Top 5 Very Bad Lyrics

I'm not someone who pays a great deal of attention to lyrics, it's the tune that gets my attention. When I do notice the words it's often because of a badly chosen rhyme or phrase and once I've spotted it, it becomes almost impossible to ignore. There's loads of bad lyrics out there but I'm only really bothered by the songs I'm likely to hear.

1. Razorlight "Somewhere Else"

"And I met a girl,
she asked me my name,
I told her what it was."

Razorlight really are rubbish though I have to own up to quite liking them early on. Their debut album had some decent indie-rock on it but that doesn't excuse the bland, generic, pap they served up on their second LP. What's worse is that, for no explicable reason, they started getting round the clock airplay based on these songs.

2. Snap! "Rhythm is a dancer"

"I'm as serious as cancer,
When I say rhythm is a dancer."

An exception made here, though this WAS back in the days when it was a lot harder to avoid the number one single. Bad as the song is overall, this couplet stands out as a shockingly desperate attempt to achieve a rhyme over good sense.

3. Marillion "Hard As Love"

"Well I hear you got my number and you want my name
I'm a stream of naughts and crosses in your R-A-M
But you know that love can be as hard as algebra
Baby nothing else has ever been as hard as love"

Ignoring the worryingly geeky premise of the verse (I mean come on guys - I was getting enough grief for liking Prog Rock already without the added humiliation of songs about binary code!) the analogy of algebra with love is a difficult one to swallow. I know a lot of people didn't enjoy maths at school but these guys must have had a seriously bad teacher if they think this is actually true.

4. Manic Street Preachers "Intravenous Agnostic"

"Into a vein exhibit the derelict
A secular mosaic distracted at birth
A Cubist abstraction let it live forever
Narcissism so lonely so live by the sea."

Whoa there Nicky, are you completely sure those words belong in the same sentence? The Manics have a habit of sounding like they just want to show off their impressive vocabulary but this song makes me wonder if Mr Wire was just trying to win a bet.

5. Culture Club "The War Song"

"War is stupid
And people are stupid"

As far as I'm concerned the only time you're allowed to get away with rhyming a word with itself is if you're Black Sabbath and you've just finished belting out one of the greatest intro riffs of all time before a nutter from Birmingham screams the phrase, "Generals gathered in their masses, Just like witches at black masses." In all other cases you have failed as a lyric writer. Using the same word is not a rhyme it's just repetition.