t the best musician in the world, Jones was the one who could help turn his brilliant lyrics into works of art with the right backing track behind him. It’s one thing not to have Jones in the picture anymore, but without his writing partner, many started to realise just how important the guitarist was to the lyrical side of things on the song ‘Dirty Punk’.
Whereas most Clash songs have lyrics that could be put onto billboards around the world and still resonate, half of Cut the Crap is made up of songs that have nothing to do with anything. In this case, Strummer decides that politics suddenly aren’t very interesting, so he might as well sing about driving his car down the boulevard. Let’s just face the facts here. Strummer probably just gave up on trying halfway through this album, and ‘Dirty Punk’ might as well be a middle finger aimed straight at the fanbase who demanded another album.
8. ‘Why Can’t This Be Love’ – Van Halen
“I tell myself
Hey, only fools rush in
Only time will tell if we stand the test of time“.
Van Halen was never known as the most lyrical band in the world. They had their bright spots, but no one listened to songs like ‘Feel Your Love Tonight’ and ‘Everybody Wants Some’ and asked themselves what the deeper meaning behind them was. Ninety per cent of their songs with David Lee Roth were about sex, so Sammy Hagar should bring a fresh spin to their songs, right? Not quite.
Although much of 5150 contains material with heavy subject matter, ‘Why Can’t This Be Love’ gives up on the concept of sanity during the second verse, where Hagar says that only time will tell if they truly stand the test of time. That’s halfway to a good lyric if you take out the redundant part, but Hagar felt that was good enough and, with limitless options, put it in the final product. While ‘Amsterdam’ might be less tasteful throughout most of its runtime, that song was dead on arrival. This track had the potential to be great, and as we all know, disappointment is always worse than anger.
7. ‘New Blue Moon’ – Traveling Wilburys
“So many moons have come and gone
And none of them were blue
Too many times the sun came up, but
It came up without you, you, ya yoo hoo-ooh“.
It would make perfect sense if The Traveling Wilburys’ albums were labelled as the best albums by any artist, period. They had some of the best songwriters in the world at their disposal, so logic dictates that they would at least have some sort of baseline quality of lyrics whenever they got together. These were just a bunch of dads coming together to have fun by the end, and Bob Dylan delivered some prime cheese on ‘New Blue Moon’.
The biggest problem of Traveling Wilburys Vol. III tends to be that Dylan is far too dominant, but for the one time he does decide to show up here, he may as well have just said gibberish. Instead of writing that one cutting line that keeps everything afloat, Dylan calls someone a “yahoo” before Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty start harmonising again as if nothing happened. If the band cut this track in a round-robin style, something tells me that they got to Dylan, and he either forgot to bring in his lyrics or drew a complete blank. Moral of the story: don’t let Dylan improvise like this.
6. ‘Please Mr Gravedigger’ – David Bowie
“Please Mr. Gravedigger, don’t feel ashamed
As you dig little holes for the dead and the maimed
Please Mr. Gravedigger, I couldn’t care
If you found a golden locket full of some girl’s hair“.
There aren’t many artists who will be able to accomplish what David Bowie did in one career. He may have had his peaks and valleys as an artist, but his fearlessness in making music was part of why fans kept themselves interested in whatever left turn he was going to pull next. But most can be excused from listening to his first album, especially when he decides to deliver slam poetry with what sounds like a roaring head cold.
Outside of the apparent sinus infection that day, Bowie’s delve into musique concrete is at least intriguing, if nothing else. As he speaks to the man overseeing his burial, his attempts at sounding deep and meaningful pretty much fall on deaf ears, especially compared to the more zany moments that crop up on the rest of the album. Bowie had the potential to write phenomenal lyrics, but rarely do any of his albums end on such a weak squib by the very end.
5. ‘Teardrops’ – George Harrison
“Teardrops
I’ve had my share of crying buckets full of
Teardrops
So hard to take I got a soaking with those
Teardrops
And it feels like I have taken over from the rain“.
George Harrison didn’t start out as a good lyricist…he moulded himself into one. As much as he may have had to take the odd critique from John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Harrison was willing to work at his craft until he was good enough to rival them by the time The Beatles ended. As well as the 1970s treated him, the 1980s weren’t as kind, and ‘Teardrops’ may be one of the worst instances of Harrison working against his instincts.
Since his label told him to start all over again on Somewhere In England, ‘The Quiet Beatle’ traded in his songs of spirituality and heart with a half-baked song about a breakup that feels like it should be hammered out by someone half his age. Then again, given the glossy 1980s production, it wouldn’t be too much of a surprise if Harrison did this entire song as a gag. The suits wanted a silly pop song, after all, so why not lean into the cringy side of pop and put out something that sucks on purpose?
4. ‘That Girl’ – Crosby Stills Nash and Young
“I can’t stop thinking ’bout her
‘Cause she’s mighty fine and I would be lying If I didn’t speak up now
Say what’s on my mind, almost any old time I’m ready to choose that girl
I couldn’t refuse that girl
You’d better not lose that girl“.
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young have been responsible for some of the most enduring anthems of the 1970s. Even if not every member was as on the ball with a pen in their hand, they each knew enough to know how to put the arrangements around a questionable song or when to keep the lyrics at the forefront of protest anthems like ‘Ohio’. Stephen Stills may have his fair share of talents behind almost any instrument he got his hands on, but somewhere around the 1980s, he seemed to trade in any lyrical taste for first-grade-level rhyme schemes.
No one really wanted to work on American Dream, to begin with, but ‘That Girl’ sounds like someone’s first attempt to write a rock and roll song, all while being stoned out of their mind. The riffs are halfway decent, but even Neil Young helping Stills along can’t salvage this track, especially with a chorus that’s all about lusting after a girl in the most meatheaded way possible. Yes, we get it, you think this girl’s hot, now, if you would please expand upon that thought, we would be more than happy to hear it.
3. ‘The Necromancer’ – Rush
“Enter the champion
Prince By-Tor appears to battle for freedom
From chains of long years
The spell has been broken
The Dark Lands are bright
The wraith of the necromancer soars away in the night“.
Rush tends to get far too bad a reputation for being a band made only for nerds. They may have not have been the coolest band on the block, but Neil Peart’s lyrics about the human condition are a lot more profound than a lot of people realise, especially when you hear him dissect the meaning of fame on ‘Limelight’ or the modern outlaw on ‘Tom Sawyer’. Every band has a breaking-in period, and for all of the nerd comparisons, ‘The Necromancer’ doesn’t necessarily help the Canadian icons’ case.
Led Zeppelin may have already got to Tolkien worship on ‘Ramble On’, but this is a glorified fan-fiction of The Hobbit, featuring every member of the band showing up within the story and getting put in front of Sauron. Don’t worry, because By-Tor, from their song ‘By-Tor and the Snow Dog’, shows up to fend them from the evil eye and escape. Given the fact that the band expected everyone to know the lore of a completely different song from another album, and all it amounts to is fan fiction, there was a good reason this wasn’t going to be the song that converted fairweather fans.
2. ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ – Billy Joel
“Hemingway, Eichmann, ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’
Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion
‘Lawrence of Arabia’, British Beatlemania
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson
Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex
JFK – blown away, what else do I have to say?“
It’s a shame that it took Billy Joel so long to develop new material. Although he had said numerous times that he’s happy to have written great songs, the lyrics are like pulling teeth for him after a while. He was always great at setting a scene, but he couldn’t even defend what he did when he tried to become a history teacher throughout the span of one song.
While much has been said about ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ being a wretched song, the lyrics might be the worst part about it. Considering he was a master of melodies, every single point in history that Joel names off feels like he’s trying to ram it into your head instead of telling a story. Other artists tend to find that perfect marriage of words and melody and wrap the rest of the instruments around it. Sometimes, you have to shoehorn in a line or two, but this doesn’t feel like pushing the envelope in that respect. This is just shoving words in your face and hoping that you hold onto them.
1. ‘Bip Bop’ – Paul McCartney
“Bip bop be-bop bop
Bip bop be-bop bam
Treat me like a good boy
Treat me like a man
Bip bop be-bop bop
Bip bop be-bop bam“.
Ahh…Paul McCartney, writer of some of the most celebrated and reviled songs in the rock canon. For all of the great lyrics he has come up with throughout his career, there are always going to be songs like ‘Ob La Di Ob La Da’ and ‘Ebony and Ivory’ that fill people with dread the minute that they come on. Macca doesn’t claim to be perfect, and he would probably agree if people pointed out ‘Bip Bop’ as his worst song.
While Wild Life has seen a little bit of appraisal from fans who realise Wings were just finding themselves, this elongated jam barely works as a song, with McCartney practically scat-singing and making some half-hearted attempt at singing about his woman treating him right. McCartney said this album was about returning to basics, but perhaps not this basic. I mean, if you look at going from ‘Eleanor Rigby’ to ‘Ob La Di Ob La Da’ to this, you would have sworn that the former Beatle was actively trying to dumb his lyrics down.