Did you ever get a dumb song lyric so stuck in your head you wanted to consult a neurosurgeon?
I worked alongside an editor for a couple years who had the mindless habit of humming “The Girl from Ipanema” under his breath several hundred times per day.
It’s a lovely song with lovely lyrics, but at some point as you find yourself standing in line to buy gas mouthing, “Tall and tan and young and lovely … uh, $10 on number 6 … the girl from Ipanema goes walking …” you realize you have a problem.
A retaliatory strike had to be made.
I’m not proud of this, but I sang the lyrics to The Village People’s “YMCA” under my breath, which totally incapacitated “The Girl from Ipanema” portion of this editor’s brain and may have shaved 20 or so points off his IQ.
By the end of the day, he was reduced to mouthing, “Young man, there’s no need to feel down, I said, young man, pick yourself off the ground” over and over, and I knew victory was mine.
Interestingly enough, “YMCA” came out in the late ’70s and is fully representative of that decade’s wealth of stupid song lyrics – perhaps unmatched by any other 10-year span in the nation’s history.
Not that there weren’t songs of great lyrical beauty. Don McLean’s “American Pie,” for instance.
But there was also Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World,” also out in 1971, which I seem to remember got all the airplay, with its wine-drinking bullfrog Jeremiah, its joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea, and the stanza, “If I were the king of the world, Tell you what I’d do, I’d throw away the cars and the bars and the war, Make sweet love to you …”
Has there ever been a more cogent analysis of war’s badness?
Again, there were monumental works of lyric beauty in the decade sandwiched between the ’60s and ’80s, like the collaborations between Elton John and Bernie Taupin.
Though I must admit, as fine a song as “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)” is I always had trouble envisioning two burly bouncers at some after-hours English pub looking through a peephole worriedly at the 145-pound ’70s-era Elton John – 10 of those pounds consisting of sequined glasses and feathered boa – in his cups and spoiling for a fight.
