To me, the worst song ever written is “Feliz Navidad” by Jose Feliciano. I know…it’s a Christmas classic and some people love it, but I despise it like I despise high taxes and lying politicians. I despise it like I despise stepping on gum or getting a group text. Have you looked at the lyrics? The song is three minutes and three seconds long. There are 232 words. All of them are “Feliz Navidad…Prospero ano y Felicidad…I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas…From the bottom of my heart.” That’s 19 words. My second sentence of this paragraph is 22 words long. I timed myself, and it took me 27 seconds to type the second sentence. I want a song that takes longer than 27 seconds to write.
But I didn’t start this blog post because of “Feliz
Navidad.” I started it because I listened to an Adele song. Wow, she sings
great, and it was a pretty song, sung by a woman who can charge $1400 for a
concert ticket in the fourth deck of a stadium that seats 40,000 people. It got
to the chorus, and she sang these words. “But I set fire to the rain. Watched it
pour as I touched your face. Well, it burned while I cried ’cause I heard it
screaming out your name.” What? She watched the pouring, burning-on-fire rain
while she touched your face, and she cried because the pouring, burning-on-fire
rain screamed out your name? It would make more sense to set rain to the fire,
but that makes almost no sense either. I mean, you could flood a fire, but
surely you can’t set fire to a flood, can you?
And this motivated me. What are some other ridiculous
lyrics?
Pharrell Williams has a catchy song called “Happy” that has
a fun music video which might even motivate a person with a sour disposition to
get up and dance and be “happy.” But what about the first line of the chorus?
“Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof.” I’m just going to be
transparent here. I’ve never felt like a room of any kind in my entire life,
and I don’t know why I would. But if I felt like a room and the roof was
missing, wow, I can only imagine how happy that would make me. Aussie comedian,
Kate Langbroek, asked Pharrell why a room without a roof was happy. His
response was it was “metaphorical for one’s space without limit.” Oh. Except a
room has four walls, limiting anyone in it.
And if I needed a space without limit, and metaphorically speaking I was in a
room without a roof, wouldn’t I need to be able to fly to get to the space
without limits? It’s a dumb lyric.
There’s a song called “Summer Girls” by LFO. None of the
lyrics make sense but I cherry picked two verses for the sake of time and
space. These are the ridiculous lines:
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
Stayed all summer then went back home
Macaulay Culkin wasn’t Home Alone
Fell deep in love, but now we ain’t speaking
Michael J. Fox was Alex P. Keaton
I was so impressed by these lyrics, I took three minutes to
write my own to mirror them:
You’re the best girl, and I love you
Magic Johnson, jersey 32.
When you take a bite, you belch
like a toad
George Martin wrote Game of Thrones
Stayed all summer then went back to
school
Ryan Gosling wasn’t Deadpool
We played cards inside your trailer
Ron Howard was Opie Taylor
I may have written a hit song.
The group, Sade, sang the classic
song, “Smooth Operator,” co-written by Sade Adu and Ray St. John, with the
classic line, “Coast to coast, LA to Chicago.” Together, they only managed to
get about 70% across the United States, but I’m giving them both 50% credit for
the stupid lyric.
Oasis has a song called “Champagne
Supernova." In it are these classic lines:
“Slowly walkin’ down the hall
Faster than a cannonball
Where were you while we were
getting high?”
Now, here is an actual
metaphor, Pharrell Williams. A metaphor is a comparison between two things that
are otherwise unrelated. With a metaphor, the qualities of one thing are
figuratively carried over to another. You know, like how a person is like a
cannonball because a person walks slow but faster than a fast thing that shoots
out of a cannon. I looked it up. A cannonball travels about 820 feet per second,
which is considerably slower than a person ambling down a hallway.
In “Vertigo” by U2, Bono masters
Spanish counting. “Uno, dos, tres, catorce!” One, two, three, fourteen. When
asked about the lyric, Bono admitted alcohol might have been involved.
“Sk8er Boi” by Avril Lavigne begins
with these three lines:
“He was a boy
She was a girl
Can I make it any more obvious?”
You mean any more vague? Ambiguous?
Nebulous? Unclear? Imprecise? I used a thesaurus. She should have used a
dictionary.
The Killers have a song called “Human” where they posed a serious question. “I’m down on my knees, searching for the answer…Are we human or are we dancer?” Since the lyricist is searching close to the floor, I assume “dancer” is a tiny species I’m unaware of.
Rihanna sings the song “What’s My
Name?” where she attempts a math calculation in the midst of her song. “The
square root of 69 is 8 something, right?/ ’cause I’ve been tryna work it out.”
I don’t know if 69 is a sexual connotation with a nonsensical “root,” but with
a calculator she could’ve rounded this to approximately 8.31, and she could put
her pencil and eraser away.
Red Hot Chili Peppers has a song called “Suck My Kiss.” They sing, “K-I-S-S-I-N-G, Chicka chicka dee/ Do me like a banshee/ Low brow is how/ Swimming in the sound of bow wow wow.” Wow, wow, the title should be “My Kissing Song Sucks.”
Hillary Duff is the queen of logic in the song “So Yesterday.” She reminds us “If the light is off, then it isn’t on.” Whoever said a left-brained artist doesn’t have right-brained thinking skills hasn’t met Hillary Duff.
Prince wrote
“Superfunkycalifragisexy.” I hand-picked two lines from this sexy song. “Keep
the blood flowing down to your feet. Brother Lois will be around in a minute
with a bucket filled with squirreled meat.” The sexiness of this song is as
obvious as the fact Lois is a male, it’s normally difficult to keep the blood
flowing down to our feet, and everyone knows how to squirrel meat.
My final selection is “Sexy and I
Know It” by LMFAO. Here are the lyrics that probably took 27 seconds to write.
“Wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle yeah/ Wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle yeah,
yeah.” I like the two “yeah’s” at the end for variety. Certainly, the penning
of those words rivals Jose Feliciano’s talent for creatively stringing together
wonderful lyrics that ring in your head unmercifully for the rest of the day.
I wasn’t completely honest about why I wrote this blog. Yes, I saw strange Adele lyrics, but mostly I have been dealing with a mini-writer’s block. I’m writing a novel, but it’s been like the funny part of my brain stopped working. My sense of humor needed a kickstart, so I needed to do something about it. People have been visiting my blog lately in record numbers, so I decided to start there and find a topic where I could be sarcastic and light-hearted and make myself laugh a little. This is my writing tip of the day—mini- or maxi-writer’s block. Change gears and write about something else at least temporarily to see if it can get you jumpstarted again. And if you’re interested in one of my books where humor flowed out of me freely, check out the following link.
