Conrad Schickedanz
We're not really sure what sort of movies the Goo Goo Dolls watch in their spare time. The movies we watch are full of good-looking people getting in gun fights with one another. If everything felt like the movies, we'd be jumping off of the top of buildings with firehoses wrapped around our waist. We're pretty sure that would do just fine as far as letting us know we're alive.
How exactly does a lover with a radar phone live? Well, probably poorly if they're fucking someone who thinks a radar phone sounds like a cool piece of technology. You have to feel bad for Def Leppard's girlfriends, who presumably all got radar phones for Christmas back in 1987, when this song was released.
While this simile may not necessarily be inaccurate, it's not overly astute, either. What's that, Boy George? Time is like a clock? Why, land sakes, we never saw it that way! And, the clock is in your heart? Holy crap, George! Make an appointment with your cardiologist, and we mean today.
First of all, everyone knows (read: we just learned on Wikipedia) that roses don't even have thorns, they have prickles. But, Poison probably didn't have a dedicated botany research department so we'll let that one go.
The real problem is on the cowboy/sad song side of things. Forget "every" cowboy singing a sad song; we're having trouble thinking of one. Clint Eastwood? Anyone in Tombstone or Young Guns? There were probably no sad songs in any season of Deadwood simply because not many sad words rhyme with "cocksucker." So who's left? Michael Irvin?
Wait a second ... does the fact that roses don't have thorns and that cowboys don't sing sad songs suddenly make this work as a simile again? Friends, I believe we have just been outwitted by Poison.
In fairness, throughout most of this hit song, Bob Seger manages to find valid reasons to compare himself to a rock-he's stoic, unflappable and rigid-but toward the end of "Like A Rock" he somehow confuses the typical rocks he references throughout his song with much more proactive and much less rock-like stones that, evidently, sprint out of gates in certain circumstances.
Come on, Ricky Martin, you can't possibly mean every girl in history. Mother Teresa? The Statue of Liberty? The Bee Girl from the Blind Melon "No Rain" video, who looked like a bee, but was as harmless as a flower?
While birds may not be terribly preoccupied with metaphysical questions about the location of their souls, they most certainly know where their homes are. It's sort of what they're known for. Homing pigeons, for example, have been let out of cages half way across the country and somehow managed to find their way back home.
This mind-blowing, simile-within-a-simile contains enough baffling layers to keep linguists guessing for generations. Here, Pharrell describes himself as "like a bird," but not just any bird-a bird that is, in fact, "like Nelly Furtado."
Much like Bob Seger, Paul Simon's mother seems a little confused about the very nature of rocks. From this lyric, we can conclude that Mrs. Simon either treats rocks like her children or her children like rocks.
What about this woman is wind-like, Patrick? We listened to your entire song-we're the only ones who have listened to the whole thing since the late '80s-and we couldn't find any mention of wind-like tendencies. She's not described as being particularly invisible, or intangible or even gusty.
Much has been made of the fact that Alanis' concept of irony doesn't quite meet the standards taught in most high school English classes, but her similes are every bit as worthy of scorn. Has anyone, in the history of mankind, ever needed a knife and ironically wound up with 10,000 spoons instead?
We don't really have time to dedicate an additional article to stupid metaphors in music, but we can guarantee that "Rhythm is a Dancer" by pseudo-group Snap would not go unrepresented if we did. Rhythm is not a dancer, it is something that dancers have. Saying "rhythm is a dancer" is like saying "illiteracy is Snap."
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