So how can you emulate the eight lyricists selected? The best advice we can give may be to explain what not to do. The art of writing good lyrics may be beyond our understanding, but the art of writing really bad lyrics is a straightforward business. Indeed, how not to write a lyric can be explained by eight simple rules.
Don't allow your political convictions to get the better of you
You're angry about some terrible injustice, you take up your pen and commit your rage to paper in the belief that your song will chime with thousands around the globe. That is all well and good - some of the greatest songs ever written have been motivated by anger - but remember to go back and check through your lyrics once you've calmed down a bit, asking yourself three questions.
One: has my indignation at the world's manifold unfairness inadvertently caused me to write a well-meaning song about an impossibly hackneyed topic? Remember: just because people can't argue with the sentiment doesn't automatically mean that it won't make them want to slap you. The gold standard here is attained by Mel C's righteous tirade against homelessness, If That Were Me: "Is it lonely where you are/ sleeping in between parked cars?"
Two: if I say these words out loud in a Cockney accent, do I sound like a cab driver? This is something Richard Ashcroft should have tried with Bitter Sweet Symphony: "Try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die/ What do you make of these asylum seekers, then?/ And don't get me started on the bloody congestion charge."
Three: has my indignation caused me to overlook the fact that my lyrics don't scan at all and thus lumber along like the straggler in a donkey derby? If so, don't despair, you're in the company of John Lennon, with his catchy paean to Angela Davis ("Angela, they put you in prison/ Angela, they shot your man down/ Angela, you're one of the millions of political prisoners in the world"), and Ian Brown ("Save us from warmongers who bring on Armageddon/ Save us from all of those whose eyes are closed to the plight of the African child").
Be really careful when dealing with sex
Obviously, it's the fundamental topic: rock'n'roll is named after a euphemism for it, after all. But tread carefully: more appalling lyrics have been inspired by sex than any other subject. If you want to see how bad it can get, look up Kool G Rap's Bad to the Bone, a lyric that I can't really go into here because it's so impossibly repellent that reading it is an utterly shattering experience, from which one emerges with a horrified sense of never wanting sex again. Suffice to say it contains the line, "I got chicks on my dick like a human shish kebab". The rest of it isn't as romantic and charming as that.
Make sense
A difficult one. Obviously, you're not writing an instruction manual here: plenty of songs don't make any sense and are fantastic, including the splenetic outpouring of surreal imagery that makes up I Am the Walrus and most things written by Mark E Smith. But other songs just don't make any sense: see Noel Gallagher's ongoing struggle to grasp the difference between fast and slow, up and down, Little and Large.
Don't go with the first thing that comes into your head
Heed the sorry tale of Björn Ulvaeus of Abba. He was one half of the premier pop technicians of the 70s, crafting singles of such dazzling perfection they sound like they had been dreamed rather than written. Alas, doing that left little time for writing lyrics for albums. He later told a journalist that he would sit up all night unsuccessfully trying to write words for certain songs, then desperately take any rubbish into the studio to prove he'd been working hard, hoping his band members would veto his efforts. "But actually," he lamented, "they didn't care." Hence, King Kong Song ("What a dreadful mighty killer/ That big black wild gorilla") and Sitting in a Palm Tree, in which a man deals with romantic rejection by sitting in a palm tree ("I will stay here among my coconuts"). Hence also Dum Dum Diddle, a song about a woman who feels sexually threatened by her partner's violin ("You are only smilin'/ When you play that violin").
Check your facts
Obviously, you are a rock star, unbound from straight society's mores. What need have you for research? Nonetheless, you need to check your facts, because if you don't, you might write Star by Primal Scream, on which Bobby Gillespie's pledge of undying fealty to the Black Power movement is somewhat undercut by the second verse. "Sister Rosa, Malcolm X and Dr King showed us we got power", he sang. "Their bodies may be gone, but their spirits still live on". This presumably came as worrying news to Rosa Parks, whose body was very much alive and well when the song came out in 1997.
Remember: multimillionaire rock stars do not have the same problems as ordinary people
Four and 20, by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, is the gobsmacking set text here, a song that has the gall to demand the listener's pity by suggesting that being a sleepless rock star in a luxury hotel room is just the same as being a financially destitute door-to-door salesman: "A different kind of poverty now upsets me so."
Don't act as if taking too much cocaine is a mythic incident of vast significance
Or else you'll write Gas Panic! by Oasis: "What tongue-less ghost of sin crept through my curtains?"
Don't be Dolores O'Riordan
Irish quintet the Cranberries often seemed less like a rock band than a protracted (and successful) attempt to prove that a certain kind of American will buy literally anything, no matter how shoddy, with the faintest whiff of "de auld country" about it. The emerald jewels in their multiplatinum crown were the lyrics of their frontwoman, the William McGonagall of rock, scientifically proven to be the worst lyricist in history.
No major global event passed without O'Riordan hastening to the word processor and coming up with something. She sometimes wrote exclusively in cliches - the Cranberries once released an album called Wake Up and Smell the Coffee. She sometimes wrote things that were trite, as on the indispensable Bosnia. "I would like to state my vision, life was so unfair," she sang. "We live in our secure surroundings, and people die out there." That was shocking news for anyone who thought Arkan's Tigers were some kind of formation dancing troupe.
She sometimes wrote things that were enormously stupid, including New New York, which declared of 9/11, "There's nothing to say," thus raising the question: then why have you written a song about it? She sometimes wrote songs like Zombie, which suggested she was only midway through learning English with the aid of an incomplete set of Linguaphone cassettes: "Another head hangs lowly/ Child is slowly taken/ And the violence caused such silence/ Who are we mistaken?"
And she wrote I Just Shot John Lennon, which features perhaps the two worst couplets in musical history: "He had perceptively known that it wouldn't be nice/ Because in 1980 he paid the price," and the staggering: "With a Smith and Wesson .38/ John Lennon's life was no longer a debate."
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