Buy Me: Songs

Marjorie Body taught in the Department of English, University of Calgary.

“Buy me,” shouts the title. Buy what? “Songs,” suggests the subtitle. “The main objective of this book is to reach recording bands and artists who may desire to put music to these lyrics for the purpose of recording them,” explains the publisher, who provides the author’s New Jersey address on request.

The reader may judge the quality of the lyrics for himself:

She won’t go out with me.

She thinks I’m a catastrophe.

I’m a hard guy and I play too rough.

In fact she thinks I’m not good enough.

So I eat with my fingers and I may be crude.

Well, I’m sorry miss perfect, you’ve copted an attitude.

“She Won’t Go Out With Me” (p. 84)

The author displays a sense of humour and seems to enjoy playing with words, as some of the titles exemplify: “I’m Busting out of This Fat Body” (p. 7), “Living in the Stoned Age” (p. 75), “She’s My Future Robot” (p. 79). Humour tends to be macabre in “Bloody Valentine,” to be overtly sexual in “Hot Love in a Hot Tub,” and to be down-right dirty in “Hot Press” (p. 86).

Granting that such lyrics catch the idiom of the general public, and that we must accept certain glaring grammatical errors, I find some of the spelling mistakes inexcusable. One lyric, about a transvestite, contains this gem: “Transition, opposition, when you have that / He is she, she is he condition / It makes me smile, it makes me laugh / Everytime he goes passed.”