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Crap Lyrics: A Celebration of the Very Worst Pop Lyrics of All Time . . . Ever ReviewLook, I understand the title means there will be incomprehensible and laughable lyrics in here. And I'm expecting the author to bring the snark, especially in a book from the UK. But... eh, I don't know.
Inevitably there will be a subjective aspect to books like this. But when books mock bad art, there's usually some real insight into where it went wrong; consider Roger Ebert's I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie or Tom Reynolds' I Hate Myself and Want to Die, both of which go into great detail about what they mock (though, to be fair, not all Reynolds' song picks are bad, just depressing). The fun comes in the dissection, the nitpicking of assorted minor stupidities, and the firehose approach. Johnny Sharp does not do this.
Instead, this book is more of a "point and laugh" (or, more accurately, "point and cringe") kind of book. Though there's certainly no shortage of cheezy, pretentious, or outright incomprehensible lyrics in here, Sharp takes a very superficial approach to all of them, missing the point of intentional oddness like some of Elton John and Bernie Taupin's work or Syd Barrett's surreal, schizophrenically inspired lyrics to "Bike", or avoiding the reality that some lyrics are less straight poetry than wordscape meant to invoke a feeling despite superficially lacking obvious meaning. (He does, admittedly, hit songs like "My Humps" and "Horse With No Name", where parody and stream of consciousness respectively fail embarrassingly, but he seems to dislike a lot of songs like that for all the wrong reasons.) In addition, the author comes off as kind of a cranky, outdated music snob, sort of like SomethingAwful's David Thorpe if he was a 60 year old classic rock aficionado, and less funny.
Writing reviews of bad art is an art form in and of itself. Good snark doesn't just lay it on with a shovel; it dismantles the target and smears it part by part to make sure nothing is left untouched. Movie, music, and video game reviewers know this; political comedians thrive on this. Point-and-laugh snark works for one-liners, but becomes tedious stretched out to essay or book length; at that point, it's about as much fun as reading Mallard Fillmore (which uses roughly the same sort of comedy, to no particular benefit). That's what the author of this book has missed. There have been much, much better books on this subject; buy them instead.
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