Really Dumb Songs

Sometimes songs just don't make sense. I'm not talking about people who listen to Steve Miller's "Jet Airliner" and walk around singing "Bingo Jed had a rhino". I'm talking about songs where you can definitely understand the words but the words just don't make sense. Sometimes they're just stupid. Sometimes they contradict themselves, or just leave you scratching your head. And sometimes I wonder if the song is saying what I think it's saying.

Like Billy Vera when he sang "...Did you think I would hurt you, or raise my hand to you?" Was he really saying that this woman is afraid that he'll beat her up? It's just such a sick thing to be singing about, I have to wonder if that's what he really meant. And I realize that they were called Billy Vera and the BEATERS, which is totally not funny but I had to point it out before some idiot did it for me.

Or what about that song by America that goes "I been through the desert on a horse with no name"? Why did the horse not have a name? If he rode it all the way through the desert, didn't he have time to think of one?

Country music can be especially stupid and I notice it more because I'm from the South and so are most country artists. Now the stereotype is that Southerners are stupid and from what I can tell, a lot of this crap doesn't help at all to dispel this myth. A lot of country music is fantastic, especially older stuff like Johnny Cash and Hank Williams, but it just seems to me that when country music is bad, its worse than just about anything else.

Let me give an example of a song I used to hear quite often but I don't know who it's by:

I've always heard it told
Love's worth its weight in gold
It can't be bought or sold

This sounds like something a third grader slapped together. What rhymes with "told"? "bold"? "hold"?

First of all, ok, Basic Economics 101 here: When the value of one thing can be compared to something else, it's said to have an economic value. It doesn't even have to be in dollars or yen or pounds; a cow might be worth six chickens or a house worth ten cows. So if something is worth a certain amount of something else then it can be "bought" or "sold". Ergo, if something is worth its weight in gold, then I can give you x amount of gold in exchange for whatever it is. So love is either worth its weight in gold, or it can't be bought or sold, but it can't be both.

Now you're thinking, But wait!!! "Love" is not a physical thing that can be weighed, right? So it can't be bought or sold after all!

Sort of. But that's not what the song says. Let's do a little word problem: This guy says "love" is worth its own weight in gold (and gold per ounce as of Friday was at about $268 USD, you can check it out at www.bordergold.com). Now since love weighs NOTHING, then what does this song say love is worth?

This is all simple math! Even Jethro Bodine could have ciphered that one. I hate when people say dumb things like that.

Ok, here's another one, by Lee Ann Rimes:

Gonna buy a one-way ticket
On a west-bound train
See how far I can go

Well, first of all, don't you have to know how far you're going before you buy your ticket?

Second of all, can't you just figure out where you are, how much money you have, how much the tickets cost, and then figure out how far you can go? Why do you have to actually buy the ticket?

And finally, if money is no object like I assume it isn't for Lee Ann Rimes, isn't it obvious to her that wherever she is, a train can only go so far west before it comes to the ocean? Can't she just look at a map?

What I really hate is when country songwriters take familiar sayings or expressions and write songs about them.

Like there's an actually song called "Here's a Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares", which people have been saying variations of since calls cost a dime, and stopped being funny 20 years ago.

See:

Jokes Some People Still Think Are Funny

There's a line from the movie Jerry Maguire where Tom Cruise is giving this big speech and Rene Zellwegger stops him by saying "You had me at hello." Well then some country songwriter actually wrote a song called "You Had Me At Hello," which was a stupid line even in the movie. I reckon I should be grateful that it wasn't followed up by the smash hit "Show Me The Money".

And I swear I think there's a song that is a paraphrase of the Miranda warnings that cops read to suspects when they arrest them. It goes something like "You have the right to remain lovely......anything you say will make me hold myself against you....." That may not be it, but trust me its just as stupid as that.

Now I'm not going to make the case that Southerners aren't stupid, and obviously I'd have a hard time doing that using country music as evidence. But I should point out that most people are stupid, and I don't think Southerners are any moreso than anyone else. It's just that most of the ones down here seem to be in the music business.

But country music is definitely not the only kind with really stupid lyrics. Take this one by Kool & The Gang:

I often pray before I lay down
By your side
If you receive your calling
Before I awake
Could I make it through the night?

Putting aside how insanely morbid it is to sing about someone dying in bed while you're asleep with them, just think about the logistics of it. She dies, we don't know how, and he sleeps through it. So why wouldn't he make it through the night? However she died, he already slept through it. Unless she died in a fire or something, in which case obviously he would die too, and the answer would of course be no, you wouldn't make it through the night. But if I wake up next to someone who's dead I am probably going to be calling 911 and doing CPR and all that, and just leave all the freaking out til later.

Or what about the one by Rod Stewart where he sings:

...And never will I roam
'Cause I know my place is home
Where the ocean meets the sky I'll be sailing

So, is he staying home or is he sailing away?

What about "Stairway To Heaven"? What's a bustle in your hedgerow? Or Hotel California? "They stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast"? Lovely.

There was a song that used to come on the radio all the time a few years ago that went:

Whatever I said
Whatever I did
I didn't mean it
I just want you back for good

Well my question for this guy is: If he doesn't know what it was he said, how does he know he didn't mean it? Is he just one of those weenies who let people walk all over him and to keep a woman he'll cave in to anything like he has no beliefs or opinions of his own? Or is it just that he doesn't ever mean anything he says?

What about all those creepy stalker love songs? Like "Every Breath You Take"? Or that one that says "I don't care who you are, or what you did, or where you go....as long as you love me...?" Does that creep anyone else out?

In that "We Are The World" song, Willie Nelson sings a part that goes:

As God has shown us
By turning stones to bread....

Maybe he's talking about a different religion, but I know that in the Bible Jesus was tempted in the desert by Satan to turn stones into bread and Jesus refused to.

In the John Cougar Mellencamp song "Small Town," it's fun to count how many times he actually sings the words "small town". (NOTE: Right after I wrote this I heard the song on the radio, and its 18 times, although it seemed more like 1,000).

In the Allman Brother's song "Ramblin' Man", I swear it sound like he sings "My father was a gambler down in Georgia, and he wound up on the wrong of the......." Nothing. I mean the wrong end of THE nothing.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is the greatest western ever made. I've probably seen it like 100 times.

Jimmy Stewart is this lawyer guy who rides into Shinbone to bring law and order to town. John Wayne is the local gunslinger and the only one with guts enough to stand up to Liberty Valance, who's terrorizing the town. Liberty Valance is a hired gun from north of the Picket Wire where all the big ranchers are trying to fight statehood, and Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne spend the first half of the movie arguing about how to handle him; John Wayne carries a gun and Jimmy Stewart wants to put him in jail.

I'm totally giving away the ending here but Jimmy Stewart winds up shooting Liberty Valance and gets elected governor and then Senator and he gets this big reputation as the Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which totally pisses him off because he was the guy who believed in law and order and using your head. And it even turns out that he wasn't even the one who did it; John Wayne was standing behind a wall and he did it.

Everybody thought Jimmy Stewart was so smart, but he wasn't so smart. If he'd had half the brains they thought he did, he would have done things differently. He would have opened his law office like he wanted to, and instead of arguing with John Wayne about how to handle things and what he was going to accomplish, he should have hired John Wayne. I mean, they both wanted change, they just disagreed on how to do it.

On second thought that sounds like a really bad 80s action TV show. Nevermind. But it's still a great movie.