Why I never call into radio shows to request songs...

[zalena]

I am notorious for mis-hearing song lyrics. It all started with that Mitch Ryder song, Devil with a Blue Dress On, which I had thought, my entire life, was Devil with a Blue Grass Song. One day I asked my brother why there were no blue grass elements in the song, banjos, etc., and after he stopped laughing, he corrected me.

It's now something of a standing joke. I run into new ones all the time. Just last week I discovered that Ozzy song with all the howling: Back of the Room, was actually Bark at the Moon which makes a lot more sense considering the context.

Ozzy has a lot of them, because he does sing with some kind of faint accent and doesn't annunciate well. Flying High Again I always heard as Playing Hard to Get, which makes as much sense as anything. (And is a much funner song, if you ask me.)

Don't even get me started with songs that have weird lyrics to begin with. Van Halen's Panama I'd always heard as Burn It Up. It leads one to ask what the hell David Lee Roth was doing singing about Panama, and why it was a hit.

This is what happens to your children if you deprive them of rock 'n roll early in life.

EDIT: Brother may very well mock me for mishearing song lyrics, but his misapprehension of a vaudeville song, Who Put the Overalls in Mistress Murphy's Chowder? as Who Put the Underwear in Mr. Smurfy's Shower? still takes the cake.

Mom used to play for melodramas, which were always accompanied by musical reviews. We know all sorts of terrible, comical, music hall songs and horrible jokes as a result. Perhaps this is where my appreciation of juvenile puns and slapstick humor comes from.

Comments

[sakuratea.livejournal.com]

Mishearings are always funnier. That's why Jon and I still call "Up above it" by Nine Inch Nails, "I was a papaya."

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We were driving down Shattuck in Berkeley several years ago when markgritter suddenly said, "Van Halen is overrated?" timprov and I exchanged puzzled glances and agreed that we really weren't all that fond of Van Halen ourselves. Pause. No further discussion forthcoming, so I finally asked why he'd brought that up. He thought that was what the singer had said on the song on the radio.

"That heaven is overrated." Oh. Well, okay. That too.

[sdn.livejournal.com]

there are books about this sort of thing, and websites too.

[sachie.livejournal.com]

Ha! I love mondegreens.

I swear Dave Mustaine sings about 'junior bacon cheese' in one of Megadeth's songs.