9

Poison - "Every Rose Has Its Thorn"

Offending Lyric:
"Just like every cowboy sings his sad, sad song/Every rose has its thorn"

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.

8

Bob Seger - "Like A Rock"

Offending Lyric:
"Like a rock, chargin' out the gate"

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.

Needless to say, anyone betting on Seger's boulder to win the Kentucky Derby probably wound up tearing up their tickets in frustration before being wheeled back to the asylum.

7

Ricky Martin - "She Bangs"

Offending Lyric:
"Cause she looks like a flower but she stings like a bee/Like every girl in history"

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?

6

Nelly Furtado - "I'm Like A Bird"

Offending Lyric:
"I'm like a bird, I'll only fly away/I don't know where my soul is, I don't know where my home is"

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.

Perhaps a more fitting, albeit less poetic, choice would be for Nelly to compare herself to a homeless man with a hang-glider or a jet pack. This new lyric balances her absence of a home with her tendency to fly away, with the added bonus that it sounds just as stupid as the original choice.

5

Pharrell (featuring Gwen Stefani) - "Can I Have It Like That"

Offending Lyric:
"You should see the way the chain heart is a charmin' flying like a bird like Nelly Furtado"

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."

Does this mean that there is some enormous freak bird out there that is Nelly Furtado-like in mannerisms and appearance, and that Pharrell is subsequently flying like that bird? Or, does the line refer to a normal bird that just happens to think like Nelly Furtado? If it's the latter, then (as we've learned above), Pharrell is flying like a bird who knows very little about birds.

We at CRACKED are ambitious, and we like to think that the real simile in this song is that "flying," in Pharrell's case, represents "songwriting," which is to say, Pharrell is writing songs like someone who knows very little about writing songs, and we have absolutely no argument with that. What is undeniable, however, is that it's pretty clear that Pharrell knows very little about similes and much less about birds.

4

Paul Simon - "Loves Me Like a Rock"

Offending Lyric:
"My mama loves me ... she loves me like a rock"

3

Patrick Swayze - "She's Like The Wind"

Offending Lyric:
"She's like the wind, through my tree"

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.

She is described as "out of my league" which leads us to conclude that a more appropriate lyric would be "She's like every woman everywhere since I appeared in Road House."

2

Alanis Morissette - "Ironic"

Offending Lyric:
"It's like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife "¦ And isn't it ironic ... don't you think?"

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're trying to imagine the circumstances, but each scenario seems more unlikely than the last:

• You work at the spoon factory, and the only way to unjam a cog in the spoon-making machine is to grease it by spreading butter over it.
• You invited the band 10,000 Maniacs to a dinner party, and the caterer, worried that they were in fact 10,000 maniacs, thought it best to limit their access to sharp items.
• You are armed for an invasion of Cereal Land, but the gates are being guarded by two juicy 72-ounce steaks.

1

Snap - "Rhythm is a Dancer"

Offending Lyric:
"I'm serious as cancer/when I say rhythm is a dancer!"

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."

Switching gears and moving on to the awful simile at the end of the song's rap verse, you're "serious as cancer"? Really? We know that you're trying to make a point, but that's pretty fucking serious. Probably a little too serious, in fact, for your ridiculous metaphor about rhythm being a dancer.

To be fair, the poetic pickings are slim when trying to rhyme with "dancer." Both "depantser" and "necromancer" would have also landed them high on this list, for instance, as would "Welcome to France, sir." But when your thumping techno dance track references tragic terminal diseases, you're going to wear the Bad Simile crown.