Or monumentally indifferent. I doubt the “years of criticism” affected him one little bit.
She also clearly flubs this line the second time she says it, which adds to the confusion.
Steve Earle, Copperhead Road, about his grandfathers’s moonshining business:
He only came to town about twice a year
He’d buy a hundred pounds of yeast and some copper line
He might buy a hundred pounds of sugar (or more) to make moonshine but not a hundred pounds of yeast.
Well, who knows… Maybe he bought TEN THOUSAND pounds of sugar to go with the hundred pounds of yeast and was making enough moonshine to blind the entire state of West Virginia?
The point he’s trying to make is that the coal miners’ livelihood is being eradicated by the advent and availability of nuclear power, which is cleaner and cheaper than coal… but the downside is that the radioactive byproduct from nuclear reactors is deadly for many years.
Now I’m not sure if carbon-14 is a byproduct of nuclear energy or not - that might be poetic licence on the non-nuclear engineer Sting’s part. But I think the lyric makes sense.
To contribute to the thread, I present Sheryl Crow’s “Maybe Angels,” which features the line:
Problem is of course, if Ms. Crow did indeed travel on I-95 to Florida, about the closest she’d get is Jacksonville, about 360 miles away. Maybe she meant I-10?
In Robert Johnson’s song “Sweet Home Chicago” he talks about going to Chicago… in the land of California.
ABBA, “…at Waterloo Napoleon did surrender…”
Not quite.
It’s a traffic jam when you’re already late(or a free ride when you’ve already paid).
I don’t want to mess with the King or nothing, but…
“Yes, we’re all cousins
that’s what I believe
because we’re children
of Adam and Eve”
Strictly speaking we would then be siblings, not cousins.
mm
I’m wondering about that figure of 12,000 years, which is double the half-life of C-14 (rounded up for poetic purposes). Makes me wonder if Sting knows how a half-life works.
Johnny Cash’s “When the Man Comes Around” has a line in it about “the father hen calling his chickens home”. Ummm… rooster maybe?
North coast, that.
The one that bugged me the most was:
“Just a city boy,
Born and raised in South Detroit”
That would put him either in the Detroit River, or Windsor, Ontario…
The transgendered chicken community has a right to be represented in song! Who are you to judge?
I know, that line always made me laugh. Johnny should have known better.
‘Africa’ by Toto contains the words:
I know that I must do what’s right
Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti
I’m told that this is wrong, apparently because Kilimanjaro doesn’t rise above the Serengeti. Can anyone confirm or refute?
True enough. And then there’s the whole meta-irony of a song named “Ironic” not being, in fact, ironic.
Okay, you win–he was not illiterate.
He was a pretentious pretty-boy and mediocre poet with minimal talent, a gigiantic ego, and the attitude of a sociopath. 
But literate.
:rolleyes:
Not a clue, but :o :o :o
I thought it was “rises like LEPERS above the Serengeti.”
No wonder it never made sense to me.
Yeah, I know. Going now.
Despite the tortured apologetics I’ve seen from their fans, I still think Bono’s “Unos! Dos! Tres! Catorce!” was a goof.
This may not be exactly in the spirit of the thread, but I thought of the synthesizer solo in the Led Zeppelin song “All My Love,” near the end of which it always sounded (to me) as though John Paul Jones clearly flubbed a note or hit an extra key.
Haha! That’s like “'Scuse me while I kiss this guy” from Hendrix. I’ll have to start a thread about misheard song lyrics. There’s actually a term for that.