How to Write a Truly Awful Song
by Giulianna LamannaMany songwriters will tell you that it’s hard to write a song. Those songwriters are liars. It’s only hard to write a good song. You can churn out bad songs like farts after a baked bean buffet. However, if you want to write a truly awful song, there are certain guidelines you must follow. You don’t want to set yourself the lofty goal of penning the worst song ever written only to find out that you missed several perfect opportunities to use clichés and bad grammar. It is for those dreamers that I have written this tutorial on bad songwriting. If you genuinely want to reach new heights of abomination, you can’t afford to miss this article.
The first thing we must do in writing our hideous train wreck of a song is choose a topic to write about. Brainstorm with a pencil and a pad of paper. Now look at your list. Is “meaning of life” anywhere on it? What about “rape” or “poverty” or “war”? If your brainstorming list featured any of these topics, read and follow these instructions carefully: pick up your keyboard. Now smack yourself in the head with it. Hopefully, that killed off enough brain cells to stop you from caring about sociopolitical issues. The bad song is no place for such things. You have only three possible topics: love, sex, and partying. Bonus for those who combine all three. For the purposes of this article, my sample song will be about love.
Now, you must remember to choose a theme so vapid and limited in scope that you only have one sentiment to repeat over and over again, every single line. Possible sentiments include, “I miss you,” or “I love you.” For the purposes of this article, my sample song will be, “I miss you.” I will start my example as all songs must start: the first verse.
As I’m lying in my bed
Thoughts, they’re running through my head
Notice the choppiness. The precedent for unnecessarily choppy lines in song lyrics was set in 2000 by the historic case “Britney v. Coherence.” In that case, the prosecution argued that the phrase “wishing that heroes exist” could - and should - be made longer by chopping it up into “wishing that heroes, they truly exist.” This is an important part of bad songwriting: making certain lines clumsy in order to fit them into a rhyme scheme. If all else fails, the aspiring bad songwriter can resort to the time-tested technique of “stretching.” If your first line has far fewer syllables than the second, the singer can simply stretch out the words in the first line, then speed up in the second line. This doesn’t sound quite as awkward as simply being incoherent, so I don’t suggest it.
Let us continue.
As I’m lying in my bed
Thoughts, they’re running through my head
And nothing has been going right
I thought we’d be together
Forever and forever
But then ABC canceled Sports Night
My first verse contains a few good examples of bad songwriting. For instance, the popular phrase, “forever and ever,” has been changed to “forever and forever” to increase the syllables in the line. This makes listeners stop and think, “Wow… that makes no sense.” Generally, the more the listener does this, the better.
Additionally, the song becomes more banal with the revelation that the narrator is singing about a television show. Even the frequent use of Internet slang - “U R 2 die 4″ - cannot beat a song about television in terms of vapidity. Remember: a song about a good television show is not automatically a good song. See David Duchovny, Why Won’t You Love Me?
The next part of the song is the bridge, which takes you from verse to chorus. Bridges are usually very short and are traditionally used by bad songwriters as a dumping ground for lines they couldn’t fit into any of the verses.
And I saw you one night
On Six Feet Under
And they called you a different name
But I know…
Yes, you read that right - you don’t have to rhyme anything in the bridge! Anything at all! All it has to do is act as an intro to the chorus, which goes as follows…
You’re not him at all
You’re Casey McCall
And my heart is now broken
So many jokes left unspoken
Please set my heart free
And come back to me
Notice the fact that I used the word “heart” twice. That is one of the many words you’ll want to repeat over and over again throughout the course of your bad song. Also on the list is “baby,” which is a convenient way to add two syllables to a lacking line.
Now, you’ll want to end your chorus with something that doesn’t rhyme with any of the previous lines, but adds depth and profundity to the song.
Restraining orders cannot restrain true love
Now comes the second verse. This is where the song gets difficult. As I mentioned earlier, a truly bad song has an eagle-eye focus on exactly one limited topic. Chances are, you’ve said everything you have to say in the verse and chorus. A good way to get around this is to put some action in the song. “Action!” you exclaim (as evidenced by the exclamation mark). “But that sounds suspiciously like a ballad!” Fear not; it doesn’t have to be too detailed. If your song is about your narrator leaving his/her boy/girlfriend, the second verse could consist of his/her memories of the failed relationship. Or his/her memories of the abandoned significant other begging his/her forgiveness. If your song is about your narrator’s boy/girlfriend leaving him/her, the second verse could consist of your narrator begging forgiveness. In the case of my sample song, the second verse will see the narrator tracking down her beloved - much to her beloved’s terror.
I got sick of my heartache (third use of “heart”!)
So I baked you a cheesecake
And I spent the whole night on your lawn
You stepped out in your bathrobe,
Picked up your copy of the Globe
When you saw me, you froze in your yawn
You said you’re Peter Krause
And get out of your house
Before you called the cops on me
But I know…
Repeat Chorus
“You said you’re Peter Krause” is an important example of tense-switching. Start out in past tense and switch to present tense, or vice-versa. (If you manage to figure out a way to use past, present, and future tense in a single sentence, please contact me. You have far surpassed your teacher.) I lay down an additional layer of awfulness with the line, “And get out of my house.” This line makes no sense in the context (the narrator was not in Peter’s house; she was on his lawn) and therefore becomes an even more obvious and feeble attempt to rhyme something - anything - with “Krause.”
Many songs follow their second choruses with bridges. Frankly, that’s too much work. Instead, I suggest repeating the chorus two or three times, each time a little louder and higher pitched. You can make the choruses sound different by recording another vocal track of the singer repeating various phrases, going, “ooooooh,” “yeah,” “baby,” etc. Finish the song by slowly reducing the gibberish until only an incoherent moan is audible.
Congratulations! You’ve written a horrible song! But you still have a long way to go before you can be considered a talentless hack. There are several more techniques I didn’t include in this tutorial, such as the “unclear you” (in which you begin the song by referring to a single person as “you,” then suddenly use “you” in reference to people in general) and the “hanging when” (in which you start a “when” statement and never finish it, i.e., “When you break my heart, I love tacos”). But ultimately, when it comes to bad songwriting, mindset is everything. You must enter a zen-like state in which the first thing that pops into your head seems like a perfect addition to any song. You must resist rewriting, rethinking, and checking a thesaurus.
If you remember nothing else from this article, remember this: “babe” rhymes with “hey.” Well, kind of. But dammit, it’s good enough.
Corollary #1: Country Songs.
Country songs are, by their very nature, awful. They also open up sociopolitical topics such as nationalism and warfare, but this cannot be addressed with any kind of nuance or maturity. Instead, you must pursue the most simplistic, jingoistic representation possible. Extra points if you can combine an exhortation that the United States is justified in the use of police state measures, with a denial that we ever would. But we could, if we wanted to.
For further examples of such atrocity, see Toby Keith.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 6 June 2005 @ 9:05 PM
Damn, I forgot about that. You’re right - a badly written sociopolitical song is worse than any shallow, simplistic love song. By the way… those Toby Keith lyrics make my brain go “owies.”
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 6 June 2005 @ 9:08 PM
If you are bad enough, and then let your recording rot for a few decades, you just be featured on the [url=http://www.wbez.org/programs/ams/ams.asp]The Annoying Music Show[/url]. Of course, the show is only a couple of minutes long each week (for national safety reasons), but the theme is undoubtedly hammered home…
-Jim
Comment by JCamasto — 7 June 2005 @ 12:30 AM
Geez, well now I sure am glad I ended up NOT performing MY song at the recent Ishcon! I didn’t realize we’d have eagle ears in the audience!
BTW, Da Vinci’s Notebook beat you to it on this one, with their excellent gutting and analysis of the boy ballad, “Title of the Song”. They even managed to frame it in an actual song! Go DVN!
Comment by raku — 7 June 2005 @ 11:11 AM
Hey now, your song was actually good!
Declaration of my feelings for you
Elaboration on those feelings
Description of how long these feelings have existed
Belief that no one else could feel the same as I
Reminiscence of the pleasant times we shared
And our relationship’s perfection
Recounting of the steps that led to our love’s dissolution
Mostly involving my unfaithfulness and lies
Penitent admission of wrongdoing
Discovery of the depth of my affection
Regret over the lateness of my epiphany
(Chorus)
Title of the song
Naïve expression of love
Reluctance to accept that you are gone
Request to turn back time
And rectify my wrongs
Repetition of the title of the song
Enumeration of my various transgressive actions
Of insufficient motivation
Realization that these actions led to your departure
And my resultant lack of sleep and appetite
Renunciation of my past insensitive behavior
Promise of my reformation
Reassurance that you still are foremost in my thoughts now
Need for instructions how to gain your trust again
Request for reconciliation
Listing of the numerous tasks that I’d perform
Of physical and emotional compensation
CHORUS
Acknowledgment that I acted foolishly
Increasingly desperate pleas for your return
Sorrow for my infidelity
Vain hope that my sins are forgivable
Appeal for one more opportunity
Drop to my knees to elicit crowd response
Prayers to my chosen deity
Modulation and I hold a high note…
CHORUS
Comment by Jason Godesky — 7 June 2005 @ 11:19 AM
Roxy: #1, I second Jason’s comment. #2, Da Vinci’s Notebook only covered the formula. Their song was too smart and well-written to be a proper bad song in and of itself, as you see above. :p
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 7 June 2005 @ 11:52 AM
That’s true!
Point taken. And thanks for the vote of confidence on the song. Hopefully it will debut at the next gathering, if Mark and I can (literally) get our act together.
In any case, I hope you all are spared from being exposed to the gut-wrenching, ear-melting horror that is J-Poppage. Para-para dance, anyone?
Comment by raku — 7 June 2005 @ 12:55 PM
In order to be a truly awful song, it can’t be too bad. Then it becomes funny, which adds value. For example, Bowling For Soup’s lyrics are usually awful from a literary songwriting perspective, but they’re funny. Another great example of hilariously awful lyrics is “You Suck”, by The Murmurs, and the Butthole Surfers’ cover of “Hurdy Gurdy Man” from the Dumb and Dumber soundtrack.
The incredibly awful songs are too poorly written to be good, but not bad enough to be funny: something so bad that you feel like you completely wasted your time listening to it. You know, like the feeling you get after you watch Garden State.
Comment by Marco — 8 June 2005 @ 10:53 AM
Now let’s be fair about this. Conservative country singers by no means have the market cornered on bad songs about war. There are just as many bad sociopolitical songs written by liberal jackasses. In fact, I would say that a GOOD song about war is rarer than a bad one.
And by the same token, there are a lot of really good songs that are about love. Let’s face it. Love is pretty universal. It’s something we can all identify with. And something like that makes for good song material. That’s why a good 90% of the songs out there are about love. The reason so many love songs are bad is not because it’s a bad topic in and of itself. It’s because most song writers aren’t that good. Did you know that close to half of all performers are below average? A shocking statistic, I know.
Aren’t Bowling for Soup and Butthole Surfers TRYING to be funny? I mean, I thought that was the point. Kind of like Barenaked Ladies. You can’t really say it’s an example of their songs being bad if they’re funny on purpose.
Also, I would like to end by saying that Garden State kicks ass.
Comment by Mike Godesky — 9 June 2005 @ 4:14 PM
You know what there’s not enough songs about? Jellyfish.
In the smultinous darknesses under the sea
O, Wicked Old Jellyfish blurms squeendishly
While the seaworms comfombled on Jellyfish Lane
O, Wicked Old Jellyfish squirmed into my brain!
Oh JellyJellyJellyJellyJellyJellyfishhh!
Oh oh you left me left me left me with only one wish!:
To slurm and slorp and schlop and splop in the gulpy gopey goo–
Underneath the watery waves, together at last
WITH YOU!
(doop doop do-wop-ee-doo)
In the miring brack mackely forests of kelp
A slimy small sea-worm is squimping “Please help–”
This seaworm was squished from the goo in my brain
When Wicked Old Jellyfish flommed me insane!
O JellyJelly, etc.
Comment by Steve Thomas — 9 June 2005 @ 4:44 PM
I don’t think there are enough songs about purple toupees. Or people with fangs. Or raincoats. But thankfully, They Might Be Giants are doing something to solve those problems. That gives me hope.
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 9 June 2005 @ 8:56 PM
Purple toupees! What about diamond wigs? Or hovering sombreros? Or even just bangs? Never noticed it before, but TMBG has a head covering fetish.
Comment by Raku — 13 June 2005 @ 10:59 AM
Wonderful stuff. I’m not a professional anything anymore - I spend half the year as a a layabout on a Philippine island (see http://www.coconutstudio.com) - (sorry - yet another publicity puff), and the other half selling beads to the natives in Majorca.
I work 3 nights a week in an English-developed shopping/food/entertainment centre that obviously plays the few leftover 60s/70s tapes that the English developer could afford to give away, as Muzak.
Amongst the ever-repeating tunes are:
‘Lily the Pink’
‘Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr Hitler?’
‘I’m Going Straight, I Am’
Peter Sarstedt’s ‘Where Are You, My Darling?’
All of them a (very) little less vapid than Giulianna’s excellent post on ‘How to Write a Truly Awful Song’
but something has surprised me - a bit of ’sampling’ that included the long and very haunting musical phrases that Stomu Yamash’ta used in his ‘rock’ opera (East Is Red ?) as musical background to his graphic staged mime of a very particular day in Japan in 1945.
To play this tune (melody, or whatever) to an wholly ignorant audience, endlessly, on the 60th anniversary of events at Hiroshima, seemed very ironic. But was it deliberate?
regards
Richard
Comment by Richard Parker — 15 August 2005 @ 10:04 AM
“I’m Going Straight, I Am”
This is the new theme song to Words Like Weeds, v 2.0
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 15 August 2005 @ 11:55 AM