h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Don't get weekends?

RF

The concept of having the weekend off whilst floating around in a spacesuit in your rocket ship is a bit strange if you ask me.

But on the subject of that song: "I miss the earth so much I miss my wife" sings Elton John

Deb

Well, he did have a wife at one point in the '80s. Mind you he was on drugs for most of the decade.

Listening to Dermot O'Leary yesterday afternoon play my all time favourite Eurovision song (and yes it's a rich source...):

Ding a dong every hour
when you pick a flower
even when your lover is gone gone gone

that looks like it was written

by

ee
cummings!

For a more subtle one, how about some Folk?

"The cuckoo she's a pretty bird
She sings as she flies
She never cries cuckoo
Till the first of July"

1) Cuckoos are not pretty. They're rather plain and brown. http://www.kazakhstanbirdtours.com/gallery/common-cuckoo-kaz.jpg

2) Cuckoos don't sing, they cuckoo - and they don't do that while they fly.

3) Cuckoos only call in May.

On the whole, that song makes me think that someone was trying to write about a lark, but needed a bird with two syllables.

Kazhakstanbirdtours.com?

"Skylark" would've solved the problem.

RF

more bad lyrics:
Why don't you scream and shout it
Too bad too bad about it
Why don't you just scream and shout it
Too bad too bad about it- Michael Jackson

And a Christmas song with bad grammer

It's the holiday season
With the whoop-de-do and hickory dock
And don't forget to hang up your sock
"Cause just exactly at 12 o'clock
He'll be coming down the chimney
Coming down the chimney
Coming down the chimney, down!
the word 'down' twice in one sentence- (Kay Thompson)from 'The Holiday Season'

Most of the songs that came out in the 'LSD era' (c. 1967-68) had pretty terrible lyrics. I mean I know they were on mind-altering drugs, but that's no excuse. To cite just one example, here's 'Incense And Peppermints' by Strawberry Alarm Clock:

Good sense, innocence, crippled and kind.
Dead kings and many things I can't define.
Oh Cajun spice, sweats and blushers your mind.
Incense and peppermints, the colour of thyme.

(It may also be 'the colour of time', which would fit in more nicely with the pretentiousness of mid-60s drug-influenced lyrics).

Speaking of bands that wrote drug-influenced lyrics in the mid-60s, The Beatles had some useless lyrics too, sometimes. I'm particularly thinking of 'Bang bang, Maxwell's silver hammer came down upon his head/Bang bang, Maxwell's silver hammer made sure that he was dead'.

On another tack, there's a song like 'California Girls' by the Beach Boys, in which Brian Wilson lists all the different kinds of girls he'd like to have sex with but can't because they don't live where he does.

How about:

"Love should be two words just like sunshine"
Frances Nero - Footsteps Following Me

I have seen different interpretations like:
"Love should be true words just like sunshine"
which removes the obvious error, but doesn't really make it any better.


Geggs

And I'm surprised no one has yet mentioned that lyric from Mel C's "If that were me"

I couldn't live without my phone.
But you don't even have a home.

It's meant to convey a culture difference, I guess, but it just makes you sound like a completely spoilt vacuous fool.


Geggs

One word: Friday. I win.

Ha! The Mel C example is one of my favourite awful examples.

My other one is by Bros.

'Most of my friends were strangers til I met them'.

Well, duh.