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Complex Numbers #671757 added October 14, 2009 at 6:56pm
Restrictions: None
No, seriously, it really DOES suck.
Yesterday, Lorien  quoted a song, as she is wont to do on occasion, for a blog entry: "Invalid Entry"  .
My first comment was "That song sucks."
Lynn McKenzie disagreed, even going so far as to impugn my favorite psychotherapist, Jung.
Well, we can argue about Jung, but there is no doubt whatsoever that the Eurythmics' song "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" sucks massive rat turds.
And I can prove it.
First of all, I'm not saying the Eurythmics suck. Annie Lennox has a beautiful voice, and their music was polished and not too overproduced compared to some of the other crap the industry was pumping into a tone-deaf public in the early 1980s, pre-Born in the USA. I hear the video was pretty well done, too, but the video is not the song and I would no more judge the song by the video than say The Matrix was a good movie just because it had killer special effects.
That said, "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)" sucks.
Let's start with the lyrics, because to be good, a song has to have good, meaningful lyrics. Otherwise, why bother making it a song? It can be an instrumental.
The lyrics:
Sweet dreams are made of this
Who am I to disagree?
I travel the world
And the seven seas--
Everybody's looking for something.
Some of them want to use you
Some of them want to get used by you
Some of them want to abuse you
Some of them want to be abused.
That's all. That's it for the lyrics. It's all chorus. Or, looked at another way, it's all verse. Oh, except for the almost-unintelligible part:
(Hold your head up--Keep your head up--MOVIN' ON)
Which before I could look up lyrics on the internet, I could swear went, "Powderhead (movin' on) Chowderhead (movin' on)" - but that's me, and that doesn't contribute to the song's massive vacuum pull. More, that was, in fact, the only saving grace of the song, and to find out that it was as much of a lie as "'scuze me while I kiss this guy" was a massive disappointment.
Okay. Okay. So the lyrics are spare. Haiku gets by with only 17 syllables; maybe they were going for that same kind of feel?
Well... No. Look at the lyrics again. Is there any imagery there? Is there a metaphor, an onomatopoeia, ANY kind of poetic trick?
Um... no.
In fact, the second line is a cliché: "Who am I to disagree?"
Oh, wait, I lied. There is one poetic device used: Rhyme.
But wait - what's the first line? "...this / ...disagree."
Do. WHAT?
They get around this by singing, "Sweet dreams are made of THESE."
That isn't a mishearing; that's no "There's a bathroom on the right." That's a LONG E and Z sound, when the lyrics - and the song title - and the album title all say THIS, which is a SHORT I and HARD S sound. You don't get those two mixed up, even if you are British.
If they'd said "Sweet dreams are made of CHEESE" and wrote that in the lyrics and song title and album title, then I'd change my opinion of the song. Really. Surrealism is always a good thing.
But it's not cheese - not even Wensleydale - it's THIS.
Okay, you say, you're wrong, idiot. "Disagree" is meant to rhyme with "seas." And yes, I'm willing to forgive the absence of the sibilant at the end of the first word. But my point remains - they don't say "this;" they say "these," creating an internal rhyme. So, no, I'm not wrong, especially if you consider "Sweet" through "seas" to be FOUR lines, which is how I've always seen it written.
Moving on: "Everybody's looking for something." So? You might as well say "Everybody needs air to breathe" or "My cat likes to lick her asshole."
I'm not even going to go into the next four lines, except to say that they'd make a set theory mathematician cry. The categories are neither overlapping nor mutually exclusive nor, as with the previous line, do they really mean anything.
As for "Hold your head up," well... Argent did it better, and first, with a song that's only marginally longer, lyrics-wise, than "Sweet Dreams:"
...And if they stare
Just let them burn their eyes on you moving
And if they shout
Don't let them change a thing what you're doing... Hold your head up, etc, etc.
Overall, if I encountered those Eurythmics lyrics written out here on WDC, I'd probably have to rate them   - assuming everything was spelled correctly.
Now, if you want a Eurythmics song that was popular AND good, you need to look no farther than "Here Comes The Rain Again."
But hey - at least it's not "Brass In Pocket" by the Pretenders. So "Sweet Dreams" does have one thing going for it. |
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