Crap Lyrics: A Celebration of the Very Worst Pop Lyrics of All Time . . . Ever!

by Johnny Sharp

Songwriters often don't seem to bother with the basic laws of the English language. Bob Dylan is famous for "Blowing in the Wind" but less known for his quite original line "wiggle, wiggle, like a bowl of soup;" Duran Duran sang "you're about as easy as a nuclear war" in "Is There Something I Should Know," and Spandau Ballet even named a song "Instinction," which is in fact not a real word. The airwaves are crammed with terrible titles and nonsensical lyrics, and this hilarious compendium catalogs and identifies the very worst offenders.

Even the greatest songwriters (and Spandau Ballet) have had the odd bad day at the office. Or more likely, a bad few minutes in the studio toilets scribbling the first words they can think of on the back of their tranquiliser prescription shortly before the vocal has to be recorded.Johnny Sharp has trawled half a century of lyrics to find the funniest examples of crippled couplets, outrageous innuendo, mixed metaphors, shameless self-delusion, nefarious nonsense and flagrant filth. Not to mention unforgivable over-use of alliteration.Crap Lyrics is a humorous celebration (and occasionally, condemnation) of over 120 of the most ridiculous hooks, lines and stinkers from pop poetry through the modern ages. Johnny Sharp has spent 15 years as a music journalist, and several of those years writing for NME under the name Johnny Cigarettes, so he knows that ridicule is nothing to be scared of. He's serious as cancer when he asks: Are we human, or are we dancer? And where do we go from here? Is it down to the lake, I fear?While moving like a tortoise, full of rigor mortis? Whether you're a diplomat, or even down the Laundromat, if you have ever heard a song and thought 'You what?', this is the book for you.