Abuse of Artistic License
So we all know that poets and lyricists sometimes bury their meaning in words that no one else can untangle. Sometimes the words are just clearly stupid. What stupid lyrics drive you nuts?
Live - All Over You: "Our love is like water, pinned down and abused for being strange." What? I guess I could see an oddball stretch where you might say water is abused, but pinned down isn't working out for me, and water being considered strange is way out in left field.
Lifehouse - You and Me: "Cause its you and me and all of the people." When I was a kid, we had single words for that, like "everyone" and "everybody". This phrase reeks of "I couldn't think of what to say after 'you and me' so I just flapped my gums until something sufficiently like English came out". I didn't like this song much the first 3,000 times I heard it (in the first week it was on the radio), and I like it less and less each time I hear it. For bonus negative points, the singer slurs so badly it was nearly a month before I realized he was saying "you got my head spinning" and not "you got my ass burning". I should submit that to kissthisguy.com.
John Mayer - Say: This whole song (phrase used loosely) sucks. It reeks of "hey I bet $5 I can write a four minute song with fewer unique words than George Harrison's 'Got My Mind Set On You' and less musical range than a 311 song and less meaning than the average Britney Spears ditty and still make a mint off of it". Congratulations, John, you've won the bet. After hearing it once, it was fortunate for the long-term health of my ears that they are mounted on the sides of my head where I was unable to chew them off in misery. The fact that the radio stations love it so much they feel the need to play it every 15 minutes means that they are delighted to have found something to torture us for the 11 months of the year that it's inappropriate to play the "Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime" atrocity. Apologists for this song think it has a message and so they defend it to the bitter end. A free clue: if you haven't fully absorbed this song's "meaning" in the first 30 seconds, you're a blithering idiot. The remaining three and a half minutes are sonic waterboarding and should be banned accordingly. The only reason this song ever made it out of the studio is because it has a name like "John Mayer" attached to it. This one song is enough for me to swear off John Mayer for life.
Juno
I don't know the name of the "song" and I don't care to know it. The "song" that was "sung" throughout that movie was really irritating. Stream of consciousness is ok, but that was just pathetic.
#3 Son
Oh man...
The Police - Synchronicity II: "Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes"
OK... I know the next line refers to a "suicidal race" and that's really where the "lemmings" reference comes in. But this line is a complete phrase in the song and needs to stand on it's own. It's a messed up simile is what it is. And it drives me insane.
Alanis Morissette - Ironic: "Isn't it ironic... don't you think?"
No. It isn't, actually. Nothing in the song qualifies as ironic as far as I can tell. If I'm wrong on this score, please someone explain it to me.
Oh man... I got a MILLION of these. But I have to stop because... I'm feeling guilty about all of the other forum posts that I haven't had time to comment on and yet here I am MAKING time to GRIPE!
Alas... forming intelligent arguments is hard... but griping is so very easy...
Ironic
Haha and I still love that song.... I don't know if it's part of common culture or not, but any time anyone says anything about something being ironic, it is an imperative for me to follow up with "don't you think?"
"Oh man... I got a MILLION of these. But I have to stop because... I'm feeling guilty about all of the other forum posts that I haven't had time to comment on and yet here I am MAKING time to GRIPE!" - That's quite all right, this thread isn't going anywhere. I forgot at least half a dozen examples while I was typing so I'll just have to come back later and add them! Hopefully we'll see some more of your million?
Hah, brilliant title...
Heh... ironic. She wrote a song called ironic that wasn't really ironic. Ironic, don't you think?
I've got Sade on my mind. I love her but there's a line in "Smooth Operator" that makes me do that rapid blinking thing.
Sade: "Coast to coast, LA to Chicago."
Bless her heart, but she might as well be saying "Coast to coast, the Pacific to Lake Okeechobee."
Ironic
"Pacific to Lake Okeechobee"!! LOL
Well you guys have all named the one that irks me the most. As an English teacher especially--having to overcome a whole generation of people thinking that "ironic" means whenever something unpleasant happens to them (maybe we should write a parody--"Isn't that narcissistic?").
Along the same lines--when the movie "300" came out, my son was studying the Peloponnesian War and said a lot of his classmates who had seen the movie left thinking it was an accurate historical account. Think of the effect of that movie 10,000 BC!
Tangent--on mishearing lyrics:
So this is the funniest one for me--there's a line in a Billy Bragg song, "I'm more impressionable when my cement is wet"--and I misinterpreted it for years. Heh, probably don't need to spell out, but it was "cement" that I misheard.
And I like this way that my son misheard Drowning Pool's "Let the bodies hit the floor"--He thought they were saying "Let the party set the flow" 
more misheard lyrics
For years and years my sister and I thought the Steve Miller Band song "Jungle Love" was about a train... and that they were in actuality singing "Chugalug".
The funniest part about that story is that my sister didn't figure it out until high school when she joined the cheerleading squad. They picked that song to use as part of a pep rally presentation. During practice my sister got a little crazy and broke out into singing as they were dancing like wild to the song. I hear that everyone stopped dead in their tracks and laughed their asses off. I have not verified whether the entire cheerleading squad remained assless for their entire lives... but it's a tragic story indeed.
Guess what?
We were:
"Born, born, born to be alive"