Bad Lyrics — Page 3

Words misused or mispronounced can take you right out of a song:

Have a pork. (Gypsy)
Some leftOvers of Moo Goo Gai Pan (Flower Drum Song)
SOUFFlé (Mr.President)

With respect, AC, what's wrong with "Have a pork"?

To me, it sounds like the way someone who has spent most of her life in show business (particularly around urban Jews) would talk.

I'm sure Sondheim would have written "Have the pork" if he hadn't wanted exactly what he wrote.

Gaveston2, it's After Eight who has a problem with "Have a pork," not me.

-AC, who is still questioning the logic of the coffee pot on the nightstand.

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Updated On: 11/6/11 at 09:59 PM

Maybe he's serving her coffee in bed? I... have no idea.

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The point of the Baker's Wife lyric is that Amiable has put the coffee on the table beside the bed so it's there for her when she wakes up. Pretty straightforward.

I adore Ragtime, but this one lyric in What Kind of Woman always bothered me:

"Each day the maids trudge up the hill.
The hired help arrives.
I never stopped to think they might have lives
beyond our lives."

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I'd like to nominate ALL of Next to Normal. Corny, cliche, several missed or inconsistent rhymes, not personalized to the characters, and a complete ignorance of the how to effectively use cast members as a chorus. Why the hell does the boyfriend who's barely met the mother sing along with the family when they discuss her history?!! He doesn't know her history! He was just introduced a scene prior.

Either, you've never seen the show or you're just talking out of your ass since I offended you by bashing it, but there are a ton of missed rhymes. I will look them up if you like, but the only ignorance exposed here is your own.

I have seen it many times although admittedly I might be selectively attending to the 'successful' rhymes, I just can't remember which rhymes you are referring to. So please, do look them up. Even if there are a couple I imagine there are very few compared to the 'true' rhymes....(days/crazed? in "Hey #1"?)

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Updated On: 11/10/11 at 02:33 PM

Darquegk,

Let's say your reading of "pork" as an adjective is correct. It's still a bad lyric because it's unclear, and just as importantly, sounds both clumsy and wrong.
"A pork," either noun or adjective is just no good.


And have you ever heard anyone use the expressions "pork egg roll," or "pork Chinese food?" I haven't.

Updated On: 11/10/11 at 03:57 PM

Oh, good grief! Some people need to get out more.

The full lyric line is:

"Have a dish, have a fork, have a fish, have a pork."

She isn't offering him an entire fish. (Since when is chinese food delivered with whole fish on the plate?) "Fish" AND "pork" are colloquialisms where the adjective stands in for the noun. (I'm sure there's a technical term for this, but I'll leave that to the linguists among us.)

It's excellent writing for character that culminates at the end of the stanza when Rose pronounces "poem" as one syllable ("pome") to rhyme with "home".

(In fact, Sondheim has said the real problem with the song is that after the first line, it isn't about anything. Apparently, he amused himself writing colloquialisms instead of content.)

It isn't unclear to anyone except After Eight. But he has a grand mal seizure every time he sees Sondheim's name in the program, so all the language is confusing to him.

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A more interesting question is where is Rose from? Doesn't the scene with her father take place in Seattle? Both Rose and her father sound more like they come from one of the cities in the Northeast. But then I'm not an expert on the working class of Washington state.

Perhaps Gypsy Rose Lee's mother was born back East and moved to Seattle with her family. Does anyone know?

After Eight, I'll grant your objections to DO I HEAR A WALTZ? Rodgers was in control of that show and the only decent lyric is the cut version of "We're Gonna Be All Right" (which, fortunately, eventually resurfaced in SIDE BY SIDE BY SONDHEIM).

But the whole point of the title song of CAMELOT is that it is a magical world that follows rules completely different from the real world where the rest of us live. Yes, of course you're right that winter ends on March the second in order to fit the number of musical notes, but so what? It isn't a realistic world anyway.

Do you also spend "The Lusty Month of May" wondering if winter ends a month early, why do flowers still wait until May to bloom? Because this is a scientific inconsistency that demands an angry rebuttal!

If you can't surrender yourself to the magic and whimsy of musical theater, then perhaps your time would be better spent watching the early, realistic plays of Arthur Miller. They're quite good and less apt to end seasons on arbitrary dates.