Some people take pop song lyrics very seriously. They memorise them, sing along while dancing or listening to them and sometimes seem to live their lives by platitudes snatched from them. Yet when we see the verses and choruses written down, they frequently make little sense or reveal such appalling use of English that the natural response is to wince. This, I know, is the sort of thing people tend to say as they get older. Most of us remember a father, mother or great aunt moaning: "Music isn't what it used to be; in our day, we had real tunes and proper words."
If you do care about such matters, however, you may be pleased to hear that you are not alone. Forget all those ghastly Euro hits. Agadoo was drivel, of course, and its creators can hardly complain that it was once voted the worst pop song of all time. But they intended it to be drivel and reaped handsome rewards. Other songs were almost as bad, though I am not sure many readers would thank me for specific reminders.
The song lyrics I have in mind are different because the writers believed them, so far as we can tell, to be literate. Exploring the internet, I found two sites - metafilter.com and spinner.com - where debates on dire or ungrammatical lyrics have attracted a lot of interest. At metafilter, the discussion began with the question: "I would like a bazillion examples of popular music lyrics and song titles that would make an English teacher cry out in empathetic pain for their abuse of grammar."
Leaving aside the questionable "bazillion", I am happy to quote from the replies. Neil Diamond came in for a few mentions, notably for "Songs she sang to me, songs she brang to me"; "The boat that I row won't cross no ocean"; and "I got a song been on my mind". Bread and America were among other artists to crop up. So were Abba, but I exonerate them for an obvious reason. The Swedes speak good English and should not be faulted simply because when they write pop songs, that English is not quite right.
There was a persuasive defence of the non-standard nature of "Black American English, what with that having a pretty special place in Rock and Roll". The same writer cleared "I can't get no satisfaction" of grammatical error, insisting that double negatives were common to many languages, not just "African-American vernacular English". But I suppose I should declare my own candidate. It is a song associated with Sir Elton John, although the lyrics are the work of Bernie Taupin.
At the websites I visited, Your Song - a song I loved when it first appeared - was criticised for the line "If I was a sculptor/But then again, no", one of several was/were issues identified. But my grievance is with another song, Candle in the Wind, a tribute to Marilyn Monroe. The offending sequence runs: "Even when you died/Oh the press still hounded you/All the papers had to say/Was that Marilyn was found in the nude."
What Taupin intended, clearly with John's endorsement, was to bash the press. Taken literally, however, the attack backfires. It suggests that every newspaper reported Monroe's unclothed state, and nothing more. It does not require many words to say a body was naked, certainly not sufficient to amount to "hounding". Taupin's complaint was that newspapers drew attention to the nakedness when covering Monroe's death. Had the lyrics properly conveyed his thoughts, he would have written: "All the papers had to say/that Marilyn was found in the nude."
Whether it would then have scanned is another matter. But there is also an argument that we should accept whatever passes, in a pop song, for English. This is not the first time I have written about Bernie Taupin's lapse. On the first occasion, the debate was brought - or brang, as Mr Diamond would say - to an end with a comment some may be inclined to apply generally: "People, really, it's just a song. Get over it!"
Colin Randall is a contributing editor to The National and can be contacted at crandall@thenational.ae
