Dirt Dogs called to my attention this clip from adultswim.com, in which Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force exposes the secret Red Sox conspiracy behind the Mitchell Report. Good stuff here, including “how else ya think Ted Williams fought all those Nazis?”:
Now, let’s talk music. Here’s a question: What would you consider to be rock’s worst lyric ever? I don’t mean that pedestrian, Bryan Adams, “girl, I’m gonna hump you so f@#kin’ crazy” garbage. I mean an honest to God, mind-numbingly, bowel-rattling, testicle-shrinking awful lyric from a band or musician from whom you expect better.
I’ve got two to get you started. First, despite the fact that I absolutely adore the song itself, The Who’s “You Better You Bet” has got to represent the band’s low-water mark, at least from a lyrical perspective. In fact, I like to imagine that whenever Pete Townsend flips around the radio dial and hears Roger Daltrey singing “your dog keeps licking my nose/and chewing up all those letters”, he sighs quietly to himself, then takes a long, slow pull from a bottle of Seagrams. Please note that this song also violates the long-held Music Law about mentioning a nose twice in one song (in addition to the aforementioned lyrics, we get, “I’m not into your passport picture/I just like your nose”). It’s not garbage by any stretch — again, I love this song, and spent my entire five hour commute home during last week’s snowstorm blasting it from my car stereo repeatedly to keep me awake — but some of those lyrics put me into semi-cringe.
Far more disturbing to me is this gem from Tom Petty’s “Into the Great Wide Open“: “He went to Hollywood, got a tattoo/He met a girl out there with a tattoo too.” See that? Right there? That could be one of the worst ever, especially when delivered in Petty’s nasally drawl. I almost wanna hop a time machine and visit him when he was writing that line and say, “Dude, you wrote ‘Even the Losers’ and ‘Don’t Do Me Like That’! Classics! Please, think about that goddam tattoo line before you greenlight it!” It’s the lyrical equivalent of game seven of the 2003 ALCS, folks. All we’re missing is Grady Little on bass.
Of course, Townsend and Petty will both be waking up this morning, eating steak for breakfast, rolling around in limos and private jets, then partying with 19-year old chicks. Meanwhile, I’m about to head downstairs to make a sack lunch.
