You might disagree with the ordering, or even with the presence here of some of your personal favorites. But at last, the list is complete: here are the worst lyricists of all time.

Blender magazine has published a list of The 40 Worst Lyricists in Rock. Never mind that the list transcends rock and includes contributors from rap, hip-hop, pop, and bad movie music categories. Lists like this just tug at one's fascination for how they are formulated, whose opinions matter in constructing them, and why the person(s) compiling the list is (are) an idiot for including your favorite songwriter and/or excluding the most blatantly idiotic lyricist ever.

Nowhere in sight are Jimmy Webb ("MacArthur's Park is melting in the dark, all the sweet green icing flowing down..."), Van Dyke Parks (Brian Wilson's collaborator on "Surf's Up"—"The music all is lost for now, to a muted trumpeter swan, columnated ruins domino..."), or John Lennon ("Elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna, man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allen Poe..."). And this is just as well, for these are moments of haunting (perhaps drug-induced) aural sculpture that deserve clemency from the charges pressed against the likes of Paul Stanley, Bryan Adams, and Kevin Federline (only number 30?????).

Mind you, there are people on this list (deservedly so) who have penned not only the worst lyrics of all time but occasionally some of the best. Paul McCartney. Bernie Taupin. Jim Morrison. Even Sting. (Who, by the way, comes in at #1!) But even these wordsmiths have unavoidable tendencies to veer into the pretentious ("caught between the Scylla and Charybdis"), the inane ("We built this city on rock and roll"—guess who penned those words...) and the trite (virtually any post-Beatles Paul McCartney).

Naturally, so-called "progressive rock" gets called to task. "A seasoned witch can call you from the depths of your disgrace, and rearrange your liver to the solid mental grace." It doesn't get better than that. So we see not only Jon Anderson of Yes but his sibling (not really...) Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, and the entire crew of Gabriel-period Genesis. (So where is Greg Lake?—"Every day a little sadder, a little madder, someone get me a ladder!")

But trumping them all is Neil Peart from the band Rush. A bunch of Canadian Randroid Yes wannabes from the get-go, Rush was a band who desperately wanted to be as pretentious as Yes but lacked their compositional chops and unwisely chose to be inspired by Atlas Shrugged instead of Autobiography of a Yogi ("Hey, Boo-Boo!"). Neil comes in at #2. How appropriate. (Am I being too vague in describing how I feel about Rush?)

I was surprised that Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers came in at only #40. Seems to me that every song off their past three albums has consisted of little beyond absurd rhymes with the word "California". (Refresh my memory, where are they from again?) Don't say I didn't warn ya...

Read the article to find more awful lyrics and lyricists and form your own opinion... unless you prefer to let the compilers of the list form it for you.