10 song lyrics that have aged like milk

‘Starfuckers Inc’ – Nine Inch Nails

“My God pouts on the cover of the magazine
My God’s a shallow little bitch tryin’ to make the scene“

When Nine Inch Nails came out, most people didn’t understand what they were looking at. There had been dark pop before ever since Depeche Mode started working, but listening to Trent Reznor was like someone physically assaulting you with music from the first time that they opened their mouth. And while that’s normally a good thing, Reznor seemed to get a touch overzealous when it came time for him to confront his issues with Courtney Love.

Although no one’s entitled to have warm feelings about their ex-lovers, Reznor’s retort back at Love for being nothing but fame-hungry does ring a lot more hollow these days. Outside of calling her a spoiled “bitch” in the lyrics, what really sells this as one of the most dated lyrics comes from the way that it’s delivered. Because from the glitchy production to the faux-metal riffs, this is the kind of sloppy seconds that Marilyn Manson would have gladly thrown out if given the opportunity.

And since Reznor was already working with Manson, it was clear that this kind of musical costume didn’t fit him very well. That was the Halloween style of melancholy, and for a song that’s all about hatred and spite, Reznor could have handled this in a much different way than blind rage.

‘All in the Family’ – Korn

“You little f****t ho
Please give me some shit to work with
‘Cause right now I’m all it, kid
Suck my dick, kid, like your daddy did“

In the world of hip-hop, making sly disses towards an opponent is its own art form. It’s not always the worst thing to get dissed by another artist, because it only serves to push you to do something better when your next project comes out. But when two emcees are going head-to-head whose main genre isn’t rap, it made for some of the most dated vernacular to come out of the 1990s, the same decade that had words like ‘X-treme’.

Although Korn was known to have a unique style when they started, Follow the Leader comes to a grinding halt the minute ‘All in the Family’. Because if there was one thing that can disrupt a Korn party, it’s Fred Durst, and while the music itself is basic as all hell, half of the song involves both Durst and Jonathan Davis trading barbs back and forth, which amounts to them talking about how the other is gay or casually throwing in every homophobic insult they can for shock value.

This was at least a little bit charming when Eminem deliberately tried to get a rise out of people, but since this was all in clean fun, it only serves to remind everyone what the 1990s really were. It was a magical time in many respects, but there were many instances where things got seriously ugly, and this is one of the many great bands that got caught in the crossover of school-bully-style rap disses.

‘How Do You Sleep’ – John Lennon

“The only thing you done was yesterday
And since you’re gone you’re just another day“

The Beatles had no obligation to be nice to each other after they broke up. Sure, it may have all come down to business, but they still managed to leave without the highest opinion of their fellow Fabs, especially since Paul McCartney decided to sue the rest of his band after going with manager Allen Klein. Although Macca did also take a few jabs at John Lennon in the process, his former partner was one to make savage insults and ask questions later on ‘How Do You Sleep’.

Although Macca’s shots at Lennon were fairly mild and cleverly hidden, Lennon leaves nothing to the imagination on ‘How Do You Sleep’. Given their situation, one could mistake him for outright hating McCartney throughout their entire partnership, namechecking songs like ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Sgt Peppers’ and claiming that everything that he made was borderline muzak to his ears.

Despite being demonstrably untrue given Lennon’s love of tunes like ‘Hey Jude’, it also became super-dated the minute that they made up, with Lennon eventually using the same riff in this song to go after Klein after he screwed him over on the tune ‘Steel and Glass’. The Beatles had cut several ties with each other during the course of their breakup, but given that Klein was a scoundrel the whole time, was it really worth scorching bridges like this all for the sake of being petty?

‘American Idiot’ – Green Day

“Well, maybe I’m the f****t, America
I’m not a part of a redneck agenda“

There are a lot of relics of the Bush administration that were never going to age that well. The Iraq War was a travesty and the fact that Americans spent years embroiled in battles they didn’t need to fight is what led to many people disagreeing with what the President had to say. And while Green Day were one of the first major power players to cast a stone at the leader of the free world, it’s actually none of the potshots that earn ‘American Idiot’ that earns it a spot on this list.

No, the egregious line comes in the second verse when Billie Joe Armstrong says that maybe he is the kind of homophobic slur that everyone claims him to be. While this kind of language came with the territory back in the day, Armstrong does at the very least use the term correctly, only using it to quote wastes of semen whose minds are too limited to understand that they are being so evil with their free speech.

The thought behind it is there, but there’s a much better way of going about this, and given how many people continue to misunderstand the shot, it might have been better if Armstrong never said it in the first place. He didn’t necessarily do anything wrong, but in the same way that there’s no way to get John Lennon off the hook for using racist slurs in his tunes, there’s little reason not to hold Armstrong accountable as well.

‘Nutshell’ – Alice in Chains

“My gift of self is raped
My privacy is raked
And yet I find, and yet I find
Repeating in my head
If I can’t be my own
I’d feel better dead“

The entire road of Alice in Chains’s career is paved with the saddest stories in rock and roll. There was a lot to admire about the way that Layne Staley conducted himself in his prime, but there was a tortured spirit at the centre of it all waiting to be let out from its cage. While he did give us some fine vocal performances throughout his career, ‘Nutshell’ will ultimately stand as the moment that he ran out of gas and was never the same again.

Compared to everything else on this list, this is by far the most morbid, as Staley talks about feeling better if he were on this planet anymore. He had clearly been giving in to his demons during the Jar of Flies era, and this was his excuse to let out all of his emotion without having to make too many of those acrobatic vocal leaps that he had done on Dirt. It was a great catharsis at the time, but it took on a whole new meaning after he was found dead of an overdose in 2002.

Because like it or not, this is Staley calling his shot as a rock and roll casualty, and even though he may not have been thinking in those terms, it’s easy to see that he knew his destiny was not going to be pretty. There had been a lot of depressing songs that came out of grunge canon, but whereas Kurt Cobain had a lot of his pain hidden amongst his lyrics, this is as clear as any rockstar has ever been when confronting their demons.

‘Brown Sugar’ – The Rolling Stones

“Scarred old slaver know he’s doin’ alright
Hear him whip the women just around midnight“

The Rolling Stones were never exactly known for playing nice. They had their moments of tenderness, but that was never any reason to believe that they would be talking about wholesome topics whenever they got behind the microphone on a rocker. And while Mick Jagger did have his casual moments of misogyny sprinkled throughout his early songs, why stop there when you can be racist and misogynistic all in one go?

On the surface, ‘Brown Sugar’ with The Stones could have easily been an ode to heroin or their various other drug songs, but Jagger takes things in a different direction. No, this tune is about a bunch of knuckleheads knocking about on a slave ship and reminiscing on how much it was abusing black women every single night. No matter how one chooses to spin it, a line about whipping the women around midnight was always going to cause some people to raise a few eyebrows later in life.

Although the band have since retired the tune from the setlist, it also makes it more of a shame considering it features some of the best riffing that Keith Richards ever played during their prime. There are a lot of ways that rock and roll bands can be edgy or dangerous, but someone has screwed up somewhere when suddenly the ode to hard drugs is actually an improvement from what was actually written.

‘Do What U Want’ – Lady Gaga

“Do what I want, do what I want with your body
Back of the club, taking shots, gettin’ naughty

Yeah, we taking these haters and we roughin’ ’em up
And we layin’ the cut like we don’t give a fuck“

The road to Lady Gaga creating Artpop was always going to have a few roadblocks in front of it. There were many ways that she could have decided to shock the people, but the idea of turning graphic art into pop music would always come together with an audible thud, even if tunes like ‘Mary Jane Holland’ and ‘Applause’ do deserve a place on her greatest hits. But when it strikes out, you get ‘Do What You Want’ where everything goes wrong.

But Gaga isn’t really the problem here. No, that goes to Mr R Kelly, who is more than willing to do what he wants with whatever body he comes across. While there had been stories surrounding the R&B singer’s behaviour, Surviving R Kelly makes this tune a sonic nightmare for anyone abused by him, almost as if he’s celebrating his ability to get away with anything he wants to because of his position in the industry.

Gaga has since apologised and claimed not to be in the best headspace when creating the tune, but the battle isn’t with her. After all, she had done a phenomenal version with singers like Christine Aguilera, so if they had the good sense to ask the fellow diva to be on the song first, we would have never had to give a musical paedophile the satisfaction of listening to his material.

‘Virtuality’ – Rush

“Net boy, net girl
Send your impulse ’round the world
Put your message in a modem (put your message in a modem)
And throw it in the Cyber Sea (and throw it in the Cyber Sea)“

For years, Rush have prided themselves on being some of the most cerebral lyricists of their time. Most of what Neil Peart wrote was about digging into fairly heavy concepts, and even if they didn’t always roll off the tongue well, they tended to get people thinking in a much broader way than they did before. That didn’t stop their reputation as a nerdy band, though, and ‘Virtuality’ is so nerdy it may as well have come complete with its own pocket protector and wire-rimmed glasses.

For those under the age of 35, the dawn of the Internet age was a golden time, and ‘Virtuality’ was all about how fascinating it would be like living in a cyber world. While everyone is more or less accustomed to doing work on a computer these days, Peart went full dad-joke mode with many of his lines, talking about ‘net boys’ and ‘net girls’ swimming in the cyber sea along with any other technical jargon he can throw in.

It’s far from the worst lyric you’d find in the Internet age, but this is more on here because of the disappointment factor. This is the same person who made something as gripping as ‘Limelight’ and could even make fans tear up listening to ‘Nobody’s Hero’, so hearing him go in the exact opposite direction made him look like the exact kind of nerd that everyone suspected Rush fans to be in the first place.

‘Trainwrecks’ – Weezer

“Someday we’ll cut our critics down to size
And crash a Diddy party in disguise“

Anyone would likely throw a dart at any of the material Weezer made in the 2000s and come away with something that hasn’t aged well. As much as they wanted to be at the forefront of popular culture back in the day, Rivers Cuomo often let his starry eyes get the better of him, especially when he tried to pass off a collaboration with Lil Wayne on ‘Can’t Stop Partying’. So how is one of their best songs from this era somehow on this list?

Listening to the tune, ‘Trainwrecks’ is the epitome of a diamond in the rough, with the kind of upbeat attitude many would expect out of a Springsteen song. When he talks about achieving his dreams, though, Cuomo’s choice of comparisons is way off with the recent context, as he talks about one day telling off their critics and being able to sneak into one of Diddy’s parties in disguise.

To anyone that has been watching the news, most celebrities would not want to be within a five-mile radius of a Diddy party after his multiple allegations, with this one line making Cuomo saying “do it please daddy” on ‘One More Hit’ actually sound acceptable. Many people like to think that the characters in this tune live happily ever after achieving their dreams, but if they actually did crash that Diddy party, let’s hope that they didn’t walk away with a lawsuit to deal with.

‘Down With the Sickness’ – Disturbed

“No mommy, don’t do it again etc”

For their time, Disturbed lived up to every bit of their band name. They had moments where they may have been too over-the-top, but when David Draiman opened his mouth, his lyrics about destruction and all things macabre seemed to work wonders for the nu-metal crowd. Like all great nu-metal acts, though, not everything holds up to the passage of time, and the band’s signature hit has an entire section that would have been far too triggering to even attempt today.

Despite ‘Down With the Sickness’ being known more today for the strange animal noises that Drainman makes at the top of the tune, the real headscratcher comes during the breakdown section. Right when everyone thinks that a solo should kick in, all that we get is an elongated rant from Draiman going at his mother, where he reenacts a bout of domestic abuse that he suffered from her, ending in her cursing her out before the final verse of the song kicks in.

Aside from making someone relive their own past trauma, hearing this almost makes the title of the tune sound that much worse. After all, if Draiman is talking about getting down with the sickness, does that mean that we have to worry about the cycle of abuse carrying on further down the line?