I've decided that all song lyrics are bad.

There may be a middle ground between sophomoric and pretentious, but nobody has managed to hit it yet. Steely Dan comes closest, but they veer off into "insufferable hipster" territory.

Novelty songs are exempt from this, but I don't have much patience for novelty songs anyway. Likewise with minimalist lyrics, because isn't that really just an excuse to be lazy?

Nobody has ever said anything profound with lyrics that hadn't already been said more profoundly in another medium. Most lyrics sound like they were written by a teenager. "Intelligent" lyrics sound like they were written by a teenager who just got out of English class.

Prove me wrong.

Note that I love pretentious lyrics, but I fully acknowledge that they are terrible. "Wheels within wheels in a spiral array/a pattern so grand and complex." I mean, come on, what the fuck is that?

I'd like to close with a partial list of rhymes that should be outlawed, because they're overused and obvious, usually because the two words mean almost the same thing or are related in a really obvious way.

• fire/desire
• you/do
• baby/maybe
• chance/romance
• dance/romance
• change/rearrange (bonus points for using "rearrange" as an intransitive verb)
• expensive things/diamond rings (Lennon and McCartney, I'm looking at you)
• self/shelf

That last one is particularly egregious because it's responsible for the phrase "put one's love on a shelf", which exists only in classic rock and was created because "shelf" is the only word that rhymes with "self".

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