Music

Everyone’s Arguing Over The Decade’s Best Lyrics

If 'We found love in a hopeless place' doesn't define this hell decade, what does?

by Jared Richards  14 October 2019
Twitter users are arguing over the decade's best lyrics

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With the end-of-decade lists starting to arrive, retrospection has broken out on Twitter, with people debating the 2010’s best songs, albums and artists. But it was one innocuous question about the best song lyric of the decade that’s really fired people up.

Last week, writer Ilana Kaplan was flooded with more than 2000 responses after asking what the decade’s best song lyric was. Of course, there were quite a few repeats: lines from Taylor Swift, Lorde, and Rihanna and Calvin Harris’ 2011 banger ‘We Found Love’ proved incredibly popular.

While ‘We found love in a hopeless place’ is peak “vaguely everything” EDM lyricism, we’re going to have to shout out the line ‘Nobody texts me in a crisis’ in Rihanna’s ‘Work’. It slips by so quickly you’d be forgiven for missing how absolutely devastating it is.

As for Swift, one line from Red‘s ‘All Too Well’ apparently stands above the rest. The heartbreakingly clever ‘Hey, you call me up again just to break me like a promise/ So casually cruel in the name of being honest’ received a lot of love.

Lorde received a lot of entries too, but the most common — and our personal favourite — was this, from Melodrama’s ‘Hard Feelings’: ‘I care for myself the way I used to care about you’.

Mitski and Fiona Apple both proved favourites, too. For the former, users debated whether ‘Nobody butters me up like you and nobody fucks me like me’ or ‘Nobody”s chorus should win out. And Apple had people screaming ‘Every Single Night”s ‘I just want to feel everything’ as if they were Hannah Horvath.

Other honourable mentions include Vampire Weekend‘s album-spanning ‘I don’t wanna live like this, but I don’t wanna die’, as well as lines from Weyes Blood, Courtney Barnett, Kanye West and Perfume Genius and Kendrick Lamar, whose song ‘Alright’ recently took out Pitchfork’s list of the decade’s best tracks.


On the less emotional end, Beyoncé’s iconic and gross line about sneezing on the beat in ‘Yoncé’ deserves a shout-out.

One person just nominated all of Childish Gambino’s ‘This Is America’, which isn’t exactly how this works but we get the sentiment. Scroll through the full thread on Twitter.