I wanted to title this piece “Tomato Plus Lime Equals Mustard.” Tell me the truth – would you have stopped to click on something like that? You see, we think a lot here about what to entitle our posts, striving to be both honest and catchy. We hope whatever we choose will capture your interest for a little while.
I eventually decided “Tomato Plus Lime Equals Mustard” would not do that, so you get the title you see above. But I’m still just a wee bit torn about this. You see, “Tomato Plus Lime Equals Mustard” may sound nonsensical when you first see it.
But if you frequent webpages devoted to the mixing of colors, which for some unknown reason I do, then it makes perfect sense. Because if you take a dollop of tomato red paint and blend it together with another dollop of lime green, guess what you get? That’s right. A lovely mustard brown.
These rock songs have problematic lyrics
See, it’s all about context. With that in mind, let’s check out some classic song lyrics and ask ourselves, are they just plain stupid, as they may appear at first blush? Or do they genuinely convey a deeper meaning in some sort of ineffably poetic manner?
I’ll warn you upfront – you may not agree with my opinion. It has been known to happen before. Sometimes many times in a single conversation. But I’ll give it to you nonetheless, with a brief attempt at explaining the origin of that opinion.
For instance, were I to choose something simple – oh, I don’t know – let’s just say something like this:
“Someone left a cake out in the rain
I don’t think that I can take it
‘Cause it took so long to bake
And I’ll never have that recipe again”
Now I ask you, is that a good lyric or a bad lyric? The song is “MacArthur Park.” It was written by Jimmy Webb. The same Jimmy Webb who wrote “Wichita Lineman,” one of the most achingly beautiful songs in all of country music, along with dozens of other excellent songs.
“Macarthur Park” is not one of them. That chorus is inane. There’s nothing wrong with using baked goods as metaphors, but the execution here is utterly trite. I mean, who exactly left the cake out there in the rain when we are led to believe, the cake was a creation of the narrator himself?
And, come on – I know he’s saying he won’t have the recipe again in reference to the “ingredients” required for a love affair, but, it’s a freakin’ cake. Duncan Hines introduced cake mix in a box back in 1951. Webb wrote the song in 1968. He could have baked another cake. Or come up with a better metaphor.
OK – that’s just an example. Now we begin. Here are eight other song lyrics that strive toward poetry and achieve…. Let’s find out, shall we?
“Stairway to Heaven” - Led Zeppelin (1971)
“There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold
And she’s buying a stairway to heaven”
May as well start at the top. It’s one of the most iconic songs in the body of classic rock. That opening line, which gives the song its title, was written by Robert Plant. At least, I assume it was. The song is credited to him and Jimmy Page, but I’m guessing Plant wrote those lyrics. Page just made up all the cool guitar parts. And, as a stand-alone opening piece of imagery, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s actually a very good opener.
The problem is that the song doesn’t do anything with the concept. A “stairway to heaven” was not new. Plant didn’t make it up. Neil Sedaka had written a song with the same title more than a decade earlier. The Archers (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger) had made a very good fantasy film with that title in the ‘40s. (The American release of the film had that title. It had a different one in England.)
It has been used because it is a good concept. Finding a path toward righteousness – a stairway to heaven. Rather efficient, if you ask me. But the rest of the lyrics have nothing to do with finding a path toward righteousness. They have to do with … I don’t know … something bustling in your hedgerow. That renders the title pretentious in my book.
But, here’s a key point. The lyric’s pretentiousness does not ruin the song. Because it remains a dynamic piece of music. Defenders of the lyric claim that is all that matters. The words fit with the song. This is a point we will return to. It’s impossible to imagine this song with different lyrics but try for a moment. Could Plant have written more meaningful words and made the song even better? I’d like to believe so, but perhaps not.
Verdict: Hung jury
(Don’t worry, I’ll be more concise and more definitive the rest of the way.)
“Human” - The Killers (2008)
“Are we human, or are we dancer?”
Oh my, the internet still fumes over the grammar. Brandon Flowers, one of the credited songwriters and frontman of The Killers, seemed flabbergasted that people complained about the singular “dancer.” A certain segment of the grammar police wanted it to be “Are we human, or are we dancers.” As if that would have made everything all right.
It wouldn’t have. “Human” and “Dancer” are not easily recognizable counterparts. If you know the origin – “dancer” is a reference to a Hunter Thompson line about how sheeplike America had become – it does make sense. But out of context, “dancer” sounds like it would be creative and artistic. Flowers is attempting to juxtapose “human” against something mechanized, but I don’t think he succeeds.
Verdict: Bad lyrics
“Loser” - Beck (1993)
“In the days of chimpanzees, I was a monkey
Butane in my veins and I’m out to cut the junkie”
It isn’t as if Beck invented the loser song. The Everlys did “Cathy’s Clown" and the Beatles did “I’m a Loser” decades earlier. And that’s just modern pop. You can go back as far as there have been songs. Beck just happened to catch a particular wave of ‘90s emo self-loathing that struck a real chord in the post-Reagan years. A lot of young people had gotten absurdly rich in the 1980s. The ones who didn’t – well, they were the monkeys.
Absurdity is the key to Beck’s song. Radiohead and Smashing Pumpkins surrounded “Loser” with their own “woe is me” songs but they played it somewhat straighter. Beck’s entire self-pitying diatribe is based on the fact that he doesn’t fit in. Thus, his lyrics are all built on that theme. After the brilliant opening line, he follows it with utter nonsense. But it is nonsense in the service of a consistent message about somehow being a square peg.
Verdict: Good lyrics
“Close to the Edge: The Solid Time of Change” - Yes (1972)
“A seasoned witch could call you from the depths of your disgrace
And rearrange your liver to the solid mental grace”
Ah, prog rock. I didn’t want to pick on any one genre too much so it came down to Yes vs. King Crimson. “Pictures of a City” (“dream flesh love chase perfumed skin – greased hand teeth hide tinseled sin”) was kind of begging for inclusion. But I felt I could not leave Jon Anderson out of this discussion.
“Roundabout” was the first prog rock song I ever really fell in love with. But even as a kid, I somehow recognized that “in and around the lake – mountains come out of the sky and they stand there” was virtually meaningless. I mean, had he given the mountains some action – some movement – that might have been incongruously intriguing. But I digress. I didn’t come to talk about “Roundabout.”
In the first piece of their “Close to the Edge” suite, that opening line is average. “Depths of your disgrace” is the kind of line that could go either way. Will it lead to inventive self-reflection or to cliched wallowing? That second line offers another option. Meaningless gibberish.
In just nine words, Anderson manages two awkward and impenetrable phrases. I don’t know what “solid mental grace” is. But I suppose it is preferable to a rearranged liver, which sounds both meaningless and rather unpleasant. And to think, we waited through four minutes of musical introduction to reach these opening words.
I have read that Anderson – especially early in his career – gave little thought to the meaning of his lyrics, opting instead for words that fit his sonic landscape. I would humbly suggest that Queef Jerky is the only band I know to have made “liver” fit into a sonic landscape.
Verdict: Bad lyrics
“Test for Echo” - Rush (1996)
“Here we go – Vertigo – Video vertigo – Test for echo”
One day, I may be brave enough to admit in this type of forum that I really don’t like Rush at all. I find them mostly pretentious and boring. But I wouldn’t say that in front of a bunch of rabid Canadiens.
Oops.
Anyway, even though I find a lot of Neil Peart's lyrics unfathomably silly, I kind of think he nailed it in this post-O.J. Simpson commentary on how crime has become just another TV show. The “test for echo” phrase, which is an industry term for unwanted sound on a recording, succinctly sums up the trend in modern journalism to throw sensationalistic stories at the public to see which ones catch fire. Then, the news/entertainment complex bleeds it dry, often to the exclusion of other pertinent stories. I’m not sure “vertigo” is the right word here, but I’ll let that slide. It rhymes.
The only caveat I want to give about these lyrics is this: Lou Reed had already covered this territory a decade earlier in his song “Video Violence.” And Reed did it better. He is just as poetic as Peart, but his imagery is far more grounded in reality and less abstract.
Saying Lou Reed wrote better lyrics than someone else isn’t much of a dis. Reed wrote better lyrics than almost everybody, so I can still acknowledge that Peart wrote good ones here. And I don’t often say that, because… well, I’ll keep my opinion about Rush to myself.
Verdict: Good lyrics
“I Am the Walrus” - The Beatles (1967)
“Yellow matter custard, dripping from the dead dog’s eye”
I am a Beatles fanboy. Not the biggest Beatles fanboy, mind you. That would be my friend Jay. But I’m somewhere in the top 100,000. I have absolutely no problem with most of the more mystically -psychedelic wordplay they explored in the latter half of the 1960s. “Tomorrow Never Knows?” Neither do I, but that jumble of lyrics somehow makes sense to me. One of my favorite tracks is John’s “Cry Baby Cry,” a nursery rhyme full of nonsense that also somehow makes sense as a reference to a gothic past that we have romanticized.
But for me, this “Walrus” lyric simply crosses the line. There have been other intentionally repulsive images in rock songs that have worked, but what exactly is the intention with this one? Of course, people have been asking the same question about “Walrus” ever since it was released.
Lennon said repeatedly that there was no deep meaning. It was just a dream. Random imagery with creative musical accompaniment. That is an acceptable explanation. And it serves to exonerate a lyric like “Semolina pilchard – Climbing up the Eiffel Tower” which comes later.
Most of the lyrics in “Walrus” are of that variety. They engage vague curiosity about who the eggman is or why people seemed pissed off at Edgar Allan Poe. Custard from a dead dog’s eye is the only lyric that moves beyond that sense of curious engagement into outright emeticism. (That may not be a word, but it should be. It would mean “inducing vomiting.”)
Verdict: Bad lyrics
“Wash Jones” - Squirrel Nut Zippers (1995)
“I was talking to an oak tree when a cypress butted in
Out of car parts, a raven made a nest inside my skin”
Jimbo Mathus loves swampy Southern Gothic, and he also loves transposing it. Plenty of other musical genres find their way into SNZ’s neo-swing. One of their best songs, “Ghost of Stephen Foster,” is chockful of absurdist lyrics that fit beautifully with the Cajun/Klezmer hybrid music. He revisited this pattern in many more songs.
But I don’t know if he ever dove as deep into the Southern mystery as he did on “Wash Jones” from SNZ’s debut album. The fact that he chose a classic native Faulkner character as his subject was a tipoff. We’d be dealing with strange voodoo. This is a portrait song of an odd character and the lyrics are intentionally incomprehensible.
But they are not nonsense, and that’s what makes the song work, at least on a lyrical basis. Mathus serves up recognizable images – cleaning fish, selling cotton – but in unrecognizable contexts. That’s why this opening couplet works. Unlike the “stairway to heaven” image, the rest of this song will build on the vague incongruity – the displacement we might feel.
As the chorus explains – ‘To understand me better, you all have to follow me home.” This is a song about understanding a character who exists in a different realm from the rest of us – one in which you may very well have a nice chat with an oak tree. (provided one of those pushy cypresses doesn’t butt it.)
Verdict: Good lyrics
“The Jean Genie” - David Bowie (1973)
“He says he’s a beautician and sells you nutrition
And keeps all your dead hair for making up underwear
Poor little Greenie”
I was going to go off on a long Bob Dylan bypass here, citing both great and inane lyrics galore, and they all may have come from “Gates of Eden.” But I’ll spare you, and close instead on this song that I absolutely love. But that doesn’t mean I think the lyrics are good.
Even if you follow Bowie closely and know a lot of the meanings behind his words – the title being a hip bastardization of French poet/playwright Jean Genet, and the constant references to occult philosopher Aleister Crowley – that doesn’t mean you have to buy into any deeper meaning.
Far Out Magazine’s Aimee Ferrier did a thorough breakdown of the meaning behind this Aladdin Sane song. That is where I finally came to understand the line “sits like a man, but smiles like a reptile” as a reference to Iggy Pop and his band the Iguanas. I can get into that.
But the dead hair for making up underwear? Sorry, I don’t get it. In a song devoted to outrageousness, all of the other lyrics are grounded in some concrete imagery. You have to dig a bit, and I don’t blame you if you choose not to, but it’s there for you if want to expend the effort. But the “dead hair/underwear” thing? That’s just an internal rhyme gone off the rails.
Verdict: Bad lyrics, in a song that has otherwise good cryptic imagery
By my count, there are approximately eleven thousand other weird lyrics we could have explored today, but I’ll leave something for next time. Maybe then, we can talk about Neil Diamond’s “I Am I Said” and a chair that apparently can sometimes hear what you are saying.