The sad song of the single eyelid girl
By Nury Vittachi
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The search is over. The world can take a deep breath. Readers have spoken, and the mission to find the most, er, memorable East Asian pop song lyric ever has come up with a winner.
Let’s go in reverse order. In third place comes Hong Kong’s Aaron Kwok with this baffling line: “A crowded car is like the noise of bees who is specially recalling my face with nostalgia.” Thanks, Aaron; keep taking the tablets.
In second place is Taiwan’s Richie Jen with this great passage: “Lonely boy’s flyswatter: Swat-swat left, swat-swat right. How come I have no one to love me? No one shows interest. How boring.” You said it, my man.
But the first place winner in this category has to be—big round of applause—Single-Eyelid Girl by the China Dolls, a group from Thailand.
This unforgettable song is about a girl who falls in love with a boy, but then discovers that he only likes double-eyelid girls, while she is a single-eyelid girl: “The boy at the table opposite us is here again today; look at his eyes, what amazing confidence. But I've heard that he only likes double-eyelid girls! With my single eyelid, I have no choice.”
For some reason, the song conjures up a vision of a Cyclops-like girl sitting in a restaurant with one huge eye in the middle of her forehead. I’ve never actually seen the lead singer of the China Dolls, so perhaps that is what she looks like.
Meanwhile, listeners of the Phil Whelan show on Hong Kong’s Radio Three wanted to add the Beatles’ While My Guitar Gently Weeps to our list of bad lyrics. George Harrison, desperately looking for a rhyme for “sleeping”, sings: “I look at the floor and I see it needs sweeping”.
An even more embarrassingly desperate rhyme was spotted by reader Dave MacDonald in Led Zeppelin's Dancing Days: “I told your mamma I'd get you home/ but I didn't tell her I had no car/ I saw a lion, he was standing alone with a tadpole in a jar.”
Raiya Kishwar Ashraf from Bangladesh added a song from her country which clearly has lyrics designed to shock listeners: “My shirt button is open: Oh brother. My shirt button is open!” Which just goes to show that different things shock different people.
Reader Ricardo Cabeza scolded us for missing Neil Diamond's Play Me, for the line: “Songs you sang to me, sounds you brang to me.”
We earlier mentioned an Indian song which went, “Light your ciggie from my liver, oh lover”. Reader Claudia Cucker says it may not be as absurd as it sounds: “The liver is the organ in your body that gives off the most heat.” Thanks, Claudia. Next time I want to flambé my dessert, you can come round and ignite it with your internal organs.
Several readers wanted to give a Most Baffling Love Song award to Manfred Man for his song about a guy who meets a girl who says: “Doo wah diddy diddy dum diddy doo.” He replies with the same phrase, and they decide to get married so they can spend every day chanting “Doo wah diddy diddy dum diddy doo”. The only possible response to this lyric is: What were they on when they wrote this, and where can I get some?
