ok.. best lyric in a hit song ever.. I’ ll start with Jerry Lee Lewis if I may?… “Ccme on over baby.. we got chicken in the barn/Whose barn?/What barn?/..my barn
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Musings on the byways of popular culture
“You and me baby we ain’t nothing but mammals
So let’s do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel”
Lovely stuff from The Bloodhound Gang there with their 1999 hit ” The Bad Touch”.
It reached number 4 in the singles chart and 1 (1!!) in the Dance (Dance!!) chart.
‘I was born in a crossfire hurricane’. (Jumping Jack Flash, obvs)
“Dearly beloved
We are gathered here today
To get through this thing called life
Electric word life
It means forever and that’s a mighty long time”
Prince – Let’s Go Crazy
“You are not what you own”
Fugazi – Merchandise
“I may be younger but I’ll look after you
We’re not in love, but I’ll make love to you
When you’re not here I’ll save some for you
I’m not him but I’ll mean something to you
I’ll mean something to you
I’ll mean something to you”
Frank Ocean – Nikes
“My name is Dr. Worm.
Good morning. How are you? I’m Dr. Worm.
I’m interested in things.
I’m not a real doctor,
But I am a real worm;
I am an actual worm.
I live like a worm.
I like to play the drums.
I think I’m getting good,
But I can handle criticism.”
They Might Be Giants – Dr Worm
“Where all the girls with the book in the club?
With the readin’ glasses on, gettin’ shook in the club
Readin’ Ta-Nehisi Coates, hummin’ SpottieOttieDope
With the “why I let ’em drag me here?” look in the club
I need a ride home and I need an iPhone
Charger and your number, can you put your shit in my phone?
Damn my phone died, can you put it in my man’s phone?
Damn his car died too, can you drive my mans home?”
Joey Purp – Girls@
“All I want is brick house with a porch that wraps around
All I want is land enough for my children to run
In the highest pitch of grace, the end of trial and gratitude
It was for you that all others I did forsake
For you all others I would forsake”
Marmalade – Julie Byrne
“First rule is “obey the laws of Germany”
Second rule is “be nice to mommy”
Third rule is “don’t talk to Commies”
Fourth rule is “eat kosher salamis””
The Ramones – Commando
“How many people rise and think
“Oh good, the stranger’s body’s still here
Our arrangement hasn’t changed?””
Father John Misty – Bored In The USA
Wilco (Jeff Tweedy) – Impossible Germany
“This is what love is for
To be out of place
Gorgeous and alone
Face to face
With no larger problems
That need to be erased
Nothing more important
Than to know someone’s listening
Now I know you’ll be listening”
“And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make”
That’s philosophy, that is
And in a similar philosophical vein:
“There is surely nothing worse than washing sieves, with the possible exception of being Garth Crooks”
Yeah but it’s also balls, isn’t it?
Emblazoned across a brother’s middle bit:
http://i1150.photobucket.com/albums/o615/JohnDetail/1C781F9F-7DAC-45BC-AE1A-0154A21646B8-249-0000000B564203DF_tmp_zpsjvjdwisw.jpeg
(Not this robot’s face obvs, but similar bod *cough*
“Boogie the beat” is it? I’ve always thought it was a special word, like “boogiedy” or “buckety” (the latter suggesting that the beat sounds like someone tapping a rhythm on a bucket)
…as you were.
Well I wudda thought “jump” was “jumped” but I guess it’s all gotta fit..
Oh – in case I gone done a bad thing – this image is lifted from the Redbubble website. There – free advertising! – may I be excused?
… unless – f*ck! – does giving free advertising get me into trouble on this site? Aaaaaagh! I need a lawyer – paging @bingo-little – no a good lawyer… (*continues for several minutes in gibberish mode – probably best to let the admins sort it…*)
Let’s be clear: there’s no such thing as a good lawyer.
You chased the sun around the Cote D’Azur
Until the light of youth became obscured
And left you on your own and in the shade
An English lady of a certain age.
Divine Comedy A lady of a certain age
At night only crickets, no prowlers, no sirens,
No pinky-ring hustlers, no Angel Dust Byrons,
No bars on the windows, no sabre-toothed neighbours,
Just good simple folks in a rainbow of flavours.
Somewhere in America there’s a street named after my dad
And the home we never had.
I’ll work for Mr. Fowler making fifty cents an hour
And I’ll save what I can so I can get a piece of land.
I’ll raise some cows and carrots, get ahead on my own merits
And if I fall I’ll take it like a man.
Somewhere in America there’s a street named after my dad
And the home we never had.
No more bland TV dinners, no ten car collisions,
No showbiz beginners making global decisions,
No daycare Fellinis, no fast food assassins,
No billboard bikinis just truth and compassion.
Somewhere in America there’s a street named after my dad
And the home we never had.
[Was (Not Was)]
Mozza’s lyric on this – so simple, but powerful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWur9ti-ZPk
This is where we go to – to the blue of the ocean
On the 30 westbound to the diamond water
Lost out in the white waves – salt purification
Bright eyes and breathless – this is how Love feels
Wash away the black stuff, wash away the road-dirt
In the thrill of the wipe-out, feel it pulling you under
This is where it saved your life in the days of the new beginning
All the sweet redemption lines that you wrote and told a thousand times
This is where we go to – to the blue of the ocean
On the 30 westbound to the diamond water
On the back-lanes down to the sea we pulled to the side of the road
Danced together in the headlights beam to the songs on the radio
Cheek to cheek . . .
– Wipeout, New Model Army
I was travelling with Laurel way up on the north coast
She’s got family living up here in a nearby town
We found a piece of land that looks out towards
the north sea islands across the bay
And the sun is shining on the water today as I look out of our front door
I’m never going back there
I’m never going back to the bad old world
– Bad Old World, New Model Army
Doctor Who’s got a Tardis and it is fucking ace
It takes its name from the acronym for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space
He uses it for getting about to do battle with cosmic crime
It’s powered by a big round bumpy thing that propels it through space and time
It goes [VWOORP] when it starts
and [VWOORP] when it stops
These sounds bought to you courtesy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop
-Observations On Time Travel, Doghorse
Punk rockers in the UK
They won’t notice anyway
They’re all too busy fighting
For a good place under the lighting
The new groups are not concerned
With what there is to be learned
They got Burton suits, ha you think it’s funny
Turning rebellion into money
All over people changing their votes
Along with their overcoats
If Adolf Hitler flew in today
They’d send a limousine anyway
The Clash – (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais
i live my life like there’s no tomorrow,
all I got, I had to steal,
least I I don’t need to beg or borrow,
yes i’m living on a…preset fuse.
running with the devil…VAN HALEN.
a pretty accurate statement of intent, and how I choose to remember my fave band from my youth.
FISH.
The answer, as usual is:
I was born by the river
In a little tent
And just like the river
I been runnin’ ever since.
Amen.
Although it’s run close by
“Then I go to my brother
And I say “brother, help me please”
But he winds up knocking me
Back down on my knees”
“Señor, señor, Can you tell me where we’re headin’? Lincoln County Road or Armageddon?”
Well he did the nobel prize for f**ks sake.
I sometimes think that “I am the light, I am the fire that burns around the sun / And I’ll set you free, so free / I am the black gold of the sun” is just the greatest lyric ever.
Other times pretty much anything from the song “The Queen Is Dead” is the greatest.
But the actual answer is, as with most questions of “best” and “song” The Beach Boys and “God only knows what I’d be without you.” It’s the single most perfect line in a song by anyone, sung by perfect singers to perfect music.
She drew out all her money out the Southern Trust
And put her little boy upon a Greyhound bus
Leaving Louisiana for the Golden West
Down came the tears from her happiness
Her own little son named Johnny B Goode
Gonna make a motion picture out in Hollywood…
Me girlfriend looks like Peggy Mount!
What am I going to do?
A-tisket, a-tasket, a Pashley with a basket
Behold Hermione, Little Miss Poundbury
I used to hanker after her when days were merrier
Before the ground floor flat West Highland Terrier
Kathleen Ferrier tickets in the post
All them Lib Dems done gone to Cropredy
Tories to Cornbury
As for me, I’ll take the TGV to Zurich and jump off the roof of Dignitas
And leave a note saying:
“Here lies the bloke, the only bloke in Harpurhey
Who wasn’t at the Lesser Free Trade Hall”
Y’all, think on
While you’re capturing the zeitgeist
They’re widening the motorway
Or:
Mama mama
You’re a whiz and a scholar too
Mama open up the room lock
Sip sip
I’m going to the moon dock
He gives to me
Buckles off shingles
Off a cockleshell on norway basin
Coke and tuna
Boots and roses from russia
Now I’ll live and die and rise
With my captain
Mama say go
Meet me captain saint Lucifer
Neither exactly hits, but this was:
What do you get when you kiss a girl
You get enough germs to catch pneumonia
After you do, she’ll never phone you
Personally, I think that the question of a “best lyric” (what an impossible proposition that is) can only be reduced to what you relate to, what speaks to you, or a lyric that articulates an emotion or experience you might struggle otherwise to express yourself.
For me, tonight, I’ll go for: “A good day ain’t got no rain. A bad day is when I lie in bed and think of things that might have been……slip sliding away”
This is my favourite lyric. It is utterly exquisite.
I was driving across the burning desert
When I spotted six jet planes
Leaving six white vapour trails across the bleak terrain
It was the hexagram of the heavens
it was the strings of my guitar
Amelia, it was just a false alarm
The drone of flying engines
Is a song so wild and blue
It scrambles time and seasons if it gets through to you
Then your life becomes a travelogue
Of picture-post-card-charms
Amelia, it was just a false alarm
People will tell you where they’ve gone
They’ll tell you where to go
But till you get there yourself you never really know
Where some have found their paradise
Others just come to harm
Oh Amelia, it was just a false alarm
I wish that he was here tonight
It’s so hard to obey
His sad request of me to kindly stay away
So this is how I hide the hurt
As the road leads cursed and charmed
I tell Amelia, it was just a false alarm
A ghost of aviation
She was swallowed by the sky
Or by the sea, like me she had a dream to fly
Like Icarus ascending
On beautiful foolish arms
Amelia, it was just a false alarm
Maybe I’ve never really loved
I guess that is the truth
I’ve spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitude
And looking down on everything
I crashed into his arms
Amelia, it was just a false alarm
I pulled into the Cactus Tree Motel
To shower off the dust
And I slept on the strange pillows of my wanderlust
I dreamed of 747s
Over geometric farms
Dreams, Amelia, dreams and false alarms
Pretty hard to beat that.
True, but “Song for Sharon” runs it close!
Another vote for Amelia, spent many an hour flying over geometric farms listening to that, but for a single verse I’d have to go for:
Well I was pacing myself trying to make it all last
squeezing all the life out of a lousy two day pass
and I had a cold one at the Dragon with some Filipino floor show
and talked baseball with a lieutenant over a Singapore sling
and I wondered how the same moon outside over this Chinatown fair
could look down on Illinois and find you there
the last 2 lines especially always make the hairs stand up on the back of my neck (sometimes even when sober)
Amelia is hampered for me by the bathetic last but one verse, with its cartoon image of zooming down from altitude, wings outstretched, to crash into a man on the ground.
Dan Baird – Dixie Beauxderaunt
Well Tina didn’t win ’cause she danced to Twisted Sister
But when Dixie told the DJ “gimme three steps mister”
All the gentlemen in the audience began to rise
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQDDn8PBvA0
I am thinking it’s a sign
That the freckles in our eyes
Are mirror images and when
We kiss they’re perfectly aligned
And I have to speculate
That God himself did make
Us into corresponding shapes
Like puzzle pieces from the clay
(“Such Great Heights” – The Postal Service)
And when you’ve given all you had
And everything still turns out bad
(“Andmoreagain” – Love)
Zoo time is she and you time
The mammals are your favourite type, and you want her tonight
Heartbeat, increasing heartbeat
You hear the thunder of stampeding rhinos, elephants and tacky tigers,
This town ain’t big enough for both of us
And it ain’t me who’s gonna leave
(“This town ain’t big enough for both of us” – Sparks
Plus the ever-relevant…
Well, you wonder why I always dress in black,
Why you never see bright colors on my back,
And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone.
Well, there’s a reason for the things that I have on.
I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,
Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town,
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,
But is there because he’s a victim of the times.
I wear the black for those who never read,
Or listened to the words that Jesus said,
About the road to happiness through love and charity,
Why, you’d think He’s talking straight to you and me.
Well, we’re doin’ mighty fine, I do suppose,
In our streak of lightnin’ cars and fancy clothes,
But just so we’re reminded of the ones who are held back,
Up front there ought ‘a be a Man In Black.
I wear it for the sick and lonely old,
For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold,
I wear the black in mournin’ for the lives that could have been,
Each week we lose a hundred fine young men.
And, I wear it for the thousands who have died,
Believen’ that the Lord was on their side,
I wear it for another hundred thousand who have died,
Believen’ that we all were on their side.
Well, there’s things that never will be right I know,
And things need changin’ everywhere you go,
But ’til we start to make a move to make a few things right,
You’ll never see me wear a suit of white.
Ah, I’d love to wear a rainbow every day,
And tell the world that everything’s OK,
But I’ll try to carry off a little darkness on my back,
‘Till things are brighter, I’m the Man In Black.
(“Man In Black” – Johnny Cash)
Modern life in two lines:
“You can have whatever you want
But are you disciplined enough to be free?”
From this:
If you want something polemical, this is the best musical take-down of organized religion, ever. Okay, most of its in pidgin, but it is very easy to understand:
I love the bit when Fela gets all righteous, starting from
I want you all to please take your minds
Out of this musical contraption
And put your minds into any goddamn church
Any goddamn mosque
Any goddamn Celestical
Including Seraphoom and Cheruboom
“You Africans, please listen to me as Africans
And you non-Africans, listen to me with open mind
Love it!
How dare the premier ignore my invitations?
He’ll have to go
So too the bunch he luncheons with
It’s second on my list of things to do
At the top I’m stopping by
Your place of work and acting like
I haven’t dreamed of you and I
And marriage in an orange grove
You are the only thing
In any room you’re ever in
I’m stubborn, selfish and too old
I sat you down and told you how
The truest love that’s ever found is for oneself
You pulled apart my theory
With a weary and disinterested sigh
So yes, I guess I’m asking you
To back a horse that’s good for glue and nothing else
But find a man that’s truer than
Find a man that needs you more than I
Sit with me a while
And let me listen to you talk about
Your dreams and your obsessions
I’ll be quiet and confessional
The violets explode inside me
When I meet your eyes
Then I’m spinning and I’m diving
Like a cloud of starlings
Darling, is this love?
Starlings by Elbow
Guy Garvey is a wonderful lyricist. I wish I liked his band more.
(Tell you what though: he means “uninterested” not “disinterested”)
If you want a lover
I’ll do anything you ask me to
And if you want another kind of love
I’ll wear a mask for you
If you want a partner
Take my hand
Or if you want to strike me down in anger
Here I stand
I’m your man
If you want a boxer
I will step into the ring for you
And if you want a doctor
I’ll examine every inch of you
If you want a driver
Climb inside
Or if you want to take me for a ride
You know you can
I’m your man
Ah, the moon’s too bright
The chain’s too tight
The beast won’t go to sleep
I’ve been running through these promises to you
That I made and I could not keep
Ah but a man never got a woman back
Not by begging on his knees
Or I’d crawl to you baby
And I’d fall at your feet
And I’d howl at your beauty
Like a dog in heat
And I’d claw at your heart
And I’d tear at your sheet
I’d say please, please
I’m your man
And if you’ve got to sleep
A moment on the road
I will steer for you
And if you want to work the street alone
I’ll disappear for you
If you want a father for your child
Or only want to walk with me a while
Across the sand
I’m your man
If you want a lover
I’ll do anything you ask me to
And if you want another kind of love
I’ll wear a mask for you.
A really obvious one, but it would probably be this:
Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks
When you’re tryin’ to be so quiet
We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin’ you to defy it
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind
Yep. That’s about as good as words get.
Jarvis knew a good lyric…
I know you won’t believe it’s true,
I only went with her ‘cos she looks like you.
You cannot quote that line and leave out the glorious “MY GOD!” that follows it.