Crap Lyrics: A Celebration of the Very Worst Pop Lyrics of All Time . . . Ever! Paperback – November 1, 2009

I bought this as a gift for my father. As a music collector he found it very funny and entertaining!

Look, 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 In addition, the author comes off as kind of a cranky, outdated music snob, sort of like SomethingAwful's David Thorpe if he was a 60 year old classic rock aficionado, and less funny.Writing reviews of bad art is an art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.

I loved this book! It's really fun to see these songs dissected into the piles of poop most of them are, and Mr. Sharpdoes it wonderfully. To me, the music industry has enough songs with "crap lyrics" to keep Mr. Sharp like his name -"sharp" - for many years to come. (One gripe, though - most of his "crappy" lyrics are from British singles of the1990s; if he expanded to American music from almost anytime since Tinpan Alley - including it - he'd never havea shortage of material to write about.)

I got more laughs out of this book than any other I've ever read. I did not take this book as a serious critique of the "crap lyrics" that pervades much of popular music--I took it as pure comedy (and something of a "celebration" as suggested by the book title). If you are a pop/rock music buff and enjoy snarky, sarcastic, and occasionally scathing British humor--this book's for you.

I've been a song writer for almost 44 years and some of the songs my friends and I like to write contain strange lyrics and made-up words to keep the listener thinking or wondering......perfect lyrics and correct english is not always part of the art or process. I understand what Johnny is up to with his Crapy Lyrics book but to me his writing here is worse than some of the lyrics he calls crap. My wife bought this for me for the holidays for a laugh but after skimming through it for an hour I closed it and mailed it back the next day. The book is not worth a dime. Much better stuff out there to read as far as lyrics are concerned. If I could I wouldn't even give this book 1 star. No wonder it's best selling rank is 355,327.

Sometimes a pop song lyric will wonderfully capture a feeling shared by many people and sometimes it’ll leave you wondering what the lyricist was thinking. This book is about the second category. Some of the crap lyrics in this book are the result of lazy rhyming, some are too baffling to explain, but all are amusing. Some of the lyrics belong to a time when we had different values. The chapter of bad euphemisms was a favourite chapter for me. A lot of the songs in this book are good songs overall, with just the one dodgy lyric so this book can also remind you of some great music. It’s a book of gently poking fun, nothing mean.

quick reply, v.satisfied

Amusing, but ultimately, too short!

Complete rubbish , the man is a total Idiot and not sharp at all.I wonder if he ever wrote a decent song.

Not as amusing as I thought it would be. Check out his much better book 'Mind the Bollocks' about the laughable nonsense of popular music.