The Commander's famous for this tune, but actually only covered it in 1971. It was written in 1955, and it's a snapshot of that pure Fifties rock sound: all clueless adolescent arrogance, fast cars and no fear. There are a lot of good images in this song ("telephone poles looked like a picket fence," "the lines on the road look just like dots") and the music, a staccato drone, is a perfect fit. I think this song has endured as a classic because together, music and lyrics draw the listener in; you really feel like you're in the front seat with madman Cody, turning white as a ghost along with his buddy. Why did I choose the above line in particular? It captures that apathetic, death-defying, Rebel-without-a-cause cool, with a little joke predicated on the nuance of the lyrics: you and I might be concerened that the tires are only "fair," but our young driver doesn't mind.

What are these "good times?" Is this some sort of metaphor for getting high, thus the "up in the air" (and previous "make you a clown") line? If so, why the perplexing "brush your" -- ugh --- "rock and roll hair"? Drugs don't give you the feeling of finely coiffed hair. And why, regardless of what these so-called "good times" might be, would they "knock you around"? That sounds kind of un-good. Could it be that the writer, that Ocasek fellow (you know, the one who looks like Tom Petty's corpse after it was beaten with a stick), wrote a bunch of meaningless gibberish? Perhaps he had indulged in too many good times before writing it. (In fairness, the next verses make a sort of sense: the narrator seems to be seeking refuge in the "good times" from, perhaps, gossip-mongers and paparazzi... but really, no amount of press-bashing can rescue that "rock and roll hair" bit.

I'm not much of a Doors fan, either, and I'm particularly unaffected by the bafflingly powerful cult of Morrison. (Ray Manzarek may have been the real genius of the group.) He was no great poet, for sure, but every now and then he came up with some great lines, especially when it came to songs about sex. The above is a startling and original image, but firmly rooted in the grand tradition of love poetry that says when you love someone, all the world must share your devotion, or be jealous of it. It's a terrific simile, sidewalk as dog, and by extension, both sidewalk and dog as poor pitiful man who thinks he might have a chance to "pluck this dusky jewel." Simile, suggested metaphor, apologue: material for both brains and loins.

I'm never been a big Eagles fan (though I enjoy Joe Walsh's material with them); their laid-back, mellow sound is just a bit too safe and mainstream for my tastes. If you're looking for capable and inoffensive country-rock lite, the Eagles are definitely your musical destination. But if you're looking for interesting lyrics, you may have to move on. Case in point, the above refrain. What the hell is it all about? It seems to be a pun of sorts, but certainly not a funny one, nor even a sensical one. For verbal tricks like this to work, they have to parse, if not make some kind of sense, both as an image and as a sentence. For example, to borrow from Shakespeare, "In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire" works, because while we don't actually burn with real fire when we feel ardor, it's not illogical to imagine such a thing. Back to the Eagles (what a drop in quality!). Taken literally, Glenn Frey seems to be saying that he doesn't need any help getting down from where he is, because he's not up anywhere. But that's not the idea at all, because he wants to make "let me down" mean "do me wrong," not "give me a hand." Yet if he were up on a shelf somewhere, "let me down" would mean exactly that. On the other hand, taken figuratively, the image just falls flat (hee hee), because where the hell else would a person be standing, the kitchen counter? I don't expect to see ol' Glenn floating a few inches off the face of the earth as if God had forbidden Frey to touch the green goodness of His creation (though I wouldn't be surprised, either).

Buried in the mud, or the dust as the case may be. I meant to cite this devastating lyrical attack on the men in high towers who send the poor to war back in August, when the media made a big hoo-ha over the US death count of the magical round number 1,000. But, you know, 1,170+ or 1,000, why turn away from injustice? We're drowning in a quagmire that may make Vietnam look like Panama, and it may even make no difference who our next President is at this point. How fucking depressing. (In case you hadn't noticed, this was one of the few entries that has something to do with the world around me.)

Tom Waits in one of his early phases: past the growling, winking beatnik, he is now the boozy, lewd strip-club piano player. (The album from which this comes, Small Change, is a humble masterpiece; get it if you don't have it.) The narrator is a broken-hearted drunkard, but witty and enigmatic. What is he comparing to a rental: a potential (one-night) paramour? The whiskey's he's drinking (citing the old joke that you don't buy beer, you rent it because it tuns through your system so quickly)? Whose story does he start to ask about, then realize it's too much trouble to even pretend to care about: the drunk at the next barstool, a woman, the bartender? Whatever, only Tom Waits could cast so many world-weary aspersions in so few lines, still end up sounding sympathetic in a seedy sort of way, and cap it all off with a maudlin pun. Ah, Tom, you old growling nighthawk, you've turned into a bizarre amalgam of deranged circus barker, street poet and noise machine, but at least we have this record to remind us of the nightlife you once cast such a knowing if bleary eye upon.

If there were musical justice in the world (part II), Shakira would be a critically adored multi-million selling musician and idol to girls the world over, and Britney Spears would be toiling in relative obscurity as a model. Or a stripper. Yes, more probably as a stripper. (As a side note, in searching for these lyrics, I found that a lot of people target these particular lines as the objects of derision. Most of the objection run along the lines of (adopts smarmy, idiotic voice): "Um, it's not very likely that we'd confuse breasts with mountains, Shakira! As if," or "Yes, it's possible for breasts to be humble, all right — not! Ha!" I can only suppose that these people have similar problems with metaphors and imagery in all writing: geez, did Shakespeare really think it was possible to compare his love to a summer's day? I mean, they're like apples and oranges! And hope isn't a thing with feathers, Emily Dickinson! As if!) Anyway, I really adore Shakira. To me, these lines, like most all her lyrics, are so endearingly dopey, so refreshingly open and positive and, well, original in their imagery, you'd have to be a literal-minded curmudgeon to gripe at them. Who knows, maybe the gripers prefer the simplistic, jeuvenile lyrics of Britney. I guess she could be singing similar lines (from "Objection") to those people: "Next to her cheap silicon I look minimal / That's why in front of your eyes I'm invisible." Come on: Shakira's voice is arresting and fascinating and varies from song to song; she writes and records in two languages; she melds an intriguing blend of all music styles from flemenco to pop to middle eastern to country, even a bit of rap; and she's beautiful! Let's see, that's Shakira four, the bafflingly famous Ashlee Simpson zero. There's no accounting for tastes — or superstardom.

What the—? I can't believe a song like this even exists. A few words of advice to burgeoning young writers who might be foolishly thinking of looking to R. Kelly for guidance. First off, if you can't think of what your subject reminds you of, don't bother writing the song just yet. Next, if you do think of a metaphor, step back and say to yourself, "Is this metaphor completely fucking ridiculous?" Unfortunately, this time around old R. didn't bother with that last step. Yeah, I know that the car is a time-honored sexual euphemism ("Let Me Be Your Driver," "I Wanna Drive Your Car," innumerable teen anthems of fast women and faster hot rods, etc) but come on. "You remind me of my jeep"? What, big headlights? No doors? Wind in your face? Big mudflaps? What are we talking here? Even more unfortunately, Kelly doesn't delve into this kind of comparison, which might have been at least made the song interesting or at least amusing. Instead, he goes on to say that the girl in question looks "something like [his] bank account." Zuh? Holy Krishna, I thought people were overlooking this guy's prediliction for pissing on young girls because he was talented. (Seriously, though, let's not overlook that.)

If there were musical justice in the world, Jude would be a superstar with legions of screaming teenage fans and approving adult listeners who tapped their toes while waiting for their kids to stop screaming, and crap like the cartoons in N*Sync or whatever it is (are they still popular?) would be folding quality khakis at the Gap. Anyhoo, Jude is a literate, engaging and clever songwriter with an endearing falsetto and an ear for alliteration, as you can see. A great part of his charm is admittedly the delivery — that smooth croon or the rapid-fire staccato syllables — but he's definitely got a flair with the pen. The above lines, a desultory yet damning description of a dated doxy, the traces of legions of liasons limning and limiting her allure, are case in point. No? Oh well, buy his album anyway, you Philistine.

Dear Beatles: Bravo, Mssrs. Beatle! Bravo! A very solid piece of songwriting craft, indeed! I can see where you get your reputation as one of the more literate acts in rock history! Why, these lines rival the complexities of the work of e.e. cummings, or Allen Ginsburg! Possibly you should eat even more of those "acids" you tout as being so helpful in releasing the flow of creative juices, so as to write even deeper and more meaningful songs than these! But watch out you don't overdo it, or you may end up penning some incomprehesible and dated gobbledygook that seems "far out" at first, but upon sober reflection is just meaningless stupidity. Love, Nick. (P.S. In all seriousness, despite the above fandango, the Beatles truly are among the greatest, and anyone who doesn't admire them is some kind of protopathic boor like Frank Sinatra.)

Let's get one thing straight at the outset. The Pogues are musical heroes of mine. Shane MacGowan is, in my eyes, a stone cold Genius, when he's not pissed off his head. Unfortunately, during the making of Crock Of Gold, the album that the above verbal guano comes from, Shane must have been mostly drunk. There are some beautiful songs on that album and some funny ones. Rebel songs and drinking songs I have no problem with — I have a bigger collection of Irish rebel music than most Americans. But this, this is just doggerel. It's vicious, nasty doggerel, too, which makes it all the worse. I don't know if Shane was trying to make a point about intolerance with these lyrics, and many others like it on the album, but if he was, it's not the reasoned point of a lucid, sober man. I deliberately did not list the more noxious lyrics in order to avoid propagating them — they're that bad: broad, unfunny exploits of hooliganism, spree killing, terrorism and hate crimes. Hard to see what kind of political point, if any, was intended with such demented doggerel; it's like Shane was so drunk he thought he was being ironic or something.

The Indigo Girls are a blast from my personal past. I listened to their first album repeatedly, was slightly disappointed with work that followed, and never really became a huge fan. I'm not saying they're has-beens or anything like it — far from it, they continue to record and tour and have a rabid fan base — but I only know them from the early stuff. So for me, this is one of those college discoveries. Sometimes our tastes shift and change as we realize that what we found so powerful in our youth is actually fairly simple, and sometimes we connect early with music that is rich enough to satisfy us long after our naive wonder is gone. To me, this song is in the latter camp; it has staying power. Fifteen years (holy Shiva, I'm old) after it appeared, it remains a very eloquent (and catchy!) warning about the perils of thinking in terms of black and white, right and wrong. Not only does the external world not work that way, bilateral thinking warps our minds and prevents us from developing fully. Zealots and radicals, "my way or the highway" and "love it or leave it" thinkers — these are the people, stunted and narrow in worldview, who often prevent society and their peers from advancing.

Here it is, the very nadir of the Chairman's career, as promised in the July 9 entry. I must admit that Sinatra's vocal performance here is absolute beauty, but the performance is not on trial here. It's the.. ah... let's be charitable and call it idiosyncratic wording. No, let's not be charitable. This isn't so much a bad line as it is a horrible, horrible travesty. You see, Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem titled "Mandalay", from which this song takes its lyrics. I use "takes" in its loosest sense, meaning something closer akin to "rapes." Ol' Blue Eyes, in a moment of grandiose fatuity, changes the words from "girl" to "broad," and later from "a man can raise a thirst" to "a cat can raise a thirst." Trivial fiddling? Not really. The sheer audacity of inflicting his empty, slangy brand of Rat Pack glibness on the works of Kipling, a real writer, is staggering. I'm not saying that all lyrics are sancrosanct; I think it's funny when Frank sings "a meatball on her finger" instead of "a ring" in "Isle of Capri." But he plays with powers far greater than himself here, and ends up sounding very stupid indeed to those who know the original. This is Sinatra's moment of towering self-aggrandizement, of overweening self-absorption in his own showy (and very quickly dated) Las Vegas cool. Sinatra may have once famously described rock musicians as "cretinous goons," but he wasn't exactly the epitome of refinement himself. A Burma broad, indeed.

Okay, I'm a sucker for a pun. But what a pun! Of course, it's a toss-up between that and "I met her on Monday / 'Twas my lucky bun day." No, wait, "The looser the waistband / The deeper the quicksand / Or so I have read." Okay, I'm a sucker for this song. So sue me. It was huge in Japan. Huge. I'm not much of a metal fan, but these guys rocked. I think they're still around, but their careers were kind of torpedoed back in the early '80s after a director with a vendetta made a documentary film of their tour that year. It was a hatchet job, but I guess that's the risk you take as an artist on the stage, in the topsy-turvy world of heavy rock.

Let me first make my standard cop-out disclaimer here: I like Joan Osborne, I really do. I think she's got the greatest set of pipes since Janis Joplin, and when she belts out that rock-soul stuff, I love it. But this song in particular is, quite simply, a blemish on the face of musical creativity. It's pretty much a toss-up between the above lines and the couplet "Nobody calling on the phone / 'Cept for the Pope maybe in Rome" as to which is stupider, but I picked the chorus because, well, it's stupider in a more important way. That is, these lines seem to strive to some sort of philosophical inquiry, when in reality they're just empty banalities. To start, what if God was one of us? Well, what if? Most Christians believe that He was and indeed is. So, not much of an original thought there. A faint glimmer of originality, or at least a common line of thought that most people just don't bother pursuing, comes next. Osborne (presumably obliviously) tosses out some desultory blasphemy: calling God a "slob" and implying that He's rather muddled about what He's doing. Nice, Joan. But all this would be fine, if only a bit over-reaching and New Agey, if the song had a point. But it doesn't. I'm not saying that every question needs an answer supplied, but if not, a question itself should at least guide you to some kind of conclusion. So, what if God was one of us? Well, if you're Christian, He is. Not an alienated stranger all alone, though. So... what? Nothing. It's just a vacuous thought that millions of others have briefly and idly speculated on, then, thankfully, unlike Joan, kept to themselves and moved on. Joan, I love you. But stick to the songs about masturbation, please.

Billy Bragg, unapologietic socialist, is also a politically-charged lyricist with almost as keen an ear as Elvis Costello's for cunning wordplay and an equal capacity for trenchant verbal barbs. In this song, he's attacking a loudmouth warhawk conservative ("There you are standing at the bar / And you're giving me grief about the DDR" --- a classic couplet if ever there was one). That's good enough, but two things make the song so much more than a self-righteous leftist whine. One, near the end Bragg turns his caustic wit on himself. Two, the aforementioned wordplay, which nips any pomposity in the bud (really, how many puns have Creed or Live sung?). Case in point, the line above is a beautiful image, and a nice homage to the Kinks to boot. What could be better?

Holy mother of Mary, this can't be real. This couldn't possibly have been an actual hit, actually played on MTV and willingly listened to my millions of (presumably legally retarded) people. And yet it was. This is another one of those songs, like Limp Bizkit's "Nookie" (see below), that filtered down to my protesting conscious ears despite all my best intentions to remain blissfully unaware of its existence. Damn. Now, I'm trying to avoid judging performances here; otherwise, lyrics apart, the bad entries would be stuffed with Boston and Foreigner and the good with Johnny Cash, who could sing the phone book and make it compelling. So the fact that this is a vomit-inducingly sappy love ballad should be beside the point. The lyrics themselves are so mind-numbingly trite, such adolescent whinebaby angst-ridden claptrap, that it simply boggles the mind. Read them all and see for yourself. And then disembowel yourself at the sheer shame of sharing a world with people who could actually enjoy these awkward, jeuvenile lyrics which should have remained hidden away in the seventh-grade homeroom binder where they belong. *Panting* Okay, I'm done now.

I am a huge TMBG fan. I make no apologies for that, either: the world needs a few more clever, literate bands. What I've always loved the most about the Johns, as their fans probably never call them, is not their interesting nasal voices, or their witty wordplay, or even their wide variety of recondite song subjects (a introduction to the life of the painter James Ensor, divisions of mammals, an epic sung by a nightlight... you know, the usual pop fare). No, what really makes TMBG a permanent fixture on my mixtapes is the disparity between their upbeat, peppy music and their dark, often very bleak lyrics. The above is just a mild case in point, however: it's not really bleak, just a rather cynical view of human nature. Don't it just hit home, though? You never miss your water till your well runs dry and all that.

Really, I don't hate Alanis. That song about going down in a thee-ah-tah is a nicely acerbic musical dis. So why is she the first artist to be featured in the bad section twice? Well, mostly because the one instance reminded me of the other. But secondly, it bears repeating: this line, this whole song, is eminently stupid. Rain on your wedding day is not ironic. A fly in your wine, no matter how how much it makes you whine, is similarly not ironic. If one is being charitable, one could, as the latter of these links does, allow that such things could be interpreted as ironic.... but really, if you're going to write a song called and ostensibly about irony, why not come up with examples that are indubitably ironic? Say, moving your wine inside from the picnic because you wish to avoid bugs and then having a house fly land in your drink. Or rain on your wedding day if you're a weatherman and you predicted sunshine for that day and it only rains that one day all month. (On a side note, once when I was working as an assistant teacher, I was talking to some 6th graders about this song and trying to explain to them what irony was and why the song wasn't. One of them said, "Maybe she meant it not to be ironic, so it would be really ironic that it was called 'Ironic.'" Damn twelve year olds, always outsmarting me.)

The lines that fired up a generation of slackers, started a movement, spawned countless gravelly-voiced imitators. On paper, they look rather dull. But I can think of very few other so succinct and apt ways of summing up the disaffection, herd mentality and alienation of being a teenager or anyone, willingly or otherwise, who skirts the edges of society's norms. Like a roving band of gangly teen mallgoers, it demands attention: "Here we are." It admits an infantile need for attention and stimulation: "Entertain us." Then it zeroes in on the individual, lost, alone, pathetic. Stupid. Contagious. One might also mention the equally terse and equally affecting "A mulatto / An albino / A mosquito / My libido," which comes off as jejeune, staccato haiku, but is gospel truth to those who've felt rejected and unloved. (As a side note, my professor of Russian history once asked me, apropos of pretty much nothing, in a sarcastic manner whether I thought Kurt Cobain was his generation's premier poet of Angst [he'd just killed himself]. Taken only slightly aback, I said, "Well, uh... yeah, I do." He seemed satisfied enough; maybe he figured if I said so, it was true after all.)

I don't want to jump on the quite full Alanis-bashing bandwagon here. I hate it when someone suddenly becomes a target, that it's somehow "cool" to berate them with a music purist smirk because they are on the official list of Who is Uncool. So I'll say right here that I think there is definitely a place for Alanis in the music world; sometimes you need a good dose of wry vitriol screeched out in a voice like a cat wailing. (Yes, that's a compliment; I love Bob Dylan.) But the above lyrics... they're the Hindenburg of lyrics, except "oh, the humanity," it's "oh, the banality." I could have picked any of the inane closers to this chorus (one hand flashing a peace sign, hailing a tack-seeeee cab, etc), but "flickin' a cigarette" to me just encapsulates the utter inanity of it all. Just think about this. What it all comes down to, what everything in the cosmos boils down to, is that the future will turn out fine. Well, that's good! But how are we sure that this optimism is justified? Why, 'cause she got one hand in her pocket. And the other one is, you see, flickin' a cigarette. Ah. Not quite the Socratic method, is it, Alanis? Pop stars really shouldn't get philosophical.

A fat joke? A cheap shot? Maybe, maybe. An snide and elitist attack on an easy target, you might even say. (The song is an observation of the bad service and weirdo passengers on England's public coach system.) But first, it's a clever joke. It's funny. There aren't too many lyrics that can make you do spit-takes the first time you hear them (if you happen to be drinking a beverage at the time); this is one of them. Oh, sure, you can say to songwriter Neil Hannon, "Well why don't you get on your private jet then with your boyfriend and shut the hell up, you fey fairy-boy," and you might be right too. But I submit that this isn't just a funny cheap shot. Look how he switches the pronoun and point of view, from "she danced" to "your arse." It directs the sympathy of the listener. Suddenly we're no longer looking at a stewardess past her prime trying to squeeze down the aisle, but we're experiencing it ourselves. It's almost as if we're in her head, first visualizing her memories of youth (miniskirts in style, her dancing), then snapping back to reality and noting that yes, it is hard to get by sometimes. I dunno, maybe I'm over-doing the English 101 stuff, but I think Neil Hannon is a supremely talented writer. Nice voice, too. (But check out I Hate Music's take on Divine Comedy. IHM is a very funny blog by, basically, the anti-me.)

It's very possible that I'm just being a crotchety contrarian in listing this here. After all, I own no less than nine REM albums (their last couple blew goat chunks, though). And when the video for this song aired (ad nauseam) on MTV, I'm sure I was right there along with the masses and critics alike hailing it as "groundbreaking" and "artsy" and "opaque" and "lacking scantily dressed women and explosions." And yes, it's even possible that the above three imperatives (with a repeated fourth) are perfectly valid commands in the order presented, and not just a few monosyllabic rhyming words. ("You can try to fly, you'll end up crying, keep on trying, no, it's just a dream..." Something like that.) I guess what put these lines in particular in the red for me, though, is the damn whininess of it all. Okay, it was just a dream. Yeah, try, cry, even fly, I guess. Get over it. Lord, don't get me started on the repeated, wailing whine-fest that is the end to "Me In Honey:" "What about meeeee?" What about you? Bottom line, sometimes Stipe gets on my nerves.

See, jeuvenile vulgarity can sometimes be clever and amusing. (Fred Durst, I hope you're taking notes.) How can you not love a country song, performed by professional Nashville studio musicians, sung by Gene Ween in a cornpone accent, and so delightfully over-the-top ("Hit the road, get truckin' / Pack your bag, I don't need the ag' / On your knees you big booty bitch, start suckin'") you gasp at the audacity of it but laugh aloud at the same time? A little humor, and an actual melody, tempers the grossest childish rants; I know of two middle aged mothers who love this song. Try that with Limp Bizkit.

When it comes to bad lyrics, this page is generally going to reflect my own tastes. So "bad" is of course relative --- there's bad compared to an artist's other work or potential, there are guilty pleasures that we know aren't quite poetry but we love them anyway, there are well-meaning lines that are just written poorly, and there are lines so dumb and over the top they're almost good. In short, this page generally ignores a lot of hip-hop and nu-metal and teeny-pop and other music for adolescents. I'm not interested in that stuff, so I don't listen to it, so I remain blissfully unaware of how bad it is upon close, specific inspection. Every once in a while, however, some "music" spawned in Satan's nightmare pits of cacophony filters down to my consciousness. In this case, the above offal courtesy of Limp Bizkit or limpbizkit or Shitstizzick or whatever that bloated oaf Fred Durst has re-christened his talentless posse. Yeah, there are varying degress of bad, but this is so supremely depraved, pathetic and retarded it's hard to imagine that it was actually deliberately penned by a member of the species Homo sapiens, much less excitedly accepted by a record company as fodder for the airwaves. I mean for the love of the almighty, are there no standards?

If you were submitting entries to a contest for clever lines, you could do much worse than stuff the ballot box with every single couplet from this song. Songwriter Rhett Miller is at his sharpest ("her on top and me on liquor") and world-weariest ("It didn't do no good / Well I didn't think it would") here. But the lines above --- the chorus -- are the strongest, the kicker which never fails to put a wry smile on my face as I recall how easy it is to disparage the whole external world when you're not feeling so great on the inside. Make 'em smile with puns and wordplay, and make 'em cry with a sob story. It's the old formula for real old-time country (see "If Love Is an Elevator, You Gave Me the Shaft"), not that formulated Nashville crap, delivered with a blistering rock edge.

Ol' Blue Eyes is certainly one of the greats, there's no denying it. But there's also little point in denying that the Rat Pack exuded a kind of lazy arrogance that their brand of macho hip ("hep"?) would last forever (their swaggering, drinking and annoying habit of calling people "cat" come to mind). The blustering audacity of reducing the majesty of Peru to "llama land," the smirking Anglo contempt of describing an Andean folk musician as a "one man band" tooting his "flute" (shades of old Deano always picking on Sammy)... it's all here. This is not the most egregious example of the Rat Pack's bluster (I'll surely detail that on this page later), but it'll do. Next time a big band purist tells you rock and roll lyrics are jejeune doggerel, point them this way.

Now, this is possibly a case of a line being great because of how it's delivered, which is something I'm trying to eschew on this page (it's good and bad lines, not performances). But I just can't overlook this fantastic verse. It kills me every time; I love the internal rhyme of "suit," "flute" and "cute" and the hard emphasis on each word, I love the way Dylan rhymes "was I" with "because I" and then leads into the title line, I love the bald-faced arrogance of the total assertion. We all do crazy things for love or lust or both. These lines mean more to me than poet laureate Andrew Motion's favorite "the ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face" (though that's awesomely great too).

I'll leave aside the fact that the song from which this irritating line taken is a mindless bubblegum fluff that grates on me for no particularly good reason. Why I dislike the lyric itself is this: The only one for me is you, and you for me. See?? There's no "me for you!" This guy doesn't care about her feelings. You're the one for me, baby, so we'd be happy together. Who cares about you? Seriously, that has always bugged me. He sings it both ways, with the conjunction "and" between them, as if they were both independent ideas or something. (And I'm not a big fan of the "call you up / invest a dime" line, either. Let's face it, the Turtles stink.)

I haven't listened to or owned any Public Enemy in years and years. (Their lyrics really are jeuvenile at times, and I'm not talking about Flav's intentionally jeuvenile, and hilarious, lyrics). But this line has really stuck with me. It's just such a concise, biting snapshot of how a politically aware black man sees the good old U.S.A., and the desultory delivery makes it all the more potent. What did the letter say? It said they were suckers. No need to elaborate, right? If you don't like this line, you must be some kind of compassionate conservative or something.