Every weekday until the end of Bucky Short List voting (November 28th at midnight EST), we will be profiling a different category in the Bucky Awards.
Today, we focus on Best Lyric. Here are your finalists:
- Broken Social Scene, “World Sick” “I feel worldsick everytime I take a stand.”
- The Arcade Fire, “Ready to Start” “All the kids have always known, that the emperor wears no clothes. But to bow down to them anyway, it’s better than being alone.”
- Shad, “Yaa I Get It” “I hope I ain't borin’ y’all rappin ’bout rap. But the only thing I love more than rappin’ is nappin’. And I know nobody wanna hear me rap about that.”
- Treelines, “Summer Song” “The hottest seller is a pile of sand, and layin’ down is an action plan.”
- Library Voices, “Party Like It’s 2012” “Party like it’s 2012, like there’ll be no morning after. Party like it’s 2012, let's hear it for the rapture.”
In high school English class, did you ever do a unit on song lyrics? I did, and all the students got to bring in their favourite lyrics and discuss them using what we’d learned from our poetry lessons. I brought in “Cigarette” by Ben Folds Five. It wasn't an example of metaphor, alliteration, or onomatopoeia. I just liked that it was a run-on sentence that had been transformed into a song.
Now I’m no lyrics expert; all I am is dust in the wind. What do you like in a lyric? Do you want a profound statement? A complicated series of rhymes? Something clever like "Bawitdaba da bang a dang diggy diggy diggy said the boogy said up jump the boogy?"
These are the past winners of the Best Lyric Bucky:
- 2006 - Wordburglar, “Word Owner,” "You said your girl looked like Drew Barrymore/I met her. She looks like Drew Carey more."
- 2007 - The Weakerthans, “Civil Twilight” “For the most part I think about golfing and constantly calculate/all the seconds left in the minutes, and so on, et cetera/Or recite the names of provinces and Hollywood actors/Oh, Ontario, oh, Jennifer Jason Leigh.”
- 2008 – Stars, “14 Forever” “And if sometimes the kids all seem a little sad/It’s ’cause they’re saying goodbye to the youth they think they had.”
- 2009 – Joel Plaskett, “Through & Through & Through” “I’m the Berlin Wall, I’m a communist/You’re a wrecking ball in a summer dress.”