The music charts are unrecognisable today compared to what they were until about 2005 (around the time downloads counted towards 'sales'). What hasn't changed however, is the songwriters' penchant for ridiculous lyrics. Here's a few from the 2010s that will leave you scratching more than just your head...
Eminem – Love the way you lie
‘Now
you get to watch her leave out the window, guess that’s why they call it window
pane.’
Eminem there, practicing his routine for the Edinburgh festival next year. He’ll probably follow that up in his next song by saying something like, ‘She borrowed one of my tops, I guess that’s why they call it a s-hurt’ or ‘she was making cakes in the kitchen, I guess that’s why they call it b-aching’.
Ridin’ Solo – Jason Derulo
Following in the footsteps of Sean Paul, speaking your own name in a song seems to be the only way of distinguishing yourself from all of the other similar sounding singers in the charts.
‘I’m putting on my shades to cover up my eyes’, Jason says. So that’s what shades are for! I thought they were for combing your hair with. He tells us in this song that he is ‘ridin’ solo’ which makes the following line so disturbing:
Only Girl in the World – Rihanna
What’s my name? – Rihanna
‘The square root of 69 is 8 something, right? ‘Cause I’ve been tryna work it out.’ I’m not sure if this is meant to be rude or something but I’m not sure you can work out a square root without a calculator or a book of logarithms?
To
be clear, a G6 is a fictional aeroplane which is better than a G4 which does exist. With that nonsense aside, ‘Poppin’ bottles in
the ice like a blizzard, when we drink we do it right gettin slizzard. Sippin sizzurp in my ride, like Three 6, now
I’m feelin so fly like a G6.’ I often
pop my bottles in the ice just like a blizzard doesn’t. I often get slizzard too, on sizzurp. You?
This
is a song about high heels so I’m not going to be too harsh on the shallowness
of the words. ‘I don’t need a runway, I
got on my get ‘em girls, I got on my get ‘em girls, I can catwalk my way to the
front page, I got on my get ‘em girls, I got on my get ‘em girls.’
Actually, I am going to be harsh. My brain is starting to melt with inanity of the lyrics in the 10s. There must be someone out there writing something worth listening to. I know, I’ll ask Miley Cyrus.
‘So come on baby, keep provoking me, keep on roping me, like a Romeo, baby, pull me close, come on, here we go, here we go, here we go.’ Does she mean ‘rodeo’ or ‘Romeo’? I can’t remember the cowboy bit in Romeo and Juliette, can you?
Firework – Katy Perry
‘Cause
baby you’re a firework, come on show ‘em what your worth, make ‘em go ‘oh, oh,
oh!’ as you shoot across the sky.’
‘You
know you really wanna (hey), wanna taste my (woohoo), you know you wanna get a
peek, wanna see my (woohoo), you know you wanna put your lips, where my hips
are (woohoo), kiss all my (woohoo).’
‘Infect me with your love, fill me with your poison.’
Afterwards, whatever you do, make sure you go to the doctors.
Grenade – Bruno Mars
‘I’d catch a grenade for you.’
Under what circumstances would you have to catch a grenade for your girlfriend? If you’re having to do this on a regular basis to show her how much you love her, I’d consider asking her to move somewhere a little less ‘Grenadey’.
Don’t Stop The Party – Black Eyed Peas
As you’ve probably realised by now, Will.I.Am thinks he has invented a new form of music which transcends even the genius of Mozart, Bach and Beethoven. He thinks he has invented such an advanced arrangement of the musical form, he just has to blink and a masterpiece will form in front of his eyes. However, he is completely wrong and just looking at the first twenty two words of this song, nineteen of them are the word ‘don’t’. Genius.
Now you understand that, read these words and feel as sad as I do :
‘Get up off my genitals …kill you with my lyricals’.
Well, he got the second part right. It’s quite obvious that Will.I.Am’s second name isn’t Shakespeare.
Marry You – Bruno Mars
Word of advice to all you out there thinking of asking your partner to marry you. Try not to call your impending wedding ‘something dumb’ and definitely tell them that you definitely want to get married. Definitely don’t tell them that you think you want to get married.
‘It’s a beautiful night, we’re looking for something dumb to do, Hey baby, I think I wanna marry you.’
See what Billy Joel, I mean, Bruno Mars has just done there? Everything I said not to do. Why don’t these people listen to me?
Give me everything – Pitbull
This song truly sickens me to the stomach. It really does. I’m going to exonerate Ne-Yo who was also on this track because I like him and I honestly think he didn’t know what he was doing. I think he was trying to crossover or what-have-you and got caught up in something he didn’t understand.
However, Armando Christian ‘Pitbull’ Pérez whose rapping I would rate as ‘intermediate level’, decides to tell us all to go and have intercourse with someone indiscriminately because, in his words, ‘we might not get tomorrow’. He tells this random stranger that he wants her to ‘give’ him ‘everything tonight’. He also tells us to ‘grab somebody sexy, tell ‘em hey’. This is of course regardless of their own feelings (because believe it or not Mr. Pitbull, women do have their own thoughts, needs and feelings) or whether they’d be happy for this short bald rapper with the worst ‘beard’ of all time to ‘love love you tonight’.
It actually makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit. At least the song has a happy ending as he tells us, ‘I got locked up like Lindsay Lohan’. All us sexy people can sleep easy tonight then. Phew!
Whip My Hair – Willow
I wonder if Willow would have had a singing and acting career if her parents weren’t Hollywood A-listers. Probably not based on these lyrics :
‘Don’t let haters keep me off my grind, keep my head up and I know I’ll be fine, keep fighting until I (yea), am down and I feel like giving up, I whip my hair back and forth, I whip my hair back and forth (just whip it).’
Try it. Cheers you right up; or gives you motion sickness, one or the other.
Abortion – Lil’ Wayne
I know what you’re thinking. How could a song called ‘Abortion’ have bad lyrics? Well, it does, and here’s a list of what I’m going to call atrocities that are committed in this song
- He rhymes ‘abortion’ with ‘unimportant’
- He uses the phrase ‘palms in
your pants’
- He says ‘I’m a hell of a
smoker’, like it’s something you can be good at
- There’s lots of swearing and
dropping of the ‘n’ word
- He quotes Ronan Keating
- He makes vulgar references to sexual practices
He needs Jesus!
Party – Beyonce
‘We got the swag sauce, she drippin’ swagu.’
Well, it’s not quite William Blake is it? You might expect something so inane to come out of Kanye’s mouth but then Andre 3000 gets involved and smashes us all across the face with this deeply unpleasant image.
‘F- with me baby, I’ll make it milk ‘til it drip down your knees’
It’s so wrong, the word ‘wrong’ seems wrong.
Run The World – Beyonce
Apparently, girls rule the world. Not quite a message of feminism which should encourage all humans to treat each other equally, rather an argument to begin a masculinism movement in response. One reason Beyonce said she wanted to write this song was to ‘give women strength’. Why would you need to do that if they run the world? Hasn’t been thought through very well has it. Then she says:
‘I remind you, I’m so hood with this’
She’s as far away from being ‘hood’ as she is from working in a call centre to feed herself and her family.
Megaman – Lil Wayne
I’ve come to a decision. Lil Wayne is the worst lyricist of all time with the worst stage name of all time. It doesn’t matter if in the future, all songs pop songs have to be written containing nothing but words of one syllable or less, Lil Wayne will still hold the title.
‘I’m a diamond in the rough, like a baby in the trash’
It’s beyond terrible. This man needs to get another job. Or Jesus.
Born This Way – Lady Gaga
‘Whether you’re white, black, beige, chola descent. You’re Lebanese, you’re Orient.’ Cultural sensitivity isn’t Gaga’s strong point is it? Just gotta make it rhyme. And beige? Who is beige??
Friday – Rebecca Black
The entire song.
Little Things – One Direction
Oh my sweet baby Jocelyn. Boys under the age of 18 should not be allowed to try and give women compliments. Saying things like, ‘I know you’re fat and smell of cheese a bit, but I still love you’, is not, I repeat, is not a compliment. I urge you never to use any of the lines in this song in real life otherwise you will soon be single and probably have a hand-print on your left cheek.
‘I know you’ve never loved the crinkles by your eyes when you smile. You’ve never loved your stomach or your thighs … but I’ll love them endlessly’
Even if she says these things, you’re not allowed to ever say that out loud. Trust me.
‘You still have to squeeze into your jeans, but you’re perfect to me’
Seriously, you can’t say that to a woman. Please stop saying these things.
‘Maybe you’ll love yourself like I love you’
Ok, I think it’s time to move on… (again)
Call Me Maybe – Carly Rae Jepsen
There is a weird lyrical phenomenon which crops up now and again and each time it does, the lyricist in question thinks they’re the first person to have had the idea. The general gist is that you ‘love’ someone before you’ve met them. Michael Bublé had a song called ‘Just haven’t met you yet’. He’s under the illusion that you can talk directly to someone in your distant future. You can’t, by the way. Savage Garden told us that they ‘loved you before I met you’, which again makes no sense; unless of course both singers are actually spiritual mediums with precognitive powers.
Carly Rae (Carly to her friends) is the latest to use this lyrical device, telling us that ‘before you came into my life I missed you so bad’. No you didn’t, stop it.
Boyfriend – Justin Bieber
Bieber is guilty of things thousands of other artists are guilty of but he was what was wrong with 2012’s music industry so I’m going to make an example of him. ‘If I was your boyfriend, I’d never let you go’, he squeaks. Proving that he thinks of women like fish, catching one and then taking her home to cook and eat rather than release it back into the river.
‘I can take you places you ain’t never seen before’. This isn’t much of a boast because he was 18 when he sang this line and most 18 year olds haven’t seen much past the insides of their bedrooms. ‘I’ve got money in my hands that I’d really like to blow’, the rich teenager brags, using his money rather than his personality to attract a mate. ‘Swag swag swag’, he continues, which is one way to describe money you stole – stole from unsuspecting eight year olds who don’t know what else to spend their pocket money on. ‘Chillin’ by the fire while we eatin’ fondue’. He knows how to live doesn’t he?
‘I could be your Buzz Lightyear’, ah, still playing with your Toy Story merchandise at the age of 18 are we? ‘Fly across the globe’, he adds. I don’t remember that bit in any of the Toy Story movies.
‘I am ‘ma make you shine bright like you’re laying in the snow, brrr’.
You’re going to what now? And the word is ‘lying’. Seriously.
Birthday Cake – Rihanna ft. Chris Brown
Rihanna did a lot of things featuring Chris Brown in 2009 but despite that, she allowed him to team up with her on this 2012 travesty. Please write in and tell me why these lyrics are a good idea :
‘It’s not even my birthday but he want to lick the icing off’, which is obviously what you do on your birthday. ‘He want that cake cake cake cake cake cake cake cake cake cake’. Is it just me or does he want that cake? I get the feeling that ‘cake’ is a euphemism, like every other innocent word in pop songs in the 2010s. ‘I’ma make you my bitch’. Lovely to see them respecting each other like that isn’t it?
Fat Joe ft. Rick Ross & Juicy J – Instagram that Hoe
‘Instagram that hoe, Instagram that hoe, Instagram that hoe, Instagram that hoe’. Next week they’re going to Instagram a rake and some secateurs.
Stupid Hoe – Nicki Minaj
‘You a stupid hoe, you a, you a stupid hoe You a stupid hoe, you a, you a stupid hoe’ Next week, Nicki will be shouting at a bag of compost.
Justin Bieber – All bad
More nonsense pouring out of this young boy’s mouth here. I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt when he says ‘Instigators, like pouring fire on propane’. He might be trying to be ‘funny’ by reversing the whole ‘pouring petrol on the fire’ joke by saying he’s the fire or something. But the award for most sexist line in a song in 2013 goes to Justin Bieber, Andre Harris, Jason P.D. Boyd and Ryan Toby because one/all of them are responsible for this :
‘Ooh, you know females and how they like to run their mouths’.
You know males and how they like to make sweeping generalisations about women?
B.E.A.T. – Selena Gomez
Whether this song was originally written for Rihanna is unclear but I hope someone doesn’t walk into the room at the wrong time when Selena starts singing ‘It’s a big bad world but I ain’t ashamed to like the lights in my hand and the beat in my face, beat in my face, beat in my face.’ Really, you need to think these things through.
Blurred Lines – Robin(’s) Thicke
How much respect has Robin’s Thicke got for women? Well, I’ll let you decide as he’s got bigger lawyers than me :
‘You
the hottest bitch in this place
I
feel so lucky
Hey,
hey, hey
You
wanna hug me
Hey,
hey, hey
What rhymes with hug me?’
Not content with those aberrations against the English language he also objectifies women in his video and tells us that there is a ‘blurred line’ between a woman consenting to activities in the bedroom and not. His wife left him not long after this song was released, finally teaching him that women do have personalities and a mind of their own and won’t do anything he asks them to do because he is a man. Poor Robin.
Heaven - Jay-Z
‘I arrive at the pearly gates, I had luggage meaning, I had baggage’. I think Jay Zed should add caveats, footnotes and references to all of his lyrics.
Drake – Versace
We’ve all got our musical heroes and we’ve all been in awe of something they wrote or sang. When we’re young and see them on TV, almost worshipping them as idols of a world we couldn’t hope to be part of. Freddie Mercury strutting about the stage like a peacock because he was an amazing artist with a fabulous voice and every right to be in command of all of our attentions. Then there’s Michael Jackson who transcended being a human for a while until the stories about his personal life came out. Before that, he was revered as a genius of dance and performance with genre defining songs such as ‘Billie Jean’ and ‘Beat it’. There are many more music icons who will live forever in the musical halls of fame and not one of them ever sang about how talented they were, how rich they were or how many awards they’d won. Because they didn’t have to. They became these personalities and lived the idol life style, leaving it up to us to appreciate how many awards they had and how big their houses were.
Then there was a rapper called Drake. He started singing about how we should get off his property because rap is a gated community. He then postulated how rap must be changing because he is ‘at the top’, ‘drowning in compliments’, that he is ‘selling a million first week’ (which other artist ever sang about how many records they were selling?), everything he owns is ‘Versace’ like this is a badge of honour, throwing the wealth he accumulated by dancing like a drunk uncle at a wedding and ‘rapping’ in our working class faces, that he’s got an album coming out in September (who mentions they’ve got an album out soon in a song lyric??).
‘I’ve been so quiet, I got the world like ‘what the F- is he planning?’. Nobody cares what you’re planning and when you go quiet it’s a blessing for all of us, believe me. He then brags about his ‘hundred inch TV’ and takes narcissism to a new level by commenting ‘damn, I look great on it’. He then uses the N- word three times in the next three sentences. No matter what the context, it’s still a highly offensive word and it’s being used more and more in rap these days.
Now, despite advertising Versace by saying the name over and over in the chorus, Drake dips into an unacceptable barrel, dipped into several times by the previous few lyrics I’ve mentioned. The one where Drake thinks being a man gives him the right to treat a woman however he likes regardless of whether they object. He raps :
‘I’m tryna give Halle Berry a baby and no one can stop me.’
I’m pretty sure Halle Berry can for a start and there’s that little thing called ‘the law’ as well. He continues to call women ‘that bitch’ and ‘your bitch’ (like she is the property of someone), mentions several other brand names, mainly cars, drops the N word another few unnecessary times, and mentions how rich he is a few more times.
Please never release any more ‘music’ ever again please. Next!
Half of me – Geri Halliwell
‘I wanna have your baby, gotta have you like crazy and iron your shirts’
That’s some ‘Girl Power’ right there. It’s like 1996 never happened.
Walks like Rihanna – The wanted
‘She can’t sing, she can’t dance, but who cares, she walks like Rihanna’ Well that’s weird. I’m not sure what position they’re looking to fill here, certainly not backing singer or dancer obviously. However, the ability to walk like a woman from Barbados seems to have got her the gig, whatever it is.
Double Rainbow - Katy Perry
I’m guessing Katy Perry didn’t get very good marks in Geography at school, let alone physics. Apparently, lightening is really loud and thunder is really bright.
‘Our chemistry was more than science it was deafening; loud like lightning it was striking you couldn’t deny it.’
What are you on about?
‘Timber’ – Pitbull
Ignoring the childish unfunny innuendo that is even too childish for a carry-on film, comedy rapper Pitbull asks us to ‘Look up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, Nah, it’s just me.’ Imagine looking up into the sky and seeing a tiny bald man with a wildly false self-image hurtling through the sky. You’d just ignore him and get about your business.
Jason Derulo – Talk Dirty
To quote the Chuckle Brothers (as I do quite frequently), ‘Oh dear; Oh dear, oh dear; Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.’ In fact, Dad-dancer Jason Derulo dips into a barrel of discarded jokes even the Chuckle Brothers wouldn’t find funny for this ditty from 2014. Exerting his masculinity on us in huge dollops, he impresses exactly nobody by telling us that he’s about to indulge in some adult behaviour with two other people at the same time. Classy I’m sure. I bet his self-respect and dignity will be well intact after meeting two strangers in a foreign country and performing what should be an act of respect and love with them both, before even having a semblance of a conversation with either.
‘Uno, met a friend in Rio, dos, she was all on me-o, tres we could, menage a three-o’, he verbally spews.
I would say I’ve lost all respect for Jason but I never had any to start with.
Marry me - Jason Derulo
Proof, if it was ever needed, that men rarely think long term and when they do, they tend to just come out with sentences they haven’t pre-planned.
‘A hundred and five is the number that comes to my head when I think of all the years I wanna be with you’
So you don’t want to be with her in year one hundred and six? Also, Ed Sheeran recently sang ‘I’ll be loving you ‘til we’re 70’. As soon as you reach 71, which in these days of medical advances, is quite possible, what then? And who is going to be impressed by you telling them you’ll love them until you’re 70? Honestly.
Money on my mind – Sam Smith
‘When
I go home I tend to close the door’.
Tend to? So sometimes you just leave it open? Odd, odd man.
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