Had a chuckle listening to Bon Scott
Gonna be a rock ‘n’ roll singer
Gonna be a rock ‘n’ roll star
Gonna be a rock ‘n’ roll singer
I’m gonna be a rock ‘n’ roll
A rock ‘n’ roll star
Yes I are!
Grammatical crimes in the name of a rhyme
by 102 Comments
Then, for a change of pace I put on Astral Weeks.
Exhibit B – Madam George
In the corner playing dominoes in drag
The one and only Madame George
And then from outside the frosty window raps
She jumps up and says, Lord, have mercy I think it’s the cops
And immediately drops everything she gots
This is certainly a crime of pronunciation :
Are you going to be threatened by
Those who have and those who have not
Those that play the power game
Who dangle jobs like a donkey’s carr-ot.
An otherwise tremendous song though – (Walls Come Tumbling Down, Style Council)
Weller does criminal grammar too. Who can forget English Rose, no matter how hard they may try?
ooooh that’s ‘orrible
all the worse coz it reminded me of Elvis C doing “She”
Thanks for reminding me of EC doing S. A horrible moment.
What’s he rhyming the ‘she’ with, Gatz?
He isn’t, unless you count ‘me’ a couple of words before. There’s assonance with ‘seas’ in the following line but no strict rhyming pattern in the lyric.
Overall it’s a clever piece of writing by the standards of song lyrics, which is all the more reason to wonder what him was thinking or what came over he.
‘Came over he’.
Hurr!
Heart’s In Dreams is more a crime against syntax than grammar, but is odd for 2 main reasons (I’m not ruling out the possibility of others):
1, putting words in Yoda order it is. 2, it isn’t even necessary to force the rhyme. What’s wrong with:
It gets round the awkward punctuation, which as I recall is audible in performance.
These Dreams isn’t it? Or should I say, isn’t it These Dreams?
“Who’s gonna love you/As much as I?”
The case rests.
First conditional form, used for a possible or likely situation: If looks can kill, they probably will.
Second conditional form, used for an unlikely or hypothetical situation: If looks could kill, they probably would.
Using “could” with “will” is a mismatch, Pete. Go stand in the corner.
Not sure if it’s grammatical or just a bit clunky but,
“No more nights by the telly,
no more nights nappies smelly…”
in Squeeze’s Up the Junction sticks out a bit (love the record though).
It’s a funny one. Pretty much every half-rhyme is a clunker, there’s a fair bit of tortured sentence structure, it has no chorus, there’s the famous bit about taking her to an incubator to give birth – but pretty much everyone, including me, loves the song.
Yeah, I’ve seen countless people on the internet quoting lines from “Up the Junction” that are supposed to be crap, but no one ever quotes …
“She gave birth to a daughter
Within a year a walker
She looked just like her mother….
…If there could be another”
… which is simply brilliant.
I’ve said it before but… Cool for Cats.
“Arrows in his hats”. He’s wearing two or more hats – fuck is he, Tommy Cooper?
I saw Squeeze at a festival on Saturday and made a point of listening out for this. I’m pretty sure that Difford sings ‘at these days, possibly since you pointed out his error.
What do you want to make those eyes at me for?
I go ape!
Ninety nine decisions treat
Ninety nine ministers meet
To worry, worry, super scurry
Call the troops out in a hurry
I’ve got ninety nine problems but a bitch is not one of them.
The star/are rhyme appears much earlier in the great Roger Miller’s “Kansas City Star”:
“Kansas City Star
That’s what I are!”
An insanely fantastic song.
I was trying to think of a Dylan example. He does cheeky things to sentences and stretching out words to achieve rhymes and maintain metre in songs but can’t recall grammatical crimes.
It’s jokey number designed to mimic Springsteen so it may not count, but the Wilburys’ Dylan song Tweeter and the Monkey Man has the chorus
A Dylan example?
And it ain’t no use in a-turnin’ on your light, babe
The light I never knowed
An’ it ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe
I’m on the dark side of the road
Nobel prize, you say?
Singing in hick-dialect there, as he frequently did in the earlier days, before he started name-dropping poets and such.
“..and even the President of the United States
must have to stand naked.”
Must and have to?
Ah but – the SONG! Impossible to read the lyrics without hearing it. Dolly Parton does a great version – go on, give it a click, cheer your old bad self right up:
Live version here, which I find very moving, somehow – the way she really inhabits the song, acts it out with looks and gestures. Wotta voice, wotta talent.
Bryan Ferry’s version is very good also/also very good (delete according to taste).
“Maybe now Baby, I’ll do what I should have did”. Deacon Blue – Real Gone Kid. A crime against the English language.
Yes convicted.
Bailiff, send them down.
Book ’em, Danno.
Whack his pee-pee!
Thought she had her head on her shoulder
Cos I’m feeling twice as older
Bearing in mind that it’s a character in the song saying this, not the person singing it.
The Palace by Father John Misty
“Last night I wrote a poem
Man, I must have been in the poem zone”
More a crime of pronunciation really, with poem needing to be pronounced pome.
Love the song though.
My favourite of these is Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A” – “I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free.”
Regina over at AmIRight.com exposes the grammar offense. Her analysis is spot-on and matches the pompous, snobbery of the song in her critique:
While the singer’s patriotic sentiments are touching, the relationship of dependent and independent clauses here just doesn’t work. That is because the connector, “where”, is a place-referent connector and therefore needs an antecedent of place in the independent clause. But there is no antecedent of place. That is to say, “I’m proud to be in America, Where at least I know I’m free” would work grammatically, but the actual lines here don’t, since “an American” does not imply a place, but is followed by “where”, which needs to refer back to a place.
Excellent work, don’t you think?
Why would I think?
Ain’t nothin’ but a song.
Another constant: all those songs are pretty shit. Maybe the authores just couldn’t be bothered to improve the lyric realising what base metal they had?
Barring ‘madam George’, that is.
..and Embarrassment. And Real Gone Kid. And Kansas City Star. And Games Without Frontiers.
But you knew that really.
I will admit to a certain impetuousness – it’s been a hard day
The strangely (and erroneously, as far as I can see – unless David Icke’s theories are applicable) self-defined “Lizard King” can be forgiven for the appalling grammar of: “Took a look around, see which way the wind blow. Where the little girls in their Hollywood bungalows” (should there be a question mark?) but I can never get past “If they say I never loved you, you know they are a liar” without wincing.
We is stoned immaculate.
I always treasured “brain is squirming like a toad”. But, you know, he sings his shit so well I don’t care.
“I’m crazy! I’m stupid!
I shoot an arrow like Cupid!
I use a word that don’t mean nothin!
Like lupid!”
Digital Underground – The Humpty Dance
“Songs she sang to me,
Gifts she brang to me”
Neil Diamond “Play Me”
Bill Withers:
“Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone”
So there is sunshine now she’s gone?
Ray Parker makes the same double-negative assertion in Ghostbusters:
“I aint afraid of no ghost”
I heard the story of the Ghostbusters song a few weeks ago. It seems that for reasons unknown he (Ray Parker Jr) had about an hour to record it and had only the bare bones of the song actually in his head. Local schoolchildren provided the shouted chorus and when he handed it in, he thought he was done for in the music biz because it was made in such a hurry with children shouting all over it.
No dude it’s just colloquial. It means isn’t /aren’t any. It’s like youve never heard any black music.
More AC/DC – Let There Be Rock
“Let there be sound
There was sound
Let there be light
There was light
Let there be drums
There was drums
Let there be guitar
There was guitar
Oh, Let there be rock”
Drums is plural, therefore there were drums
Does Neil Diamond’s “Songs she sang to me, songs she brang to me” count?
Nobody ever loved me like she does
Oh, she does, yeah, she does
And if somebody loved me like she do me
Oh, she do me, yes, she does
That’s very rude. 😳
No it aren’t
Don’t brang him down Tig !
Just twigged to a Dylan corker
Lay Lady Lay
Lay across my big brass bed
He wants her to produce loads of eggs. See also Lay Down Sally, which may be more to do with sexual activity.
One of the rare slip ups from the UK’s dominance of Eurovision was “One Step Furter” by Bucks Fizz wake-hoppers, Bardo in the 1982 competition.
Aside from the questionable lyric “you coulda turned around and hit me and I wouldn’t have cared” there was an absolute howler towards the end. This is what happens when the English try to sound American and cool with their pop socks, yo-yos and Levis jeans. Ready?:
“I shoulda tooken one step further”
‘Looking for a little romarnce/Given half the chance”
Well, you would, wouldn’t you
Ironically, if he sang it properly – ie in a northern accent – it would work.
It would still be a shit record though.
David Ford (who I may have mentioned once or twice) has a song Waiting for the Storm which includes this line:
O my lord I can’t believe
All these crimes which are accused of me
The first time I heard it, just after it was written, I told him this syntactic car crash would cost him three points of his poetic licence. Obviously he ignored me, and recored it that way anyway. But he says that very time he has sung it, which is hundreds of times over the years, he dies a little when he gets to that line. He’s even stopped and scowled at me, if I’m in the room.
On my 50th birthday he very kindly did it properly, just the once: (1:14 here)
I’m reliably informed that it doesn’t mean a thing if it hasn’t got that swing.
Furthermore, I most certainly am not misbehaving.
I suspect Frank Zappa was fully aware of the grammatical rules he was breaking here and just didn’t care.
“Do you know what you are?
You are what you is.
You is what you am.
A cow don’t make ham.
You ain’t what you’re not
So see what you got.
You are what you is
And that’s all it ’tis”
It hasn’t, it isn’t, it even ain’t!
Is you is or is you ain’t my baby? Various offenders there. Louis Jordan had previous too.
It’s not *quite* the same thing, more scansion than rhyme I suspect, but I need very little encouragement to exclaim that…
“it’s loud and tasteless and I’ve heard it before
You shout it while you’re dancing on the-er dance floor”
One of my favourites is from Alice Cooper:
Well we got no class
And we’ve got no principles
And we got no intelligence
We can’t even think of a word that rhymes”
Brilliant
Yes, it is. Right up there with the Turtles’ “you’re my pride and joy etcetera.”
That would be “innocence”, Twang, Maybe even “principals”. Brilliant indeed.
Here, a mild Motown classic one which has always bugged me:
“I’m gonna make you love me, yes I will, yes I will”
Some, I would even say most, of the above examples are just people having fun with our lovely English language, well aware and feeling good about breaking the rules to make a rhyme.
Because sometimes the rhyme is more important than the rules.
Well, yes.
Just as we are having a bit of fun.
Point taken. Still no justification for Weller though, Christ!
No grammatical flaw, just plain awful
Dylan -Sign Language
You speak to me with sign language
While I’m eating a sandwich
“I am”… I said
To no one there
And no one heard at all
Not even the chair
“I am”… I cried
“I am”… said I
And I am lost and I can’t even say why
I have about one billionth of the talent of Neil Diamond but please allow me to point and laugh at the “not even the chair” line.
Ha! Ha! Ha! (point) – yeah Neil! Like, chairs are known for excellent hearing, aren’t they?
That and Holly Holy my fave tracks by the I’m A Believer hitmaker
He was probably referring to the Gestalt therapy ’empty chair’ intervention. Probably.
Midge Ure is guilty of getting his was/were muddled:
As was/were Ponce:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vot0lojni3k
Prince makes up for it with a nice piece of grammatical correctness in “Nothing compares 2 U”:
” … I can see whomever I choose”
Top marks for the use of “whomever” there, Mr Prince, sir!
Bridge Over Troubled Water.
No, not the original, I am sure Mr Simon would never be ungrammatical. However, Miss Franklin adds her own introduction where the backing singers repeatedly sing, “Still water run deep, yes it do.” I had a friend, a primary school teacher, who would always yell, “DOES”.
Thing is, why couldn’t they sing ‘does’ in the first place? There isn’t a rhyme that had to be made. Or was it just to avoid that sibilant ‘s’?
Singers just love to go “oo”.
Exhibit A
Sympathy for the devil.
Exhibit B
Funky Gibbon.
As Lou said:
…and the coloured girls go Does D-Does D-Does D-Does-be Does Does D-Does
What the fuck is an erster?
A type of shellfish in a Hull restaurant?
Errr nerrr, slaaaaamy!
Don’t you buy that from a Hull delicatessen?
Dernt kner. I ernly get chorizerr, prosciutterr and pepprerrni.
This ain’t no fascist groove thang!
This isn’t a grammatical error but I always loved T’in Lizzy’s
“Tonight there’s going to be a jailbreak, somewhere in this town” – maybe it’ll be at the Prison?
This may need to be a separate thread….
This one often gets mentioned here and, as I always say, there are loads of prisons in London.
Stupid place to build prisons. So many routes to escape, and the streets are full of criminals anyway.
Build a wall!
A bigly wall!
Dublin has a number of prisons so it’s not as dumb a notion as it first seems.
@Gary is somewhat presumptuous to think an Irish band would be referring to London. Written in 1976 it was possibly referencing or inspired by the audacious 1973 helicopter assisted escape from Mountjoy Prison in Dublin.
To quote Phil Lynott’s own words (albeit out of context, in a different order and with my name added); “I might have written Jailbreak about London, perhaps. So Gary’s probably right as always.”
Not a lyrical faux pas as such, but I’ve always been puzzled at Leo Sayer being insistent that “I won’t let the show go on” when the song is called The Show Must Go On. Apparently. he was very unhappy at Three Dog Night’s cover of the song, which changed the lyric to the more logical “I must let the show go on”.
New Order’s World (the Price of Love) is tremendous – but there’s a line that needs changing
“That’s the price of love
(Can you feel it?)
If you could buy it now
How long would it last?”
Right. So. The “price of love” is the concept. When you talk about price, you want to know what that price is. So the primary question is always “how much?”.
So that last line – surely – should be something like:
“How much would it cost?” or (better) “how much would you need?”.
Thank you for your time.
Change Barney’s magnificent lyrics? I am disgusted. I think you are a pig, you should be in a zoo.
You caught him at a bad time, so why don’t you…
I suppose this is a pronunciation rather than grammar but still, stand up in the dock, Altered Images.
I would like to climb high in a tree
I could be happy, I could be happy
Or go to Skye on my holidee
Updated Version:
Or go to Skype on me holidee
The whole of Ian Dury’s Billericay Dickie but this in particular
Had a love affair with Nina
In the back of my Cortina
A seasoned up hyena
Could not have been more obscener
She took me to the cleaners
And other misdemeanours
But I got right up between her
Rum and her Ribena
As for the first line of Clevor Trever…
Ian Dury also invented words for the sake of a rhyme.
Splittingemness
(There Ain’t Half Been Some Clever Bastards)