to get disproportionately angry when songs do not make sense

I've just cried my way through this thread! Can't even think of any silly examples myself because i'm still singing a mixture of Alanis Morrisette, Oasis and christmas songs in my head!! Brilliant!!

I have always felt irked by 'The Lion Sleeps tonight' which starts 'in the jungle, the mighty jungle'

Do Lions live in jungles?

"I only knew you for a while
I never saw your smile
Till it was time to go, time to go away"

Now that is a glorious 80s song, but really - can't have been much of a relationship if she only smiled at you when you were leaving, can it, Phil Oakey?

Also there is a line in a Spice Girls song that has wound me up for years - "throwing far too much emotions at me" - if you just sang "emotion" it would make perfect sense, FFS.

Percy, sorry, is not a joking matter. Not to detract from the devastating famine in Ethiopia (itself the result of war and politics). Yet the lyrics are still wrong. E.g., despite what you write, they (Ethiopia is a majority Orthodox Christian country) really would have known it was the time of Jesus' birth - faith is much all many had at the time :(
Anyhow I won't go on, since the song achieved much good, and this thread is supposed to be about Lisa Stansfield and stuff.

Oh - I heard that a "chimney" was a knife to the artery in the neck.

So, what's she going to look like with a fatal stab wound releasing her blood all over t'place.

Not so jolly now, is it?

Thanks Tabulah!

Asha and 45rpm, what vinyl singles were played at...

Everybody needs a bosom for a pillow is the bit that's always made me go

G'wan then, someone explain "Brimful of Asha on the 45" - that's always seemed deliciously odd to me!

"Whats she gonna look like with a chimney on her? " apparently is referring to giving her a black eye. something to do with being american slang for one.

This song has always been infuriating to me:

I'll never be Maria Magdalena

You take my love
You want my soul
I would be crazy to share your life
Why can't you see what I am
Sharpen the senses and drawn the knife ( help!)
Hold/hurt me and you'll understand

I'll never be Maria Magdalena (who wants you to be her anyway? )
(You're a creature of the night)
Maria Magdalena
(you're a victim of the fight)
(you need love)
Promised me delight
(You need looooooooooove)

Why must I lie
Find any prize
When will you wake up and realize
I can't surrender to you
Play for affection and
Win the prize
I know those party games too ( what kind of party games, charades?! pass the parcel? )

I'll never be Maria Magdalena
(You're a creature of the night)
Maria Magdalena
(you're a victim of the fight)
(you need love)
Promised me delight
(You need love)

love the intro though, and the whole 1980s vibe. Wonderfully bad Euro 80s trash

Of course normally "things grow, there's rain and there are flowing rivers" BUT there was a fucking DROUGHT at the time which is what this song was written about. And people were starving and dying of famine - I doubt that Christmas was much on their minds, which is the point being made there. Some people here seem not to understand the context of this song. Perhaps they are too young to remember it.

Ha ha ha - this thread is genious.

As for snow in Africa, well of course - but it gets worse:

"And there won't be snow in Africa this christmas time
The greatest gift they'll get this year is life
Where nothing ever grows
No rain or rivers flow
Do they know it's christmas time at all? "

Um, yes, things grow, there's rain and there are flowing rivers BUT
YES "they" bleedin will know it's Christmas, esp if we're talking Ethiopia, given that Ethiopia is one of the most ancient Christian kingdoms in the world...

Now I love the much-mocked Levellers (I was a 90s crusty after all) but their anti-war song 'Another Man's Cause' has always bugged the hell out of me:

Your daddy well he died in the Falklands
Fighting for another man's cause
And your brother he was killed in the last war
And your mother well she's lying home alone

Total British casualties of the Falklands - 255. Total of Desert Storm (presumably the 'last war' referred to: 47). MAN, that's an unlucky family. And THEN, in the final verse, he decides to join up himself! Really, with that sort of genetic luck, wouldn't you be looking for a nice bullet-free office job?

A classic from Leonard Cohen

Don't go home with your hard on
It will only drive you insane
You can't shake it or break it with your Motown
You can't melt it down in the rain

I don't know if this is right but I always thought it was "ever changing world in which we're livin'" in live and let die. Sorry if that's already been said...

Having read the wiki entry linked to above about "The pompetus of love" from Steve Miller, I misread the quote from his earlier Maurice song as episiotomy rather than epismetology - ouch...

Steve Miller The Joker

Peter Gabriel's Jeux Sans Frontier:
'Whistling tunes we're kissing baboons in the jungle'

Like to see you try, mate. They'll have your bloody face off!

I think a sock hop is some kind of 50s dance thing for teenagers?

(The things you learn from watching Kim Possible...)

"Santa Baby, please slip a sabre under the tree for me"

That's much better than the actual lyric. I'd be quite chuffed if Santa gave me a sabre for Christmas.

Thought of another repeat offender: Taylor Swift. Bad enough that her song about Romeo and Juliet stalked me in every public space I stepped into for about three months, but

'You were Romeo, I was a scarlet letter'

To misquote the Princess Bride:

"You keep using that [phrase]. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Taylor Swift, really now. You read to the end of Romeo and Juliet, right?

Wait, did you read The Scarlet Letter at all?

My DD's favourite bands are the Kinks (she thinks it's okay to be into inane pop so long as it's retro), the Smiths (oh god), the Beatles (um...), Pink Floyd (let's hope that she doesn't take her role models from music), Joy Division (kill me now), and Radiohead, whom I'd never heard of before she started blasting angsty experimental songs about "laughing till my head comes off". It seems to be full of slightly disturbing surrealism like that. The one that gets me, though, is half the Smiths' discography. "Why do I waste valuable time on people who don't care if I live or die" - if your life is so worthless, why is your time so valuable?!

Natasha Bedingfield's 'These Words' makes me want to throw the radio in the fire. I could have written those lyrics while on the toilet.

'waste bin full of paper
Clever rhymes, see you later'

Quite.

'I never meant to cause you any sorrow
I never meant to cause you any pain
...I only want to see you dancing in the Purple Rain'

WTF is purple rain and why is laughing in it so all important that you would cause sorrow and pain to the one you love??

I heard Fireflies by Owl City on the radio yesterday and thought of this thread.

"I'd like to make myself believe that planet Earth turns slowly." Because actually it's whizzing round so fast that you can feel it.

"It's hard to say that I'd rather stay awake when I'm asleep." Yes, it probably is.

And it gets better.

"'Cause I'd get a thousand hugs
From ten thousand lightning bugs
As they tried to teach me how to dance
A foxtrot above my head
A sock hop beneath my bed
A disco ball is just hanging by a thead"

WTF is a sock hop?

It's almost on a par with Milow's You and Me (In My Pocket), which I think someone's already mentioned and which they play on the radio all the time here too.

Gloria Ah, now that finally makes sense (well, sort of). I always thought he was singing about a young girl he'd never seen and wondered how he'd managed to fall in love with her.

9 Million bicycles. I'd like to see your evidence, Melua.

So glad others are as nuts as me. And at bounce and rhyme, 'the baboon combing his auburn hair', sounds like an orangutan to me!

"I've been looking so long at these pictures of you,
I can almost believe that they're real..."

Well then Robert, I really think you need to step away from the pictures and maybe stop using quite so much hairspray!