What are your favorite indecipherable or incorrectly deciphered rock or pop lyrics?
Some comedian whose name escapes me talked about some of the classics, such as the chorus on the Steve Miller Band’s “Jet Airliner”:
“Whoaaa… Bingo Jed had a light on.”
Or “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” by the Beatles.
“The girl with colitis goes by.”
Or “Purple Haze” by Hendrix:
“Scuse me while I kiss this guy.”*
Two recent songs fit this category for me. One is “Conversations Kill” by Stone Temple Pilots.
The best guess I can make on the chorus of this song is, “Time to take her holder, lead the Asians, conscience lady.”
Another even more recent one is “Scar Tissue” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. For like a month I didn’t have a clue what the chorus said. Thought it was something like,
“With the Burba Shave its salon-y view and.”
Found out much later that Anthony Kiedis is saying, “With the birds I share this lonely view.”
Guess I’m not looking for the right answers so much, as the funny wrong ones! Any nominations?
“In much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” - Ecclesiastes 1:18
I always had a hard time with the Rolling Stones and their lyrics. I’d have to listen to one of their songs a couple of hundred times to make out what old Mick was saying.
In “The Caterpillar”, by The Cure, I always thought Robert Smith was singing “ketchup in a gun” instead of “caterpillar girl”.
An infinite number of rednecks in an infinite number of pickup trucks shooting an infinite number of shotguns at an infinite number of road signs will eventually produce all the world’s great works of literature in Braille.
One of my favorite movie scenes is the one from Jumpin’ Jack Flash, where Whoopie Goldberg’s character is playing that song and trying to write down the lyrics as she hears them. After hours and hours, and tons of wadded up pieces of paper, she finally gives up and goes out and buys the sheet music. Too funny!
And I agree about Blinded By The Light. I think everyone in the world thought they were saying “wrapped up like a douche.” What is that? Eeewww
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” - Anne Frank
Thank you. I knew that “Conversation Kills” was not the correct title, but I couldn’t very well point out that someone got it wrong when I couldn’t remember it myself. I kept trying to picture the back cover of “The Crow” soundtrack to no avail.
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And I agree about Blinded By The Light. I think everyone in the world thought they were saying “wrapped up like a douche.”
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Depends on whether you mean the Springsteen version or the Manfred Mann version. Mann screws up the lyrics tremendously. The original line is “set loose like a deuce.” Mann says “wrapped up like a douche.” Maybe the last word is his pronunciation of “deuce,” but since he got the first half wrong, and gets the following line wrong, too, (I’d have to listen to it again to check exactly how) there’s a good chance he isn’t following the lyrics and saying “deuce.” And there’s definitely an “sh” sound in Mann’s pronunciation.
Of course, any published lyrics are the Springsteen version, so you can’t go by them.
“East is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.” – Marx
Aaahh, but they (Manfred Mann’s Earth Band) don’t say that. The lyrics are, “revved up like a deuce.” You can read them here.
How that differs from Springstein’s version I can’t corroborate, since I can’t find a lyrics site that shows the version as recorded by him, only Manfred Mann.
The point was, they are amongst the most commonly misheard lyrics.
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” - Anne Frank
And speaking of Elton John, does anyone know what he’s saying in “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”?
Goodbye yellow brick road,
Where the [something] hounds[?] are starting to howl[?]
You can’t plant me in your penthouse,
I’m going back to my plow [which doesn’t rhyme with howl]
Back to the [something something something to do with woods]
Hunting the [something something]
Oh, I found the other side of my future lies,
Beyond the yellow brick road . . . .
LOL jodih. Were it not for the fact that the album had the lyrics printed on it (IIRC), I wouldn’t have known what the heck he was singing either. Here’s how it goes…
Goodbye yellow brick road
Where the dogs of society howl
You can’t plant me in your penthouse
I’m going back to my plough (meaning he’s not a city boy, but a country boy at heart.)
Back to the howling old owl in the woods
Huting the horny back toad
Oh I’ve finally decided my future lies
Beyond the yellow brick road
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” - Anne Frank
I was also completely mystified by Scar Tissue … I wasn’t even going to hazard a guess at the chorus!
R.E.M.'s lyrics used to be notoriously incomprehensible. There’s a song called We Walk on their first album that has the chorus “Take oasis, take oasis, take oasis” - I always heard it as “Tape, erase us”
As far as deliberately mis-singing lyrics goes, Supergrass’s song Alright (“We are young/ we run green/ keep our teeth/ nice and clean”) is sung by a friend of mine as “We have teeth/ we have teeth/ we have teeth/ we have teeth” … I am no longer able to listen to that song without singing it the same way!
Speaking of REM, is it even humanly possible to understand the lyrics to “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” A couple of my friends used to listen to that song and just sing “something, something, something” along with Michael Stipe. I looked up the lyrics one time, and they are truly bizarre, which may partially explain the indecipherablity. A line I always thought was “You wanna shout violent things, uh huh” turned out to be “You wore a shirt of violent green, uh huh.” I still can’t hear it.
BTW, I ALWAYS thought that it was “Scuse me while I kiss this guy.” (Until I was aboput 14, I guess, and I must have heard the song several gazillion times by then, as my dad worships at the Shrine of Jimi.)I thought it was an odd lyric, but hey, maybe the guy was Jimi’s best friend or something. Who knew?
