By Michael.Remember Robert Palmer and that video from quite some time back?
Went like this didn’t it?
“You might as well face it you’re a dick with a glove…”
Er…and wasn’t it Nirvana who proclaimed: “Here we are now – in containers”?
I love a mondegreen me – a misheard song lyric that becomes, to a critical mass of individuals, part of the accepted version of that song. So when one of these individuals hears the song being played on the radio say, the default position is to sing-a-long and heartily emphasise the erroneous lyrics. That’s what I do anyway.
Like for example, Desmond Dekker (and the Aces)’ song “Me ears are alight”. Thanks to that ad on the telly a couple of decades ago some people still actually think it’s called “Isrealites”. No hang on – other way round.
C'mon, there’s loads of these. The band Queen is the source of untold unstaged mondegreens with plenty of examples riddled throughout “Bohemian Rhapsody” alone. There's one line in the verse of The Stranglers’ song “Golden Brown” which is subject to all sorts of interpretations including “M.A.S.H. re-runs” and “mancheeros”. Have a listen. Ooh, and remind me to bore you with how clever that song is in that it switches, very unusually, between time signatures 3/4 and 4/4 yet still workszzzz. Right, sorry did you nod off then?
Anyway, my interest is such that I demand to know why kd lang has been so keen to tell us that she “Can’t stand gra-vy” and what made her fellow Canadian, Bryan Adams want to reveal to the world that he had his first “sex dream at the age of five” in “Summer of 69”? I’d have kept that one schtumn if I were you pal.
Is all this a bit juvenile? Yeah course it is and that’s maybe part of the fun. A friend of mine recently made a perception-changing remark about that dreary old tune by misery-making, self-pity exponent Christina Perri which has been troubling the charts recently. As soon as my chum told me the song was officially called “Jar of farts” I was suddenly able to cope much more easily with the song’s hideous unctuousness.
So the motto is - in the interest of keeping things nice and light - let’s hear it for the mondegreens!
