Monday, June 9, 2008

If you're from Belize, well then ya best Belize it

Yesterday was quite a lyrical day. I blogged about the enjoyment I derive from FOX's Don't Forget the Lyrics, and I gave a sacrament meeting talk about the influence of media in which I opened with the following anecdote:

I was nine or ten years old when I began listening to the radio a lot. One of the songs that was getting heavy airplay at the time was "Gyrlz, They Love Me" by the immortal Heavy D & the Boyz. At one point in the song, D is trying to set the appropriate mood for a date he's about to go on. He says, "turn on the radio, Anita Baker starts to sing." The first time I heard the song, and for many years thereafter, I thought he said "turn on the radio and eat a bacon-sausage thing." This seemed like something someone named Heavy D would do, so I didn't question it.

In my talk I made some contrived comparison to how we can get wrong or confusing messages from the media we consume, but I mostly just wanted to tell that story. (Speaking of sacrament meeting, I found it very amusing that we needed a letter from the First Presidency instructing us not to use visual aids in talks or ask people to look up scriptures.)

There are loads of funny lyrics out there, both imagined and real. This post's title is the logical follow-up line to "Cuz seein' is believin', and you best believe it" from Shaquille O'Neal's (yes, that Shaq) "Giggin' On 'Em." My friend David is well aware that, despite the above story, the biggest Heavy D-related laughs I get are from hearing the opening line from "Now That We've Found Love" (1, 2, tell me what you got--when a rapper counts in a song you assume it's because they needed to rhyme with something).

The aforementioned David has famously (among my friends, anyway) misheard lyrics ranging from ZZ Top to Huey Lewis and the News. Chris, the music programmer from my days working on the "Marie and Friends" radio show, told me some of his favorites: mistaking "I won't put my hands up" for "I will pull my eyes out" from Dido's "White Flag," and instead of "I'm gonna miss everybody" in Bone Thugs-N-Harmony's "Crossroads" hearing "anonymous severed bodies."

There's even an entire website devoted to incorrect lyrics, named after a famous Jimi Hendrix mishearing (be forewarned before perusing, though: many of the "new" lyrics aren't particularly clean). If you have any funny misheard lyric stories, leave 'em in the comments.

6 comments:

Janelle said...

My husband misheard Gwen Stefani in the song "Spiderwebs." When she sings "It's all your fault/I screen my phone calls" he thought it was "It's all your fault/I scream my balls off." He didn't understand the reference, since it was obviously a woman singing. I laughed at him for a long time about that one.

Kristina said...

Me: "Until this guy falls down onto me" for "Until the sky falls down onto me" from Savage Garden's Deeply Madly Truly.
My mom: "Take the back right turn" for "Paperback writer" from the Beatle's song of the same name
Also my mom: "There's a bathroom on the right" for "There's a bad moon on the rise" from the CCR song of the same title

jeff said...

All good ones.

K-Town, yours is similar to the classic mishearing of Elton John's "Don't Let the Sun Go Down On Me." A lot of people think that's what CCR says.

angelalois said...

My dad used to listen to this song when I was a kid, and the chorus was "you're my motown lover" ... and I was convinced he was saying, "you're my molten lava."

btw, you've been TAGGED by me!

Unknown said...

Misheard Lyrics: My king goof on that from a Hymn..."My this shalmano"... as a kid I often wondered what a 'shalmano' was. Fortunately I learned to read and figured out it was "by this shall man know..." and that makes a lot more sense!

jeff said...

Dave, I also wanted to know what a shalmano was when I was a kid! Let's come up with a definition for it.