Imma be chillin with my mutha mutha crew

[Gob]

Forget heartfelt laments of love, we now have kids singing about their hair, writes Daile Pepper.
The Top 40 this year has become a haven for musical madness.

The best-loved songs of our time often feature meaningful lyrics that move us – "Imagine all the people/living life in peace...", John Lennon.

But the top of the current pops feature kids singing about their hair, young women singing about their shoes (c'mon Jessica Mauboy) and pre-pubescent children lamenting love.

Christina Aguilera can belt out a song, but it's the song that's the problem.

No more Paul Simon singing, "And the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls/and tenement halls/and whispered in the sounds of silence".

No Bob Dylan asking, "How many times can a man turn his head/and pretend that he just doesn't see?"

English is out, and urban gangsta sex talk is in, along with meaningless fairy-floss drivel, as long as it rhymes. Repeat as many times as necessary and, hey presto, you've got a so-called hit on your hands.

In the quest for making money out of music, clever and interesting lyrics have clearly been put in the too-hard basket.

There are those that just repeat the same thing a million times - Barbara Streisand - and the worst offenders bring back lyrics that worked when a sexy Patrick Swayze mouthed them, but not when bastardised to a bad backing beat by the Black Eyed Peas - (I've Had) The Time of My Life.

My worst of the year has to be Christina Aguilera singing about her "Woo Hoo". You have got an amazing voice. Why do this to yourself?

Worst lyrics of the year

Willow, Whip My Hair
"Don't let haters keep me off my grind/keep my head up and I know I'll be fine/keep fighting until I (yea), am down and I feel like giving up/I whip my hair back and forth, I whip my hair back and forth (just whip it) (repeat x 6)."

Justin Bieber, Baby (most annoying song of the year)
"Baby, baby, baby, oh/like baby, baby, baby, no/like baby, baby, baby, oh/I thought you'd always be mine, mine."

Ke$ha, Tik Tok
"I'm talking about everybody getting crunk, crunk/Boys tryin to touch my junk, junk/Gonna smack him if he getting too drunk, drunk."

Jessica Mauboy, Get 'em Girls (a song all about high heels)
"I don't need a runway/I got on my get 'em girls, I got on my get 'em girls/I can catwalk my way to the front page/I got on my get 'em girls, I got on my get 'em girls/(Won't you get 'em girl, wanna swing my hips this way)."

Miley Cyrus, Who Owns My Heart
"So come on baby, keep provoking me/keep on roping me, like a Romeo, baby/pull me close, come on/here we go, here we go, here we go."

Travie McCoy featuring Bruno Mars, Billionaire
"I wanna be a billionaire, so f..... bad/buy all of the things I never had/I wanna be on the cover of Forbes magazine/smiling next to Oprah and the Queen."

Katy Perry, Firework
"Cause baby you're a firework, come on show 'em what your worth/make 'em go 'Oh, oh, oh!' as you shoot across the sky-y-y."

Rihanna, Rude Boy
"Come here rude boy, boy, can you get it up?/Come here rude boy, boy, is you big enough?/Take it, baby, baby/Take it, take it, love me, love me."

Black Eyed Peas, Imma Be
"Imma be chillin with my mutha mutha crew/imma be makin all them deals you wanna do (hah)/ imma be up in that maylist flicks, doin 100 flips/and imma be, sippin on drinks cause/imma be shakin my hips, you gon be lickin your lips/imma be takin them pics, lookin all fly and s..."

Christina Aguilera, Woo Hoo
"You know you really wanna (hey), wanna taste my (woohoo)/you know you wanna get a peak, wanna see my (woohoo)/you know you wanna put your lips, where my hips are (woohoo)/kiss all my (woohoo)."

I have long hated "Black Eye Peas" ever since I listened in to a (much younger) Hatch and her mate listening to the drivel they put out...

[oldr_n_wsr]

Disco wasn't much better.

[loCAtek]

Word!

[Andrew D]

"getting crunk"?

[Sean]

It rhymes with 'junk' and 'drunk'. That seems to be good enough these days...

[Gob]

1. crunk

1995, Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter were scheming ways to get past the TV censors on Conan's late night talk show, and they settled on an all-purpose, suitable replacement for the infamous seven dirty swearwords that they couldn't say on TV: Crunk. The choice to use that word was definitely not random. Ice T just happened to be on the show that night, and he likely fed the word to them beforehand and certainly helped fuel its popularity during the telecast ("That was seriously crunked up, right there."). But Ice never claimed to have come up with the word--he probably got it from Dirty South rappers, who had been using it for years as a euphemism for getting really crazy and fucked up on marijuana and alcohol (stoned and drunk. Chronic plus Drunk = Crunk). Or maybe crack and drunk. Or coke and drunk. Or maybe just being crazy and drunk. Whatever it is, it means getting really crazy and fucked up. And with Conan's introduction of the word to northern suburban audiences, Crunk came into its own as the recognized sound of the new generation of Dirty South Rap, prompting white college fratboys everywhere to wander around going "WHHHUT!! OKAAY!! YEEEAAHHH!!" like annoying dipshits. and it's all thanks to Lil Jon, and by Lil Jon I mean Dave Chappelle.


crunk
A cliched and overused hiphop term that has been beat to death more than "Bling-Bling" and "Shizzle". It means to get crazy and drunk. The term lost it's "cool" factor like two years ago, but that doesn't stop wiggers and wanna be gangstas from using the the term as much as possible.

Yo! We be all blinged out and getting crunk up in this club fo sho! (Translation: I'm a total fucking idiot, and don't know how stupid I sound!)

[Sue U]

[darkblack]

'The best-loved songs of our time often feature meaningful lyrics that move us – "Imagine all the people/living life in peace...", John Lennon.'

Yeah, and 'How much is that doggie in the window', and `...there were plants and birds and rocks and things...', and...Oh, God I can't contemplate the universal banality any longer.

Every so often some overstimulated wanky wank comes along with the stock argument that 'In my day, lyrics meant something - these kids today and their wretched doggerel, my generation knew how to write eternally inspiring songs of love and hope, blah blah' - what a bunch of arse concocted by ropey old farts for ropey old farts, who no doubt compose and peruse such drivel whilst cleaning their bong out by drinking the water.

Settle down with a tumbler of prune juice and gin and your Jethro Tull records on the Victrola and leave de youth alone, Methuselahs.

[Gob]

ROTFLMCO!!

Or to put it another way...

There will always be those approaching middle age and trying to put off the inevitable decline into the world of adulthood, who try desperately to stay hip and cool, in a vain hope of not appearing "old" and hopefully getting laid. You can tell them by their apologist stances on modern music and art, and their being laughed at by mature adults and kids alike.

Speaking of the Tull…

Whenever I get to feel this way,
Try to find new words to say,
I think about the bad old days
We used to know.

Nights of winter turn me cold --
Fears of dying, getting old.
We ran the race and the race was won
By running slowly.

Could be soon we’ll cease to sound,
Slowly upstairs, faster down.
Then to revisit stony grounds,
We used to know.

Remembering mornings, shillings spent,
Made no sense to leave the bed.
The bad old days they came and went
Giving way to fruitful years.

Saving up the birds in hand
While in the bush the others land.
Take what we can before the man
Says it’s time to go.

Each to his own way I’ll go mine.
Best of luck in what you find.
But for your own sake remember times
We used to know.

[BoSoxGal]

I have to admit that my 61 year old cancer-ridden friend got me hooked on the Black Eyed Peas, and I ended up traveling many miles last summer/fall listening to that album.

Imma be, Imma be, Imma Imma Imma be - it's such a catchy little ditty!

[darkblack]

There will always be those approaching middle age and trying to put off the inevitable decline into the world of adulthood, who try desperately to stay hip and cool, in a vain hope of not appearing "old" and hopefully getting laid. You can tell them by their apologist stances on modern music and art, and their being laughed at by mature adults and kids alike.

Yeah, there's those poxy herberts too, sneaking sniffs of the bicycle seats of eternal youth and honking out art with a capital F on their synth-o-sizers. Of course, the one sure way to nip that pestilence in the bud is cut them off their dole (or government job) before they can contaminate the world with their perfidious anti-melodies or unduly soil any rave-addled co-eds.

[Sue U]

What darkblack said. All of it.

[oldr_n_wsr]

What darkblack said. All of it.

All except for this

soil any rave-addled co-eds.

Even old men need some nookie nookie if the ladies are willing.

[Gob]

Yeah, there's those poxy herberts too, sneaking sniffs of the bicycle seats of eternal youth and honking out art with a capital F on their synth-o-sizers. Of course, the one sure way to nip that pestilence in the bud is cut them off their dole (or government job) before they can contaminate the world with their perfidious anti-melodies or unduly soil any rave-addled co-eds.

I refer the (dis)honourable "gentleman" to the reply given here

[darkblack]

Well, it appears that I have ruffled some stylish cardigans - y'know, the kind with patches on the elbows, as preferred by librarians, elderly clerks and toilet botherers - so I'll just state for the record that Gob no doubt continues to hold being a notorious Bolshie pervert, rude noisemaker and speed demon as his fundamental core values...in spite of his current sedentarily bourgeois predilections and dutiful nest-building for his better half, as self-enumerated in the above reply.

[Gob]

Yeah, what he said...

[Gob]

The lyrics for the new James Bond theme song take the cake for stupidity, but that will be no impediment to sales success, because it is sung by Adele.


The world's most bankable white soul singer (plus a 77-piece orchestra) can give gravitas to such nonsense as ''Skyfall is where we start, a thousand miles and poles apart, where worlds collide and days are dark, you may have my number, you can take my name, but you'll never have my heart.''

Skyfall will soar to the top of the chart and replace the current No. 1, Gangnam Style, which was described by a Sydney newspaper recently as ''a brilliant satire'' on ''credit card-touting cashed-up bogans''.

Listen closely and you'll have trouble detecting the satire. Don't panic. You're not suffering from aphasia. Apart from the words ''sexy lady'', Gangnam Style is in Korean. Its author, who calls himself Psy, is a Seoul singer.

Translated, the lyrics discuss a ''girl who covers herself but is more sexy than a girl who bares it all'' and a ''guy who has bulging ideas rather than muscles''. But nobody is buying it for those deep thoughts. We just want to practise the dance moves.
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Gangnam Style confirms the proposition that lyrics are irrelevant to pop audiences. Conservatives who get offended by the vapid, violent and sexist language in recent hits can console themselves with the thought that nobody cares much about the words any more.

The chart on this page shows typical lyrics from the five top-selling songs of the past 10 years (a period when we moved from the word ''single'' to the word ''track'', and from the CD to the download). It's hard to imagine that those words would explain even 10 per cent of the sales appeal.


For comparison, I chose some lyrics from the best-written songs of the previous 50 years. I would argue that lines such as these explain at least 50 per cent of the appeal of the tracks in which they appear.

1. Maybe there's a god above, but all I've ever learned from love was how to shoot at someone who outdrew ya. It's not a cry you can hear at night, It's not somebody who has seen the light. It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah.

2. Got in a little home town jam, so they put a rifle in my hand, sent me off to a foreign land, to go and kill the yellow man.

3. LA is a great big freeway, put a hundred down and buy a car. In a week, maybe two, they'll make you a star. Weeks turn into years, how quick they pass. And all the stars that never were are parking cars and pumping gas.

4. You'll be doing society a favour. That sonofabitch is brave and getting braver. We want to put his ass in stir. We want to pin this triple murder on him. He ain't no Gentleman Jim.

5. While Lennon read a book on Marx, the quartet practised in the park, and we sang dirges in the dark, the day the music died.

6. Mama, just killed a man, put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he's dead. Mama, life had just begun, but now I've gone and thrown it all away.

Number 1 is a rhyming exercise by Leonard Cohen. I included it reluctantly because I suspect its depth is more apparent than real, in the tradition of such hymns as Whiter Shade of Pale, with those 16 vestal virgins leaving for the coast, and Viva la Vida, with those Roman cavalry choirs a-singing. Then I read that The Voice winner Karise Eden refuses to sing Hallelujah at her concerts as she gets too overwrought. If she can extract emotional meaning from Cohen's lines, the lyrics work.

Number 2 is from Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA, adopted as a nationalistic anthem by the American far right, who clearly haven't understood the detail.

Number 3 is from Do You Know the Way to San Jose, by recently deceased lyricist Hal David. He said he aimed for ''believability, simplicity and emotional impact'', which have not been songwriting priorities in the past 10 years.

Number 4 is from Bob Dylan's Hurricane, with words so powerful they helped to get a retrial for Rubin Carter, a boxer accused of three murders (''the man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done'').

Number 5 is from Don McLean's American Pie, an epic poem telling the history of pop from Buddy Holly's death to the break-up of the Beatles.

Number 6 is from Freddie Mercury's Bohemian Rhapsody, an operatic fantasy about a poor boy fearing the fires of hell as he waits on death row.

And then there are a whole lot of songs by Paul Kelly. I found it impossible to settle on one. Psy, the Seoul singer, promises he'll write his second single in English. Let's hope he finds inspiration in the likes of Springsteen, David, Kelly, Dylan and McLean.


The songs

Australia's top-selling singles of the past 10 years (and typical lyrics)

❏ Party Rock Anthem, LMFAO (sold more than 800,000 copies): ''I'm runnin' through these hos like Drano, I got that devilish flow, no halo.''

❏ Somebody That I Used To Know, Gotye (700,000+): ''No, you didn't have to stoop so low, have your friends collect your records and then change your number.''

❏ Sexy and I Know It, LMFAO (600,000+): ''We headed to the bar, baby don't be nervous; no shoes, no shirt and I still get serviced.''

❏ Call Me Maybe, Carly Rae Jepsen (550,000+): ''You took your time with the call, I took no time with the fall; you gave me nothin' at all, but still you're in my way.''

❏ Moves Like Jagger, Maroon 5 (550,000+): ''You say I'm a kid, my ego is big; I don't give a shit and it goes like this.''

[Jarlaxle]

I have to say there is a pretty good case to be made that one of the best lyricists ever is Jim Steinman. From love songs, to murder ballads, to breakup songs, to songs about corruption in Gotham City, to middle-aged reminiscing about youth, to a song about growing up that hit so close to home that the man he wrote it for actually cannot sing it in concert because he chokes up...to a song he wrote that is, fittingly, about the power of music.

[Gob]

For me, Peter Hammill is the lyricist I admire most.

However, if we wait long enough, I'm sure the retard will be along to tell us who the; "greatest lyricist in the whole world ever, and if you disagree you're a moron," is. You know. The one he likes.

[Jarlaxle]

Maybe the best line ever: "Remember everything that I told you/and I'm telling you again that it's true/You're never alone, 'cause you can put on the 'phones/and let the drummer tell your heart what to do."