Abba, *Waterloo *:
“At Waterloo,
Napoleon did surrender …”
Bzzzzt - wrong! He was defeated there, yes, but did not surrender for weeks afterwards.
Ralph McTell - Streets of London
"Have you seen the old man
In the closed down market
Kicking up the papers with his worn out shoes
In his eyes you see no pride
Hands held loosely at his side
Yesterday’s paper, telling yesterday’s news "
Hey, Ralph, yesterday’s paper contains the day before yesterday’s news!
Yes it is! Unless you’re measuring from downtown…but the lyric goes, “Twenty-six miles across the sea.” Which is correct. (On the other hand, “A tropical heaven covered with trees and girls” is dead wrong.)
Hmm…somebody already mentioned “Little Girls”, so I’ll go with a plain old incorrect, boringly non-creepy one. I’m always bugged by that line in Gerry Rafferty’s “Right Down The Line” which goes:
“You’re as constant as the Northern Star, the brightest light that shines.”
Excuse me?! Polaris is NOT the brightest star in the northern sky, it’s like 50th brightest or something. And due to a wobble in the Earth’s rotational axis, the Northern Star will shift from Polaris to Vega in 25,000 years, so it’s not that constant either!!!
In “Take That Look Off Your Face,” Don Black has an English woman living in New York’s infamous line “He’s doing some deal up in Baltimore now…”
Bernadette Peters changed it to “down” in the Broadway version.
If a woman stays with me for 25,000 years, that’s constant enough for me. 
Well, not to quibble over such a minor point, but I was sure I’d seen or heard one of the Four Preps at one time commenting on the fact that Catalina Island wasn’t actually twenty-six miles from the coast, but that for some reason it must have sounded more mellifluous to the songwriters so they went with that. So, I Googled it and came up with several tourist companies that run boats back and forth, as well as the Encyclopedia Brittanica, all of which show the distance to be twenty-two miles.
I measured it on the road atlas and…umm…well, the ferry ride from San Pedro to Avalon is approx. 26 miles. So I claim a tie on this one. ;j
And why would it be? I’m not familiar with this little ditty.
And it takes on an entirely different note when Good morning, little schoolgirl is sung by Jonny Lang. He was what? 17? when he recorded it? I can just see him daydreaming about a 16 or 17 year old girl in his highschool, all done up in her school uniform, and singing this song. In that case, it seems almost normal.
As is REM’s “The One I Love”
Am I supposed to be swooning or dodging bullets? Fire! With a gun - or is this some kind of cannonball salute?
Well, not anymore it ain’t. But in the pre-Stonewall era, yeah, YMCA’s in some large metropolitan areas DID have the reputation of being gay cruising areas. The YMCA provided single-occupancy rooms for young men who ostensibly had no famlilial connections to fall back on (guys new to the city) and forbade women as guests in rooms, but did allow male visitors. They were employed by gay guys as places to “trick” (have quickee sex), and not a few of those young out-of-town guys were gays looking to escape being “doomed” to a life of passing-as-hetero. (One legendary “gay” YMCA on 23rd street in Manhattan has recently been changed into a ‘David Barton’ gym with a heavly gay clientele.) So, yeah, the song is factually right.
Or Kylie Minogue could respond with her profound philosophical dissertation that goes a little something like this:
na na na, na na na na na, na na na, na na na na na, na na na, na na na na naa, na na na, na na na na na
[QUOTE= YMCA
Through the roughly 500 billion times I’ve heard this song played, I’ve always wondered…has hooking up with gay guys at the local YMCA ever been common practice, let alone now? [/QUOTE]
I can’t speak for all YMCAs, bit the downtown San Francisco YMCA has quite a reputation for hook ups.
Yes even now. AIDS has been with us for over 20 years. And remember, safe sex does not spread AIDS. Unprotected sex can.
And it’s not an orgy in the steam room. There is a certain amount of discretion. Often it’s an excahange of phone numbers with someone you met while working out.
There’s a bar in San Francisco called The Tongue and Groove. Why the hell do they need to hook up at the Y?
For “just plain wrong”, howsabout Johnny Rotten belting out “We’re so pretty, oh, so pretty!”
Or Michael Jackson’s macho posturing… “I’m bad!”
Then again, to pick up a previous theme on this thread, that song also contains the lines “Your butt is mine… You’re not a man.”
::Puts on flak helmet, ducks into foxhole::
Prince was supposedly asked to appear in the video instead of Wesley Snipes, and tersely declined. Reportedly the idea of being opposite The King of Pop while he lipsynched “your butt is mine” was, to His Royal Badness, something of a disincentive.
Boy George singing the line, “I’m a man who doesn’t know how to sell a contradiction” from “Karma Chameleon”.
Uh, Boy? (may I call you Boy?) Have you looked in a mirror lately?
I think I may have discovered the reason for the discrepancy. There are 5,280 feet in a land mile, and 6,076.1155 feet in a nautical mile. This works out to roughly 26 land miles, or 22 nautical miles. Perhaps the songwriters were going by land miles and the encyclopedia and tourist companies were measuring by nautical miles.
So, you’re correct, it’s a tie; we’re both right. 
Yay, us. 
But the Tongue and Groove is a straight bar/club
To show paedophilic ideas are not just from dirty old men, I give you Kate Bush: Infant Kiss
I’ve never fallen for
A little boy before.
No control.
Just a kid and just at school.
Back home they’d call me dirty.
His little hand is on my heart.
He’s got me where it hurts me.
Knock, knock. Who’s there in this baby?
You know how to work me.
And Mr. Croce seems to believe trees and wild animals have names.
Like the pine trees lining the winding road
I’ve got a name, I’ve got a name.
Like the singing bird and the croaking toad
I’ve got a name, I’ve got a name.
And I carry it with me like my daddy did.
A man’s gotta know when to lay off the weed.
(But hey, at least he wasn’t content just to refer to them as “trees and birds and rocks and things” like SOME OTHER PEOPLE I COULD MENTION.)