worst lyricist of the grunge-rot era: gavin rossdale or daniel johns

Voted the guy who wrote the lyrics "Benzedrine telephone"

sheesh, this sort of mean-sprited posting is my bread+butter but idk either of these dunces well enough to feel confident choosing either of my volition.

this should be fun tho.

I couldn't recite a Silverchair lyric to save my life.

Voted the guy who wrote the lyrics "Benzedrine telephone"

― real warm grandpa (Neanderthal), Friday, November 3, 2023 7:56 PM (seventeen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

another win for the guy who wrote "you're the analyst, the fungus in my milk"

Voted the guy who wrote the lyrics "Benzedrine telephone"

otoh, fucked Boy George

possibly

When I was 13 I thought Gavin had to be some kind of genius because none of his lyrics made any goddamn sense

as a lyricist he is from hell

I love this

In a sea of shitty '90s alt rock lyricists, Rossdale really put in the work to rise to the tippy top of that pile. It was pretty impressive, in hindsight. Johns was twelve, I'll give him a pass.

rossdale in a walk

In the middle of a world on a fish hook, you're the wave, you're the wave, you're the wave

It must be your skin, I'm sinkin' in
It must be for real, 'cause now I can feel
And I didn't mind, it's not my kind
It's not my time, to wonder why
Everything gone white, everything's grey
Now you're here, now you're away
I don't want this, remember that
I'll never forget, where you're at

moon
spoon
june

https://compote.slate.com/images/354e2d83-df9e-4d78-9638-04d7b68ad364.jpg

five hit singles from three million albums is not a good ratio.

otoh, fucked Boy George

Marilyn, not George

Johns was twelve, I'll give him a pass.

He was past his third album when he thought

In a sense
It’s innocence

was profound enough a lyric to hand-write for the CD booklet

I reflexively voted for Rossdale but thinking about it... still Rossdale.

I couldn't recite a Silverchair lyric to save my life.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Saturday, 4 November 2023 00:13 (yesterday)

^^^ this. I can't remember enough about Silverchair to form an opinion anymore complex than 'they sucked'.

there's no bathroom, and there is no sink
the water out of the tap is very hard to drink
very hard to
DRINK

Mistakes don't mean a thing if you don't regret them,
So pack your tactic toes for the winter

i have never listened to bush and probably never will, but johns' dissociatives album is full of awesome bad-good lyrics, his unguarded word-vomit works surprisingly well

When I was 13 I thought Gavin had to be some kind of genius because none of his lyrics made any goddamn sense

I liked how he was always repeating lines, and the janky text block format of the lyrics in the Razorblade Suitcase booklet.

Daniel Johns also dropped this:

Ana wrecks your life
Like an anorexia life

skimmed the lyrics of a few of their hits and rossdale seems to be pretty poor attempts at sounding poetic while johns regularly writes lines that are such bizarre bad-sounding nonsense that i have no idea what he could possibly be getting at. so johns is worse but also more endearing in just how bad he is

xp The first line would be an obvious enough pun on its own, but then he just goes ahead and spells it out

re: rolling stone cover, what deranged demographic wants to see a shirtless gavin AND pj o'rourke on pat buchanan?
also, worst grunge lyricists: pj o'rourke + pat buchanan.

xxxp "Ana's Song" is bad, but (to get v real for a minute) as a male person who went through an ED in my youth, I appreciated that Johns spoke openly about his experience – and I suppose also that he sung about it, insofar as it brought up the topic in interviews.

Johns lyrics are like if I just strung together every 1/4-clever but mostly stupid DO U SEE play on words that ever instantiated in my brain.

Rossdale lyrics are like

My dog is a cat
And circles are squares
And I'm just a bald man
With a head full of hair

Must be your skin
I’m sinking in
Something something
Heavy about everything
SWALLOWED
something something
SWALLOWED

I may have combined two Bush songs there actually, I can’t remember if Swallowed had any lyrics except for SWALLOWED

I read that exact PJ O'Rourke column lol

xp every Bush song sounds like two other Bush songs combined.

Got a machine head
It's better than the rest
Green to red
Machine head

^ Not written by an eight-year-old, somehow

Gavin Rossdale has mirrors in his house, so he's well aware no one's paying attention to the words.

I thought this was gavin vs daniel johnston for a minute, and that would make for an interesting "who has more childish lyrics?" duel.

I first thing I noticed about him was that green strat he played, which looked like he's taken a screwdriver to, to 'rough it up'

"I'll take 'Guitars With Unrealistic Wear Patterns' for 500"

no more maybes
your baby's got rabies
sitting on a ball
in the middle of the andes

You say that money isn't everything
But I'd like to see you live without it
You think you can keep on goin’, livin’ like a king
Ooh, babe, but I strongly doubt it

wow maybe money *is* everything

SWALLOWED FOLLOWED
…etc everything about love blah blah
SWALLOWED SORROWED

discareded rhymes
borrowed, hollowed, furrowed, marrowed

Bernard Sumner is Stephan Merritt.

SWALLOWED
OH NO

the most interesting thing ABOUT rossdale is the marilyn story & of course pungent smoothbrain that he is, he denies it

He talks earnestly about his lyric writing approach, I'll give him that

https://www.songfacts.com/blog/interviews/gavin-rossdale-of-bush

Gavin: There's always got to be something within there - threads of things. But I like that sort of Ginsberg-y, stream-of-consciousness approach to words, rather than, say, country songwriting where there are narratives and stories and places and names and descriptions. That's a specific approach, and I've never related to that because for me, it tied things down too much. I like broader stories. It doesn't always have to be time and place and descriptions.

It's just a tool. It's a decision and approach you can take. I like things that sort of float more, and have more schizoid elements to them. At the same time, I feel like I have over the years changed and done different things. More cohesive things, because I was always aware of that. But I just like things that are a little more jagged and fit in together.

I don't, for instance, do that thing that some people have done where you have a very obscure title that doesn't appear in the song at all. You know that game? I don't do that. That's really kind of out there. Like Tool.

If you took something like At The Drive-In, and Cedric's [lead singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala] approach to lyrics, that is like, holy mackerel! What is going on? And that's in every song. But somehow, when he sings it, it has a cohesion. But that is on another level of like, "What the hell is that about?" Whereas I was a soft-core version of that, where there are threads. But I also like the idea that for all of us, our thoughts are scattered and our attention is short and things bounce around - so that's part of it. That's what I feel is an integral part of it.

lol, I just remembered that I originally thought the lyric in Silverchair's 'Tomorrow' was 'you're gonna wade through that void'. The truth...may have surprised me.

HATE IS WHAT I FEEL FOR YOU
AND I WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT I WANT YOU DEEEEAD

I've got a fair capacity for taking in trivial details, but haven't the foggiest who daniel johns actually is!

i prefer Bush over Silverchair just due to Rossdale's lyrics sounding better in context than Johns'. i always felt the worst lyrics i heard from the grunge-rot era belonged to Candlebox though.

There are many contenders, really.

Too heavy, too light
Too black or too white
Too wrong or too right
Today or tonight
Cumbersome

Here's something that is automatic
It's wax ecstatic (prounced 'uh-static')
When life is nothing less than tragic
It's wax ecstatic
When life has lost all its magic
It's wax ecstatic
When life can't promise the fantastic
It's wax ecstatic

i wondered if i should include the candlebox guy

may-yay-be you meant to include the candlebox guy/but you didn't anyway

lmao

Wonder is Rossdale high-fived himself after the opening couplet here:

Do you feel the way you hate
Do you hate the way you feel
Always closest to the flame
Ever closer to the blade
I am poison crazy lush
Built these hands to lift me up
We are servants of our formulaic ways
I'm screaming daisies
From fourteen miles away
I've got my own time
Got it all today

WE ARE THE YOUTH
SO TAKE YOUR FASCISM AWAY

we are the problem child
we spend our lives on trial
we walk an endless mile
we are the youth gone wild

oops *they call us problem child*

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

no more maybes
your baby's got rabies
sitting on a ball
in the middle of the andes

― ivy., Sunday, 5 November 2023 19:07 (two weeks ago) link\

just wanted to make sure you all remember this amazing insight before voting

Always wondered if David Bowie cared about Rossdale swiping lyrics from “Life on Mars?”

songfacts.com on the significance of "Everything Zen":

This song helped bring the word "asshole" into the mainstream. The first verse contains the line "Should I fly Los Angeles, find my asshole brother," which most radio stations left as is. This type of profanity would have been removed just a few years earlier, but standards of acceptable profanity were being lowered. The TV show NYPD Blue was using it on primetime US TV, something that had never been done before.

Should have censored "Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow"

Amazing how much more regressive American radio got. I heard a ridiculously censored “You Oughta Know” a while back that eliminated the “go down on you in a theatre” with a comical echo effect. No matter. Terrestrial radio is dying

actually that part was routinely censored back when the song first came out on American radio too. I had no idea what she was saying there until someone played me the unedited track much later

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

The funniest was when they censored “45” in “Santeria”

maybe it was a columbine thing

It was really 9/11 that sent FM radio into conservative meltdown mode. I remember that “COP” got blocked from Sublime’s “April 29, 1992”

Pure Massey car

VERY HARD TO DRINK