There must be something wrong with my ears (or the way my brain processes sounds). I just acn’t understand the lyrics to rock and roll songs…I cannot makeout what they are saying.
Is this common? I find that I have to read the lyrics to actually knowwhat they are saying…even balladeers like Kurt Cobain-I couldnot get into his music, because I could never hear what he was whining about.
Is this common? Can your ears mix up voice and music, to the extent that yoiu can’rt understand what ois being daid?
I think sometimes you have to get used to how someone sings. Mainly though you do tend to lose the odd syllable here and there which can make it nearly impossible to figure a word out.
Personally I find that the Radiohead guy has such a slurred delivery that even when I know the lyric I can’t quite match it to the noises i’m hearing.
I can’t understand lyrics for most singers either. If I wanted to know the lyrics I’d have to look them up online or read the liner notes.
I don’t know why, but you’re not the only one.
Most rock singers aren’t known for their clear diction and enunciation either. Imagine yourself at a nightclub trying to talk to a stranger with a speech impediment over the house band, and you get an idea of the difficulty of the problem. Rock music basically has a low signal-to-noise ratio, usually. It’s not surprising, therefore, that many people have difficulty picking out the lyrics by listening to a song.
It’s very common. There’s even a local (DC area) country station that advertises that you can understand all the lyrics to country songs, as opposed to those effete rock-and-rollers. Also, singers with extremely clear diction make lousy rockers (Think Jim Nabors singing “Blowin’ In the Wind”); Dylanesque slurring gives emotional and artistic authenticity.
One of my all-time favorite songs, “The Sonwriter” by the Good Rats, had one lyric I could never quite nail down after twenty years of listening to the album. Last year, I found their web site–no lyrics posted–and I just e-mailed the guy who wrote the song. He sent me back an e-mail the next day. Oh, the miraculous age we live in!
Don’t paint all R&/orR with the same brush. Every lyric from Steely Dan is crystal clear they have more of a jazz heritage. Rockers who sing blues based music is another matter and isn’t part of that formula. I got to hear John Lee Hooker play live about a year before he dies and his show was awsesome but I’ll be damnned if I could make out the lyrics even on the songs I knew half the time. Singing Boom Boom and Boogie Chillun with perfect diction would just be horribly wrong.
Mind you there are limits. No one sings A Little Help From My Friends like Joe Cocker but you’re never sure if he’s really into the song or having an attack of some kind. “Won’t someone help that poor man?”
I must interject here – I don’t consider this a hijack – that I have the same problem with almost all vocal music. I have a hell of a time determining what most singers are saying – choral music is a particular difficulty. Popular singers are normally an exception – I have no trouble figuring out Frank Sinatra or Jimmy Buffet, for example.
I have a working knowledge of most European languages – what the hell, I’ll throw in Latin, too, but regrettably not Gaelic, in spite of my handle – but quite often I cannot even tell which language is being used. This applies even if the language is English. This mortifies me.
Soprano voices are a particular trial to me, but I think they are a trial to everyone. The only exception I can think of that I have listened to with pleasure is Maria Callas.
I have a better chance with tenor voices. Luciano Pavarotti is a joy to listen to in every language
I have always had this problem with Rock lyrics. On the other hand, after reading the lyics to hundreds if not thousands of Rock tunes (yes, off LP inserts and liner notes) I don’t think I am missing much.
Rap and Hip-Hop are for the most part a closed book to me, since it is a rare example of these genres that I can decipher at all, but this is probably my fault for not being in sync with the people producing such work. I don’t think I am missing much here, either. An uncharitable person might say that I am too old, and probably the wrong color.
This ubiquitous tragic flaw irks me greatly, but I don’t see what I can do about it.
Again, as Padeye writes above, this does not apply universally.
I just heard Korn on the radio. Clear as a whistle! I don’t see why they don’t get more radio play. 
But what I really want to add is that I watched a poetry reading on the tube a while back, and noticed the same phenomenon.
I have little trouble hearing the words in rap, but often the slang is beyond me. That, I’ve learned from my teen-aged grandchildren, is generational, not racial.
Peace,
mangeorge
ralph124c: don’t worry. The ubiquity of the experience of Mondegreens shows that many, many people have trouble with lyrics. I used to feel guilty about it, but have long since concluded that those who claim to hear the words generally often know them from the sleeve notes beforehand.
You are definitely not alone.
Of course, in pop and rock music good articulation is not high on the agenda for most artists, so it’s not entirely surprising if you can’t tell what they are saying most of the time. The lyrics for the chorus of ‘Blinded By The Light’ was the subject of vicious debate for years before the boring old internet brought the correct lyrics to the masses, and as for the chorus line in REM’s ‘Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite’… well, they even held radio phone-ins to discuss exactly what Mr. Stipe was saying.
However, I can seldom tell what singers are saying even if they happen to be one of the few who bother to articulate their words. My brain just doesn’t work very well in that regard - normal speech is fine, and in fact I can track and remember conversations more accurately than most people. But if speech is ‘contaminated’ by anything else - background noise, music etc. - then my ability to parse and comprehend what’s being said deteriorates rapidly. I’m just deliciously freaky like that.
An excellent example of not listening would be Ronald Reagan’s use of Born in the USA in his campaign. And a lot of conservatives actually bought it (the record). Springsteen, apparently, was not very thrilled. 
There was a book some years ago which collected anecdotes about how people had misheard rock lyrics. It was marginally amusing.
Far more entertaining was a long piece done on the National Public Radio show All Things Considered maybe fifteen years ago. It did not focus on rock lyrics exclusively, the predominated. There were clips from dozens of people telling how they had misheard lyrics in all kinds of songs. After each person told what they thought they were hearing, the song excerpt in question would be played. Sure enough, “Bernadette!” does sound like “Burn to death!”, and “I’m so hot for you, but you’re so cold” does sound like “I’m so affable but you’re so cold”. There was even a confession by a prominent rock singer–I think it may have been Gordon Sumner (“Sting”)-- that he had never been able to figure out the lyrics to “Blinded by the Light”.
As for the point mentioned before that some singers are far easier to understand, I must have heard the song “Mr. Bo Jangles” hundreds of times before I heard Sammy Davis Jr’s cover. It was only then that I understood that “he looked like the very eyes of age, as he spoke right out”. Always before I thought “he looked like the very eyes of age as the smoke ran out”, which I think I like better.
When I was a kid, my mother kept the kitchen radio tuned to a station which played big band music, and which shut off at sundown. Each day they played “Moments to Remember” by The Four Lads as their sign off.
For years I heard the introduction:
“The night we tore the goal posts down,
The ballroom prize we almost won…”
as:
“The night we tore the goal posts down,
The bar room fights we almost won…”
which seemed like a strange thing to get sentimental over.
In my experience this problem doesn’t exist to the same degree in other languages. When I lived in Chile, people were constantly asking me to tell them the lyrics to songs and got very frustrated when I told them I couldn’t. “The song’s in English, right? You speak English, right?” One guy decided I didn’t understand the British rock band because I didn’t speak British English, so he went off to look for a guy who had studied a couple years of British English in school.
This led me to the following theory to partly explain the issue, at least with respect to Spanish. In Spanish, no matter what kind of screwed up accent you have, the five vowel sounds remain the same. It’s the consonants that people mangle. So when you’re listening to singing, with elongated vowels, the basic form of the word is still there. But with singing in English, all you hear is random vowel sounds. The sound of a vowel varies greatly from accent to accent, and singers turn every vowel into some dipthong that doesn’t resemble it’s pronunciation in real life.
Throw in the fact that lyrics are poetic. In real life, you don’t actually understand every word that is said to you, but you don’t realize it because you can fill in the words you miss from your knowledge of the language. Think about this common Mondegreen (according to SF writer Jon Carroll): “There’s a bathroom on the right” is a normal phrase in everyday English, whereas “There’s a bad moon on the rise” would never be said in normal speech.
…and so you say that I’m weird because I understood ‘Louie Louie’ by the Kingsmen the first time I heard it ? Notwithstanding the fact that some smoke helped me…
You did?
So enlighten me. And millions of others, I’ll bet.
I think maybe the smoke deceived you. Careful now, there at least 2 or 3 “swear to god” versions out there direct from various members themselves.
If somebody posts the version endorsed by Cecil, ignore it.
Ai nikki gerbil see wanna fee.
Yay-pa na gono wa-wa-wee!
Ma nibba sibbo na manna may
Yee po na boo-bah bee low hay!
Looee Looe, Oh, baby, mee na go.
I have to agree with Chula. Usually when I figure out what an indecipherable lyric is, it is often something that is not normal English. (The first artist that popped in to my head when I saw this thread was Elton John, although as lyricist Bernie Taupin is probably more to blame.)
I think it was probably somewhere in the fifth year of friends when I finally figured out they were singing “Your love life’s DOA.” Probably would have been sooner if I had a tv with closed captioning.
I tend to have a problem understanding song lyrics more when a band is performing live. With live performances, the soundboard mixing is often done in a way that makes the instruments sound much louder than the vocals, with the result being that you can’t understand anything being sung.
Screaming was always a part of rock, but I’ve noticed that in modern rock, incoherent screaming is far more prevalent. I have a much harder time understanding new alternative rock more than classic or mullet rock.
elmwood, you’re not an old dude, are you?
I don’t think you’d say that if you had experienced classic rock when it was top 40. Girls screamed for Frank Sinatra, but I believe the really loud stuff started with Elvis. And never stopped.
I dunno about Bill Haley and the Comets.