Six popular song lyrics that are batshit crazy in retrospect

MUSIC fan? Ever listened to the lyrics of a song you love and thought ‘wait – what the f**k’? These songs are, on close attention, completely deranged: 

Yellow by Coldplay

I swam across / I jumped across for you / What a thing to do / ’Cause you were all yellow

Yellow is a hard colour to sell in a love song, associated as it is with piss. Chris Martin gets off to an okay start, saying that stars are yellow, which kind of, and that the song is called Yellow which is tautalogical but accurate. But when he starts hinting his lover might possibly have jaundice, that’s weird.

Earth Song by Michael Jackson

What about elephants? / Have we lost their trust? 

Lost their trust? Did Jacko borrow a fiver from a pachyderm and not pay it back? In the wider context of a song about perpetual human suffering and a ravaged earth bringing up one specific animal and questioning whether it would still vouch for us is mental even for him.

Buck Rogers by Feeder

We’ll start over again, / Grow ourselves new skin / Get a house in Devon, / Drink cider from a lemon / But I don’t wanna talk about it anymore

The lyric that makes most sense is not wanting to talk about it any more, because it’s incomprehensible. Why would you put an apple-based drink in a lemon? Literally any county/food combination would fit better. ‘Get a house in Surrey, drink cider with a curry’. There, you guitar-thrashing muppets.

Happy by Pharrell Williams

Because I’m happy / Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof

Having already claimed to be like a ‘hot-air balloon that could go to space’, which no because physics, Pharrell goes on to assert that a roofless room is his happy place. Really? A room where the rain comes in? Where the sun beats down? A room that quite frankly isn’t much of a room at all? And you expect us to clap along?

Stayin’ Alive by The Bee Gees

Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk / I’m a woman’s man, no time to talk

Coked-up helium-voiced nonsense. If some twat with a stupid walk asked if you could tell it meant he was a ‘woman’s man’, you’d honestly be left wanting for any possible reply.

Human by The Killers

Are we human? / Or are we dancer? 

Repeat offenders, because ‘open up my eager eyes / I’m Mr Brightside’ means bugger all when you think about it, this lyric is not only lunatic babbling but ungrammatical. We are human. We are not ‘dancer’. Glad that’s settled.

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How to pathetically prove you're cleverer than everyone else

DO you feel the constant need to prove your intellectual superiority? Here’s how to do it, as you’re not smart enough to work it out for yourself: 

Show off obscure knowledge

Anything niche will do. Perhaps you know a single fact about nuclear physics, or recently watched a YouTube documentary about crisps. Either way flaunt your knowledge in the face of others’ ignorance, affecting to be shocked they don’t know Walkers produce 11m packets per day.

Bang on about your IQ

Everyone knows intelligence ain’t nothing but a number. If you once got a high IQ score on a dubious online test, mention it frequently. Ignore the fact that your genius-level IQ has not resulted in great wealth or success. As an intellectual you’re above that.

Have a stock of ‘clever’ words

Employ unfamiliar terms like ‘fissiparous’, ‘inter alia’ and ‘tergiversation’ when simple wording would be fine. However you want to appear clever, not an outright bellend, so steer clear of Jacob Rees-Mogg-isms like ‘floccinaucinihilipilification’.

Subject people to a book you’re reading

Don’t worry if other people haven’t read it and cannot contribute to the conversation; that just means more talking for you. Ensure this happens by only discussing an over-hyped pop science book about gravitational singularities you’ve only read four pages of.

Do sudoku

Clever people are good at maths, for example Einstein, and sudokus are the very height of maths. Puzzle over it ostentatiously before filling in numbers with a flourish, implying you’ve mounted yet another obstacle that is as nothing to your intellect. Put in any number you like, because nobody cares and nobody will check.

Have various affectations

Being scatty, disorganised or drunk suggests you’re too deep to bother with normal life. Dressing in a bohemian fashion is also good. But if you want the full ‘Pretentious? Moi?’ effect, start smoking a pipe.