Is this the worst song ever written?

A coconut-flavored musical hot take.

Thanks to Kamala Harris, the New York Times has dubbed this the summer of coconut memes. (I suppose that has a better ring to it than “the summer of couch-fucking jokes,” but we all know which one is getting the real traction.)

Please allow me to capitalize on the coconut craze that’s currently sweeping that nation with a hot take about some 53-year-old music: “Coconut” by Harry Nilsson is the worst song ever written.

Now, I am recently on record as against the judgment of other people’s music tastes. So if you like this song, please do not feel personally attacked! I bear you no ill will. I am simply arguing that objectively speaking, the song “Coconut” stinks like a donkey’s anus.

I first encountered this song when it was used as a jingle to launch Coca-Cola with Lime in the early aughts.¹ And perhaps that’s the easiest way to sum up its awfulness: it was an extremely effective jingle.

Spotify gifted me a more recent listen while I was shuffling through some kid’s music, where the song’s sunny vibe fits right in. Because let me be clear: I am NOT saying that “Coconut” isn’t catchy. It’s catchy as hell! That’s part of the problem! When I hear a bad song, I want to immediately forget it. But “Coconut” will get stuck in your head for days. I know this because it refuses to leave mine.

Nilsson was a singer/songwriter in the late 1960s and early 1970s who first found success by writing songs for The Monkees and Three Dog Night, among others. He hit the larger popular consciousness in 1968 when John Lennon and Paul McCartney cited him as their favorite American artist. In 1969, his cover of "Everybody's Talkin'" became a top-10 hit driven by its appearance in the film Midnight Cowboy.

“Coconut” was released in 1972 as the second single off the album Nilsson Schmilsson, and somehow went all the way to #8 on the Billboard Charts. I can’t say what Lennon & McCartney think of this one, but Chortle is taking an official editorial stance: it sucks.

First of all, there is exactly one chord in the entire song. C7. A perfectly good chord. But there’s a reason most songs have a little variety to them, and it’s so you don’t look at your phone and wonder if “Coconut” is stuck on loop. But the song only feels more repetitive once lyrics arrive. In less than four minutes, Nilsson sings the phrase “put the lime in the coconut” 28 times — once every eight seconds!

But why put the lime in the coconut? That’s the crux of the song’s roiling conflict.² Nilsson’s opening lyrics set the scene:

Brother bought a coconut, he bought it for a dime
His sister had another one she paid it for the lime

A compelling premise, to be sure. Siblings navigating the fruit economy has been fodder for many a hit single.

To summarize the rest: Sister proceeds to drink her lime juice and her Brother’s coconut milk together, which gives her a stomachache. She calls a Doctor in the middle of the night, who suggests that she drink lime juice and coconut milk to settle her upset stomach. End of story.

This feels like one of those stories that, halfway through telling, you realize isn’t as funny as you thought, so you struggle to come up with a better ending than what really happened. In other words, I’m not sure it’s a sturdy thematic base for a four-minute calypso song. (That’s probably why the third and fourth verses repeat the first and second verses almost exactly, begging the question of why they couldn’t just make a two-minute calypso song.)

To perk things up, producer Richard Perry suggested that Nilsson sing the verses as separate characters, each with a slightly different yet always uncomfortable Caribbean patois. The voices aren’t quite racist, but they definitely add another question mark at the end of “How did this become a hit??”³

Music is subjective. Maybe “Coconut” isn’t actually qualitatively worse than any other bad pop song out there, much less some of the literally unlistenable microgenres that barely qualify as music. But it’s an especially mystifying hit.

To me, it sounds more like something Sebastian would sing in a direct-to-VHS Little Mermaid sequel than a top-10 single. It would fit right in on an album of Jimmy Buffett doing Louis Armstrong impressions. Hearing it makes me want to scream, “What the hell were these guys thinking??!!!” It’s the worst song ever.

Anyway, I added it to my son’s DAYTIME FUN! playlist.

---

Can you explain why this song was so popular? Please leave a comment. I’m begging you!

---

More Music from Chortle

1. It also makes a memorable appearance over the closing credits of Reservoir Dogs.

2. I’m being extremely generous by using the word crux, which Google defines as “the decisive or most important point at issue.” There is nothing decisive or important at issue in “Coconut.”

3. It doesn’t help that Nilsson recorded a video for the song in a gorilla costume.