Singing the wrong words: Grammar in today's lyrics

Grammar seems to be one of the last things today’s popular musical artists think of when creating songs. Turning on my radio, I hear pop song after pop song featuring lyrics like “I got the eye of the tiger,” or “I be in the club,” and although I don’t consider myself a “grammar Nazi,” I still cringe.

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article this summer about a new style guide with “aims to establish basic rules” for the music world in terms of capitalization, punctuation and other grammar issues.

Personally, I can see this new style guide helping, but I also wonder if artists will chose to use it. Because music is truly a form of art, I can see how artists can be creative with it from time to time. Simple grammatical errors in music lyrics have been around since the rock n roll ages, with song titles like “Lay Down Sally,” by Eric Clapton, and of course, “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones.

These three selections use the words “lay” and “no”incorrectly, respectively. In Clapton’s song, he writes the main chorus lyrics and the title using the word “lay,” in “lay down Sally.” This is an issue of “lie” vs “lay."First of all, this sentence is written in the present tense. Therefore, the use of “lay” is incorrect because “lay” requires a direct object along with a subject, whereas “lie” doesn’t require a direct object. (For example, you can “lay” a potato on the couch, and you can “lie” down on the floor.)

As for the Rolling Stones, they are guilty of using a double negative in “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” Double negatives are often frowned upon because they simply don’t make no sense. If you think about it, if you say “they do not make no sense,” you’re saying that it does make sense, which isn’t what you’re initally trying to say. What you may mean is that “they don’t make ANY sense.” So it should be “I Can’t Get Any Satisfaction.”

 

Another grammatical error that comes up in song lyrics is use of the passive voice. In the Beatles “All you Need is Love,” the passive voice is everywhere. Lyrics switch from “All you need is love” to “love is all you need” throughout the entire song, and ultimately switch from active to passive voice. The subject of “All you need is love,” is “you,” the main verb is “is,” and the direct object is “love.” In the active voice, these slots are all in the correct place, but in the passive voice, they are inverted, putting the direct object before the subject and connecting them with the verb.

In addition, there are times when artists make up words in order to get the rhyme. Gwen Stefani is guilty of this in “Bubble Pop Electric,” with lyrics “I’m restless, can’t you see I try my bestest.” Justin Timberlake also falls victim to making up a word in “What Goes Around,” featuring lyrics “When you cheated girl, my heart bleeded girl.”

For sake of rhyming, I can definitely see why artists would go to certain lengths to make up words and violate grammar rules. Like I said earlier, music is indeed a form of art, and isn’t meant to follow the rules in the first place. Especially in the Beatles’ song, “All you need is Love,” they alternate from active to passive voice perhaps to put emphasis on the word “love,” because that is the main theme of the song. But when looking outside the classic rock era and instead at modern day pop and hip-hop songs, grammatical issues are growing to a whole new level.

 

I personally find it hard to believe that people like Miley Cyrus and Pitbull are true “artists,” rather than famous people simply reciting lyrics that contain multiple grammatically incorrect phrases. Timbaland’s “The Way I Are,” is a prime example. Sure, for rap and hip-hop songs the syllables of words need to match up with the beat, so it’s often understandable for artists to alter words and sentence structures. But for example in Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks,” he raps “Yo, we at war/We at war with terrorism, racisim, and most of all we at war with ourselves...” instead of “We’re at war,” etc. Same number of syllables, so why doesn’t he follow the grammar rules to make himself seem at least a tad smarter?

Then I wonder if these grammatically incorrect phrases are actually a reflection of our pop culture and our society today instead of a sore attempt to be creative. I’ve for sure been guilty of sending texts or speaking in grammatically incorrect sentences, including the occasional “I be in the library,” or “where you be, dude?” I do it to be funny or add some personality to the conversation.

So in the end, bad grammar in today’s pop music seems to be more of a question of our society, and what is making us talk like uneducated goons when most of us are in fact capable of using grammar correctly. This is a whole different topic, and is one that I may dive deeper into in the future, but for now, I have to make it through the next few weeks of finals and such. Off to make a playlist for studying that most likely consists of upbeat songs with horrid grammar.