"I'm hot cuz I'm fly/ You ain't cuz you not."
Yikes.
Someone once wrote that "The times, they are a-changin.'" I think it was Rihanna.
Indeed, the lyrical quality of today's pop music is sometimes harder to defend than that of decades past: It is the subtle poetry of supermanning hoes and the understated eloquence of humps - which may or may not be lovely lady lumps.
Now, I'm one of those old farts at heart, who can't just sit back and enjoy Beyonce's bootyliciousness without getting upset that "Crazy in Love" samples the Chi-Lite's "Are You My Woman (Tell Me So)?" and no one even notices. She was right: I'm just not ready for that jelly.
And then I get my undies even more in a bunch around all that junk inside my trunk when I realize that maybe three percent of you know who the Chi-Lites are anyway, and probably only two percent of you care - with a two percent margin of error.
But I'm not so out of touch as to not realize that there have been dumb lyrics ever since the first guy rhymed: "I love you/ yes I do/ I hope you'll be true/ and that you love me too" (for examples, see every third pop song ever recorded). Sometimes a rhyme just makes you cringe, be it Dylan or Diddy.
Therefore, without further ado, I give you Ari Goldberg's Top Three Worst Rock & Roll Lyrics of All Time:
3) Billy Joel, "Piano Man," 1973. "And he's talkin' with Davy/ Who's still in the navy/ And probably will be for life." Sorry, Billy, "Davy" with "navy" doesn't cut it. What about, oh, I don't know, talkin' with Bobby, who still needs a hobby? Or with Larry, who's still really hairy? Or Frankie, who misses his blankie?
Now, I'm not saying there's a song I'd rather hear at nine o'clock on a Saturday. I'm just saying that with rhymes like that, maybe those bar patrons putting bread in his jar shouldn't be so astounded at what he's doing there after all.
2) Rick Springfield, "Jessie's Girl," 1981. "You know I feel so dirty when they start talkin' cute/ I wanna tell her that I love her, but the point is prob'ly moot." You just can't help but twitch when you hear this. It's the only corny '80s song that can throw Springfield's prized dance move - the '80s power pump - off for a moment.
Cute with moot? You want to tell her you love her so badly that it's heartbreaking? No. That it's killing you inside? No. It's making you ponder with mild apprehension whether the point is moot? That's what you landed on?
I don't know how Springfield wrote this without laughing; even the word itself is funny. Go ahead, say it out loud to yourself a few times. "Moot. Moot. Moot." Weird, huh?
1) Barry McGuire, "Eve of Destruction," 1965. "Yeah, my blood's so mad/ Feels like coagulatin'/ I'm sittin' here just/ Contemplatin'." I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit. Ah, the Vietnam protest song, it's almost a genre itself. How many roads must a man walk down? Probably as many as it takes to get to the hospital for his coagulating blood.
Can you imagine how the writing process must have ended? After days on end trying to make a good rhyme with "contemplatin'," I picture an exasperated McGuire surrounded by empty Red Bulls and crumpled paper just throwing up his hands with a resigned "F-k this," writing in "coagulatin'," popping in a Hot Pocket, and calling it a day.
I guess what it comes down to with the content of modern music is that we didn't start the fire. And at the end of the day, even the classics can fall under that same umbrella... ella, ella.
Ari Goldberg is a senior majoring in History and can be reached at Ari.Goldberg@tufts.edu.
