What Is The Worst Line Stephin Merritt Has Written?

His earlier stuff is pretty good, though.

Anyway, pick and choose any lyric you want. Probably the most irritating is the facetious and pointless "papa was a rodeo", but any of his "clever" pastiches would do.

that one does its best to ruin "as you turn to go," but thankfully it's not match for the other lines and the loveliness of the whole thing. it just strikes me as him trying to be overly clever when there's no need for it in the song.

Fred: I agree 100% - I had quite forgotten the clunk with which that line falls. That was exactly the kind of example I was trying to think of - where he seems to think he's written a line that's in the usual vein and up to standard, but somehow the aesthetic antennae were switched off.

... he could write "symphony orchestra, you can have your own town" in the next CD " 15,000 chords about love and one hate song"

For me the 'petunia' line on "The Night You Can't Remember" is pretty ghastly. I've no time for people who dislike SM cause of 'artifice', but as Pinefox suggests he can't win them all.

And Tanya's already said her piece on the subject. Ouch.

Actually Merrit's posturing claim to like "Bubblegum and Experimental music *and nothing in between*" sticks in my craw almost as much.

I agree with Hymie that the earlier stuff was good though, "Summer Lies" actually has some feeling in it. Pinefox, you reckon Stephin M is not well known? where are you hiding? check music sections of any press anywhere in the world and squirm at the fashion victims' hagiography bandwagon rolling down that ol' road marked "sell by date approaching".

The bubblegum and experimental music thing was a great soundbite and something I can heartily sympathise with to boot. But it's obviously not true: he's an indie boy at heart. I think as an aspiration, though, it hits the spot.

Susan Amway's voice was nicer (i.e. possessing more feeling whether mouthing dirty clever clever epithets or not) than Claudia's too in my opinion.

Interesting that this thread is raising hackles so much. Magnetic Fields - love 'em or loathe 'em, you can't ignore 'em!

And the bubblegum / experimental thing strikes me as a fairly standard hatred of the middlebrow, which it seems remains a fashionable form of snobbery amongst the high-minded.

Stephin Merritt has an extraordinary way with words. He's one of many pop personages who I wish would write books which I'd probably love, instead of music which I don't much like. You could ask me why I demand a feeling of emotional engagement from music and not from literature, but I wouldn't be able to answer the question sensibly.

This whole category thing always confuses me.

Obviously there's nothing I can do to make people emotionally engage with 69 Love Songs like I do: all I can do is assure them that it - and the same goes for many of the Magnetic Fields' other records - engages me like few other albums. I just wanted to resist the implication - which I'd detected, perhaps wrongly, elsewhere in the thread - that 'intellectual' or 'clever' songwriting could not also be heartfelt.

Incidentally, most of my favourite Stephen Merrit lines come from "Memories Of Love" - especially "some are brilliant, some are awful/some are summer fluff/some are epic Russian novels/memories of love". Fantastic.

"The problem, Tom, is not that you *can't* have intelligence and feeling at the same time."

Bollocks! If you believe that, go off and listen to The Troggs for the rest of time. Who says the two are mutually exclusive? No doubt some male specimen with a small hypocamus and poor left brain/right brain connection who *is* unable to feel and think at the same time.

I agree, that the are not the same thing. But they are not mutually exclusive.

Me, I *like* Stephen Merritt's too clever by half wordplay. But I'm one of those overly intellectual emotionally stilted indie kids that everyone likes to slag off for that sort of thing.

The only thing worse than an artist being totally over-hyped is when everyone jumps on the "let's slag off X artist cause he's hyped" bandwagon. But I've expounded on that subject ad infinitum already...

I'm not going to talk about his worst line, I'm going to comment on my personal favourite, which will probably conjure up more groans than the rest of them.

"Love is like a bottle of gin, but a bottle of gin is not... like... Love."

>Bollocks! If you believe that, go off and listen to The Troggs for >the rest of time.

Dear masonic Boom Please re-read Tim's statement. There, you see. He is *not* saying you can't have the two at the same time. That's the same as saying you can have the two at the same time. Presumably your pathetic grip of semantics is why you find Stephins cold-fish wordplay so entertaining.

I still think Stephin Merritt is crap, plus he has that whole unusual- spelling-of-name thing that I usually despise (see: Thom Yorke). His songs leave me very cold, by and large - there are a handful of exceptions, but even those I find to be a bit lyrically clunky. His writing style is too *self-concious* for me, like he's very aware at all times how oh-so-clever he comes across to the indie masses.

Which of course isn't anything against the people here who like him, it's a broad generalisation of his fans as "indie masses".

To me, he's like an American Damon Albarn. Take as you will.

The charming Pete Dyson said that Merritt was well known, and asked where I was hiding. I have three responses.

1. I have been hiding where I always hide: in a compartment (holding National Insurance card, minicab numbers, chord diagrams, etc) of a wallet which Harriet Wheeler keeps in her back pocket. It has its perks, this life. Really, it's not all bad.

2. It's true that, hiding out as I do, I am very out of touch, and don't read 'The Music Press', etc. Naturally I make no apology for this.

3. Nonetheless, I still think that Dyson is mistaken. OK, it depends what you mean by 'well-known'. Merritt is better known than me, it's true. He's even better-known than Tim Hopkins, except in New York gay circles. He is probably well-known as a figure to many folk that read Freaky Trigger. OK. But that doesn't mean he's *that* well-known. Like I said, a year ago I didn't know who he was (Harriet doesn't seem to have any of his records). And my parents had never heard of him till I clunked out a few of his songs on their piano about 4 months ago. And nobody I work with has heard of him; and nor should they have. I stand by my claim that he is relatively obscure.

Is 'HFR' deliberately bad, and if so, is that plain Bad? It's a good question.

I agree with those who think 'IDBITSun' a work of genius, not one of turgidity.

I don't think I really see why 'You can have your own car' is bad.

My latest nomination for a lax line: 'The tears have stained all the pages / Of my True Romance magazines'. It feels lazy, a received idea, doesn't quite fit the song, just drags it out and fills in time.

I think that Hyacinths&Thistles contains some of his weakest material (as well as some excellent). And

1. 'Give Me Back My Dreams' is lyrically very average by Merritt standards: for instance, 'whether to cry or scream' is a lazy sort of choice to offer.

2. In 'Kissing Things' the line 'They're not too wide to get around / given the old school try' is pretty incomprehensible to me. I take it that there's a play of some kind on 'old school tie' - but how? To what end? Has he bitten off more English English than he can chew here?

3. 'Outside it could be China' in 'Night Falls Like A Grand Piano'. I'm not sure whether this line is bad, good, or neither. But it's such a non-sequitur.

4. 'Volcana!' from 'Volcana!': sums up the badness of the track.

5. I don't really understand the concept of 'Waltzing me all the way home' either; I mean, the image is not very (to mix metaphors) resonant. And to rhyme 'home' with 'poem' *once* was funny, but...

6. I like 'You x5' as much as many others do; but I don't like the 'Tis tis' element. I know I have said this before.

"acoustic guitar" is fairly unbearable the whole way through. cub was never so twee. "she always said that you were the one who could make her move her cute little bum" is the low point of _69ls_.

"i don't believe in the sun" is a great song marred by the corny lyrics (except the last one, of course). "the only sun i ever knew was the beautiful one that was you." yecch.

"i miss doing the wild thing with you" always seemed like a really feeble follow-up to the heartbreaking "come back from san francisco/ and kiss me -- i've quit smoking."

agree with the bit about the petunia.

where are the indie masses who fawn over sm? i haven't met them. since i know almost no one offline who owns one of his albums, i have trouble seeing how he could be a) not obscure, b) some sort of indie lemming cult, or c) comparable to a radio phenomenon like blur.

In theory that's great; you put it well. I love roughly the same idea when he writes something like 'We used to hold hands in the movie show, but we'll never hold hands again'. I just think that in that particular line in 'BBD' it's superfluous and clunking, rather than eloquent and stimulating.

>>> "acoustic guitar" is fairly unbearable the whole way through.

I think that is way over the top. The playing, singing and melody are splendid, for three things.

>>> "she always said that you were the one who could make her move her cute little bum" is the low point of _69ls_.

Yes, possibly. It's too 'dirty' for me.

>>> don't believe in the sun" is a great song marred by the corny lyrics.

Sorry, I totally disagree. I think it's A Great Song.

>>> "i miss doing the wild thing with you" always seemed like a really feeble follow-up to the heartbreaking "come back from san francisco/ and kiss me -- i've quit smoking."

I agree. Well spotted.

>>> agree with the bit about the petunia.

Yes - maybe this point has something.

>>> i have trouble seeing how he could be a) not obscure, b) some sort of indie lemming cult, or c) comparable to a radio phenomenon like blur.

Me also. We agree. He is not any of those things. He is Relatively Obscure.

I guess that one reason I asked the original question was to try to get at and explore the difference between Merritt and other 'great lyricists'. And I think it tells us something about his peculiar kind of quality that he's penned fewer clunkers than, say, Dylan or Morrissey. Maybe we could say that he's more precise and calculating than them; maybe that he's taken fewer risks; maybe that his way of occupying a genre actually makes it easier to pen appropriate (if not necessarily scintillating) lines. A pretty great lyricist as they go, I think - but in a way which, as with so much else about this character, is very peculiar.

I'm pretty sure there's a Buffy episode that performs the same trick but I can't remember which one it is right now.

From "Desert Island," off "Holiday":

"We'll develop muscles / from cracking coconuts / Let our clothing drop off / feel each other's butts"

Even as a goof it's horrendous.

"don't want to cry a tear for you, not a single tear for you, so excuse me if I do."

"reach for my prescription from my pocket and instead I grab your locket."

"your biography is an irresistible cartography of the possible or... the impossible? I'm not sure."

"so I'll take to coloring books and suffer all your withering looks, thinking bout you all the while."

Surely there's a "Search/Destroy" thread just for the 69 set?

An unexpected revival inspired by poster Imago:

This thread is literally almost 21 years old. I fear that much of it is callow. But I just found myself thinking "what's the worst Merritt song, that would be a good question" and then thinking "... I think we had a whole thread like this".

He may now have issued lines and songs worse than he had 17-18 years ago!

This is a contender for a relatively bad song lyric, from c.2012:

I'm going back to the country
City life's too slow
I'm sick of that 120 BPM funk and disco
I'm doing a one-eighty
Break out the fiddle tunes
I'm still that barefoot lady howling up at full moons
And I'm gonna fly back to Wyoming
And never more my friends I'll go a-roaming
I'm gonna fly back to Laramie
Let Laramie take care of me till they bury me
I'm going back to the country
The big city's too small
I don't need more than one tree house but there's none at all
I'm hanging up the tire swing
A hammock in the yard
I'll hear an angel choir sing as I wing countryward
And I'm gonna find me a country boy
And have a couple country kids, Leanne and Leroy
And we're gonna wind down those country roads
And sing and play the dulcimer till this world explodes

And I fear that I will also nominate this from 2020:

She's got the biggest tits in history
She loves to show them 'round
They're bigger than her chickadees
They each weigh half a pound
She told me she's got more of them
But I've seen only three
And those were, I'm quite sure, the biggest tits in history
Your average tit weighs half an ounce
That's if you feed them well
But she's got ways to make tits bouncy baby boys from hell
She majored in biology
She knows whereof she speaks
You know her tits are happy from their smiling little beaks
She's working for the government
She's breeding them for clones
To use them on the battlefield
For intercepting drones
Her mother did the same work
It's all through her family tree
And that's why Lola's got the biggest tits in history
Tits in history
Tits in history

"You know her tits are happy from their smiling little beaks"

seems especially bad.

should be "by their smiling little beaks" surely