Song lyrics that bug you!

[BillStickersWillBeProsocuted]

I was listening to Objects in the rear view mirror by Meatloaf the other day and it contains the line:

"If life is just a highway, then the soul is just a car"

That line always bugged me - for a start that's a pretty big "if" but apart from that surely in that analogy the body is the car and the soul is the driver?!

Another one is maybe a bit more Niche but Tim Minchin has a song called "Grew on me" where he likeness his love for his wife with various illnesses (it's actually much more sweet than that makes it sound!) which contains the line:

"The successful removal of you would probably kill me too"

Surely if it kills the patient you can't call it a successful removal?! What really bothers me is “the attempted removal of you” would fit the song just as well and make more sense!

Anyway I'm bored at work so thought I'd see if anyone else has any pedantic lyrical bugbears?!

That’s the point though, isn’t it? They don’t need no education because they don’t give a shit about correct grammar. That sort of bourgeois nonsense is the problem! Your insistence that they have to say ‘any’ instead of ‘no’ when the latter is perfectly comprehensible just because it follows the correct rules highlights that you are just another brick in the wall …

Exactly 😆

Baby by Clean Bandit:

Guess I had my last chance
And now this is our last dance
You fell through the cracks in my hands

The cracks in my hands? What are they?

"I am"... I said
To no one there
And no one heard at all
Not even the chair

Neil Diamond.

Do chairs ever hear anything?

Ooh the Bryan Adams one that always gets me is “those were the best days of our life” From Summer of ‘69. I mean it makes perfect sense at face value, but he’s done pretty bloody well for himself since then so I doubt very much whether it still rings true…. It always makes me ponder at a rock star’s life and whether he ever has a little chuckle to himself about it.

I always assumed he was talking in character here rather than it being a true story - he’d only have been 10 in 1969 after all!

Ed sheeran...castle on the hill. When he goes on about his friends or whoever they are and the rubbish lives they're leading now. Did think he said one sold coke so was surprised at that..but barely getting by..on 2nd wife blahhhh...

The 69 he's referring to in that song isn't the year....

"Slowly walking down the hall, faster than a canon ball."

Just no. All the nope.

there are a lot, but it will annoy me thinking about them

I never knew that!

i will always forgive the incubator bit because that song is absolute pop-song-nirvana. It is perfect in its storytelling.

pp mentioned songs using "I" instead of "me"? I love adore and revere Midnight Oil. But in one of the songs on their last (sob) album (Reef -which is totally angry and brilliant) they have this bit

"It doesn't belong to the government
It doesn't belong to the mine
It belongs to the people
People like you and I"

and every time i shout "ME!, Peter, it's ME!" (Luckily they didn't sing it at any of the gigs i saw last year)

I’m fairly sure the 16 refers to dress size, not age.

Yes, and the bit about "if he's XXL" only means that he might need a rather big t-shirt too, and nothing else...

I get unreasonably irritated by Pink Floyd, "we don't need no educay-tion".

Yes, you fucking do, your grammar is dreadful!!

i assume they're drinking cider but they're happy and having fun and it's as though it's champagne.

I love Ed, but his lyrics are a bit - meh

that is precisely the whole point of that song

The lyrics to every single Pink song. 😡

Especially the 'Jessica simps' one.

"Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" - such a beautiful old song, but that line : "Now, laughing friends deride, tears I cannot hide..." They are certainly not friends!!

Once there was this kid who
Got into an accident and couldn't come to school
But when he finally came back
His hair had turned from black into bright white
He said that it was from when
The cars had smashed so hard
Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm
Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm

I was going to post exactly this 😁

What?!
I thought he just stood on her mama’s porch and she held his hand. I don’t think I can sing along to it any more…

You haven’t heard the line towards the end “me and my baby in a 69” then?

I thought it was just a kind of Elvis-like interjection, but then found out…

I just assumed it was “me and my baby in ‘69” as in the year…

To pick on another song though: Wonderful Christmastime by Paul McCartney…

”The choir of children sing their song
They’ve practised all year long:
Ding dong ding dong ding dong…”

Really? They practised all year for that?!

Abba, Super Trouper. The rhyming of ‘last show’ with ‘Glasgow’ grates on me (can understand the sentiment though; I mean 1970s Glasgow was erm, on the rough side from what I hear). But the line ‘I’m thinking about you only’ makes me flinch; it’s just bad.

More obscure this one, but we used to sing hymns in school assembly back in the dark ages, and there were a few with nice catchy tunes and the most awful sanctimonious words. One such had a second verse that went:

May they learn from this great story
All the arts of friendliness:
Truthful speech and honest action,
Courage, patience, steadfastness;
How to master self and temper,
How to make their conduct fair,
When to speak and when be silent,
When to do and when forbear.

I used to cringe at that as a teenager. Moon and stick came to mind. Nowadays of course, when humming ‘When a knight won his spurs’ I’m reminded that the sword of my youth is getting a bit rusty. 😆

@NumberFortyNorhamGardens Don’t forget Abba were writing in a second language though - they’d have got extra time and a bilingual dictionary in an exam 😄

(Incidentally do you know the Allan Ahlberg parody of When a Knight Won His Spurs?)