Have you ever been listening to a song and are so taken aback by an unhinged lyric that you have to go back and check that it’s exactly as insane as you thought it was? Yeah, me too. Typically I don’t listen very closely to the lyrics of songs. However, every so often, there’s one so special it requires recognition. Here is a collection of a few of my favourite lyrics that have stopped me in my tracks (pun intended).

If you, like me, have a middle-aged white Australian father, you’ve probably been forced to listen to a lot of Triple J over the years. When I was fifteen, Pond came out with their album The Weather and to say my dad was obsessed is an understatement. This meant anytime one of their songs was played on Triple J, my dad would turn it up and sing along — horribly off-key, mind you. Truly nothing is more horrifying as a teenager than hearing your dad fucking belting the line, ‘in between my penis and chin/is camembert and shame’ (Pond, Sweep Me Off My Feet). The moment has never left my brain since and probably never will.

Being on Youtube in the mid to late 2010s, you may have come across the animation community and its even smaller subset, the animated meme community. Me and my brother fucking loved to show each other the most stupid videos from there, like Momotaro by Ap Selene and Vivziepop’s Timber. I still maintain that some of those songs were good. One of our absolute favourites was the reanimation of Pokemon Sun and Moon characters to You Reposted in the Wrong Neighbourhood by Shokk. The image of Professor Kukui dancing hard to ‘I’m a menace, a dentist, an oral hygienist’ is timeless. The original may have been deleted, but I still go back to reuploads every now and again.

For one of my introductory courses in first year, the professor would play the music video for a song at the beginning of each module (so usually one or two a class) that was in some way related to the content we would be learning. We were forced to listen to all manner of wild songs at 8 am on a Tuesday morning, but I can’t deny that they were part of the reason I loved that class and went to every lecture, even with that brutal start time. One of the most memorable was the 17th song in which the line, ‘I’m learning to hate all the things that used to be great when I used to be bent!’ was uttered. Honestly, the entire song, I Want to Be Straight by Ian Dury (ft. The Blockheads) is mad, so I would encourage watching the music video or even just listening if you feel so inclined.

In the past couple of months, a lot of my friends have moved houses and as the fantastic friend that I am, I helped. On one of these expeditions, after we had moved most of the boxes into the new place, we were taking a break and listening to the radio (which station I couldn’t tell you for the life of me). We were sweaty, exhausted and overheated. Basically we were delirious, which means that only something truly out of pocket would’ve shaken us out of our stupor. It was actually an earlier lyric from the song that caught our attention (breathing out a hole in my lung) but the later lyric is one that stuck with us so bad we immediately had to look it up to make sure we didn’t hallucinate what we had heard. We hadn’t, and that lyric was; ‘I’m a sex change and a damsel with no heroine’, from Silverchair’s Straight Lines. 

When I told my dad about this collection of silly song lyrics that he had originally prompted, he was at first amused but then said he had the perfect song to add to it. He was right. The entire song is a collection of lyrics that I’m frankly astounded made it past a producer but the one I’ve chosen is tame enough that it’s entertaining but not batshit enough to be concerning – like some of the rest of the song is. That lyric is ‘I like football and porno and books about war/ I got an average house, with a nice hardwood floor’ from Dennis Leary’s song Asshole.

Those are all lyrics that have really stuck with me, but there are others that I believe deserve an honourable mention:

 

‘May God rest that twink, he is no more’ – Lynks, USE IT OR LOSE IT.

 

‘Jerry Lee Lewis was the devil’ – Ministry, Jesus Built My Hotrod.

 

‘Sipping tea by the fire is swell/ pushing people in is fun as well!’ – Starkid, Different as Can Be.

 

‘I get eaten by the worms/ and weird fishes’ – Radiohead, Weird Fishes.

 

‘I have a big gun/ took it from my Lord’ – MELL, Red fraction.

 

‘Doctor holding a big bottle of tonic but the bottle’s full of rings and the doctor is Sonic’ – Tom Cardy (ft bdg), Beautiful Mind.

 

‘And I’ll blend up that rainbow above you/ and shoot it through your veins’ – Owl City, Rainbow Veins.

 

‘I got money and fame and fancy clothes/ I got a cat food sponsor deal’ – 2winz², Just One Day.

 

‘Your waitress was miserable and so was your food’ – Alex Turner, Piledriver Waltz.

 

‘He keeps begging me to eat me out, I said, / “You gotta take my tampon out with your mouth”’ – Ayesha Erotica, S&M remix.

 

‘Sixty-nine is the only dinner for two’ – Childish Gambino, Heartbeat.

 

‘Bish I’m a star but not Patrick’ – Lisa (BLACKPINK), Ddux4 (JP. Ver).

 

‘The whole world is my daddy / wabi sabi papi’ – Okay Kaya, Mother Nature’s Bitch.

 

‘Pick my shorts out my ass with my blood-stained hands’ – Ashnikko, Cheerleader.

 

‘You won’t doo-doo me, I smell TNT’ – Kendrick Lemar, United In Grief.