What Is The Worst Line Stephin Merritt Has Written?

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