Izzle Pfaff!

Yesterday the fiancee picked me up from work, and we were driving home, the radio playing. Suddenly Wang Chung’s “Dance Hall Days” started up, and I of course was mindlessly singing along, when I suddenly thought, “These are the dumbest lyrics ever.” Look:

Take your baby by the hair

And pull her close and there there there

Take your baby by the ears

And play upon her darkest fears

What? Oh, well. I’m nothing if not agreeable, so I did in fact grab my fiancee by the ears and then poured a cupful of live spiders down her shirt. Well, in my mind I did. But there’s more:

So take your baby by the wrist

And in her mouth an amethyst

Hot damn! So I released her ears and pried open the fiancee’s jaws. Jackpot! A shiny amethyst! I knew I had me a great gal.

Of course, these are not actually the stupidest lyrics ever. They’re just pretty damn stupid. The worst lyrics ever is of course going to be a pretty subjective topic, and everyone will have their own opinion. While thinking about this, I rejected the obvious choices, like Alanis Morrissette or (as was suggested to me) Leonard Nimoy just because their lyrics are so obviously witless and bad. I also passed over things like “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?”–which I consider to be the most heinous song ever perpetrated on an innocent public–as well as skull-clutchers like the entire oeuvre of the Indigo Girls. So it’s all kind of arbitrary, but I just thought for a while about the relative terribleness of certain song lyrics that I think have gone unremarked on.

But before I leave off the Wanging Chungers, I do want to point out that I found a fucking great Mondegreen that someone had about that song. Someone posted somewhere that they had always heard the lyrics this way:

Take your baby by the ears,

and play upon her doggie spheres

Which is, you know, the best thing ever; it’s going onto my tombstone to baffle untold later generations. It’s like something out of the i ching.

Anyway. So I just was kind of free-associating with the idea of bad lyrics, when I remembered an old song from college days by that deathless old bastard Malcolm McLaren called, wrenchingly, “Something’s Jumpin’ in Your Shirt.” McLaren at his most winsomely affecting, don’t you think? Check out the lyrics:

No matter what I do, no matter what I say

My t-shirt’s changed since yesterday

I look into the mirror and my t-shirt’s got a mark

I guess it’s just because my life is falling apart

But I felt something hurting

And a boy said,

There’s somethin jumpin!

Jumpin in my shirt

Something’s jumpin, jumpin in your shirt

Something’s jumpin, does it really hurt?

Something’s jumpin, my hearts on red alert

Walk the body! Walk the body!

Oh my god! It’s like . . . Faulkner! I really, really like the t-shirt-as-life-barometer or whatever the hell it means. These lyrics are so awful, they really just make me very happy. Walk the body! Okay! I don’t even know what the fuck that means, but I’ll try it! Something’s jumpin’ in your shirt! Is it your heart? No, I think it’s clear that we’re talking about boobs. God, what a great, great bunch of horrible lyrics.

But that’s a pretty obscure song. How about MOR mainstay Toto? They had a pretty big hit with the chugging, faceless “Africa.” Read on!

I hear the drums echoing tonight

But she hears only whispers of some quiet conversation

She’s coming in 12:30 flight

The moonlit wings reflect the stars that guide me towards salvation

I stopped an old man along the way,

Hoping to find some long forgotten words or ancient melodies

He turned to me as if to say, “Hurry boy, it’s waiting there for you”

That’s not so bad. I mean, it’s insipid and meaningless, but not the worst ever, though you can see where Mr. Mister was getting inspiration from. It makes no sense, of course: if she’s flying in, why are the moonlit wings reflecting the stars guiding him towards salvation? Or is he on the plane? Is that where he stopped the old man “along the way?” Never mind, no time! Hurry, boy!

It’s gonna take a lot to drag me away from you

There’s nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do

I bless the rains down in Africa

Gonna take some time to do the things we never had

The wild dogs cry out in the night

As they grow restless longing for some solitary company

I know that I must do what’s right

As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti

Oh, what dizzying poetic heights! I particularly like the total creative surrender implied in the “hundred men or more” line. Hmmm . . . what’s a big, big number? More than a hundred! Brilliant. What the fuck do the rains in Africa have to do with anything anyway, and why would you bless them? All you’re doing is irritating those wild dogs (huh?), restless for whatever “solitary company” could possibly be. I’d be restless too. But the final line brings it all home. You know what a beautiful mountain is like? Another mountain.

I know I’m not exactly going after big game here, but hey, like I said, I’ve just been brain-dumping. But I must say, it’s time to bring out the big one; I’ve been waiting to find something that competes with the next song in terms of sheer fucking awfulness. It so clearly shoots for straight-faced Bukowskian hard-knuckle poeticality, and so spectacularly fails, I really find it kind of breathtaking. It’s worth quoting the entire mind-ripping thing, starting with the ass-tastic title. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the lyrics of Live:

“Insomnia and the Hole in the Universe”

my brother kicked his feet to sleep

my brother kicked his feet to sleep

my brother kicked his feet to sleep

and i sang the dirge song

my brother never missed a beat

my brother kicked his feet to sleep, sweet feet

my brother kicked his feet to sleep

and i sang the dirge song

Angel, don’t you have some bagels in my oven?

Lady, don’t you know a man when you see one?

Crazy lady with the shiny shoes, where are you?

Kick you feet and calm the space that makes

you hollow

little swami’s got his bowl to eat

little swami always walks his beat, sweet feet

little swami’s got his bowl to eat

and i sing the dirge song

it’s amazing how they come to see

the little swami with his bowl to eat, sweet feet

the little swami only wears a sheet

and won’t sing the dirge song

anal, tight-assed soldier with that dogged heart

put down your gun

we are ready to explode, we gotta take it smart

and take it slow

Holy fucking good golly! Sing the “dirge song,” brother! I don’t know what other kind of dirges there are, but oh well! Not that anything in there makes any fucking sense at all anyway! “Angel, don’t you have some bagels in my oven?” I think we’ve all asked this at least once in our lives.

I mean . . . jesus. I really don’t know what to do with all that. What’s the cross-reference foot fetish going on with his brother and the hungry swami? Who’s the poor soldier that gets sucker-punched at the end with the anal stuff? Maybe he should have kicked the space that made him hollow.

I fold. I mean, I just can’t do any better than what Live has already done. I take my baby by the wrist. I sing the dirge song. Where have all the cowboys gone?

Africa.

Saturday night, a friend celebrated her . . . mumble . . . something-or-other birthday, so we did what actors tragically often do: we gathered at a bar and performed the ancient ceremony known as karaoke. Different people have different reactions to this activity, usually ranging from “I want that person singing to burn to death right now,” all the way to “I want everyone else in the world to burn to death right now.” I understand. My own position is, “Singing in public is a scrotum-tightening ordeal of sheerest panic not unlike being attacked by rabid knife-brandishing gibbons.”

But you have to understand that it’s a little different going out with a bunch of actors (if you haven’t already, in which case, you should do so if only as a bold anthropological experiment). Actors are, famously and correctly, known for characteristics like deranged binge-drinking; an almost pathological lack of shame; a desperate craving for attention, even of the most negative sort, which is unfortunately at odds with a gnawing fear that at any given moment, someone somewhere nearby is being slightly more entertaining than themselves; and finally, in some remarkable cases, actual singing talent. That last trait is of course subjective when brought to bear on karaoke, whose arrangements of any given song have been anesthetized, splayed open, gutted with a baling hook, filled back up with chewed cardboard, and then hastily half-revived and sent reeling back out into the world. Karaoke arrangements are like Gorey’s doomed tatterdemalions: wan, utterly without hope, and about five seconds away from an awful death.

There are ways to deal with all this. Some actors are wonderful; their voices are perfect, and they rise above the insipid tripe oozing from the speakers behind them; they perform the song. But there are other people who take a different tack: they attack the song as if it had punched their kid sister in the face, and destroy it utterly. These are the people to be feared and locked cages and poked with sticks until science finds a way to understand them and then fuck with their brains cruelly, Clockwork Orange style, so they may one day be stopped.

Guess which group I’m writing about? There were some lovely performances that night, I’m sure, but their memories have been destroyed by the following people, all of whom I am, I should add, very fond of. Lest it seem otherwise.

First out of the gate on Saturday was T., who, evidently feeling that the world wasn’t quite Hobbesian enough for his liking, lit into an eye-popping rendition of Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long.” It actually started out okay, which is to say as okay as conceivably possible, for about four lines, when he mystifyingly substituted “karate” for “karama” in the lyrics, and then started stalking the tiny stage making frightening karate moves, kicking the air and leaping around like a frog on a hot plate. Since T. is about nine feet tall and ganglier-than-thou, he looked an awful lot like the muppet Animal after a thorough macing. He continued singing, exhorting everyone to madly karate “ALL! NIGHT! LONG!” and, because the rest of us have a tender spot for such awful things, we sang along. By the end, he had an awful lot of people in the bar staring into their drinks, wondering what fiendish thing had been slipped in there by the clearly malevolent bar staff.

Not long after this fearful spectacle came C., who ominously prefaced his performance with a suspiciously sincere bit of spoken dribble: “This song is about America.” Then the dire plonking strains of Phil Collins’ “Another Day in Paradise,” started polluting the air, and C. whipped his vocal cords into a frenzied yelping that approximated human noise. C. paid very little attention to the actual melody–itself a mixed blessing–and opted instead for the Kamikaze approach: he’d lift his voice up into a stratospheric whoop and then come divebombing down in a murderous assault on the helpless notes lying far below, which burst into flames and screamed piteously and C. shot past them straight into the ground. Occasionally, he would totally unneccessarily howl, “This song is about homelessness!” Actually, the way C. performed it, it could have been about autocannibalism or cataclysmic viral spread.

Not long after C. finished his clumsy autopsy on Mr. Collins’ pithy social ruminations came the birthday girl, V. V. is one of the masters of this art form I’ve described, and I can honestly say that on one past occasion, her grim chemical-peel version of Kim Carnes’ “Bette Davis Eyes” lifted me to another plane of existence; it was so otherworldly and horrific, it had me holding my sides laughing, otherwise I would have surely rushed the stage and impaled her on many forks. On this night too, she was mining the 80s, with her frontal assault on Pat Benetar’s interminable “Love is a Battlefield.” You knew where she was going almost immediately with the initial “Whoooaaoooaaaooo” banshee wail, because she already sounded like Diamanda Galas stuck in a taffy puller. V. continued along in this vein, paying absolutely no heed to the song’s meter or rhythm, instead opting for a kind of Paul Harvey vs. Eric Bogosian dramatic interpretation: “Heartache to heartache . . . . . . . . . . WESTAND!” Her eyes bulging like Don Rickles undergoing electrotherapy. In the audience, the drinking rate redoubled itself, and the regulars in the bar were looking decidedly twitchy and haunted, like sentient lab rats, aware of their fate, but unable to do anything about it.

The last one I remember, however, is K. K. is also legendary for his talent for eviscerating perfectly good songs, though he didn’t pick one on Saturday. No, again Mr. Phil Collins was selected for the old artistic cornholing, this time “Against All Odds,” which, for terrible reasons known only to himself, K. began singing with the most offensively ridiculous and overblown Cajun accent imaginable. “Teee-aa-iike a lwoook a-et me NYAA-OOWWW!” he bleated, clutching the mic in both hands, eyes closed and head thrown back as if delivering the finest of gospel standards. “Thyeeeh’s juzz’an EEE-OOMPTY SPYUZZ!” It was just ghoulish, the aural equivalent of diving into a swimming pool filled with dead dogs.

There was more that night, but those are certainly the highlights of horridly good fun. We had predictably emptied most of the rest of the bar by the time I left, and they weren’t even done yet. So there’s an idea of what you can expect if you go out singing karaoke with actors, or at least actors who are my friends, who are all troublingly disturbed individuals, and who wants it any other way?