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Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy: The Science of Misheard Song Lyrics
HughPickens.com writes Maria Konnikova writes in The New Yorker that mondegreens are funny but they also give us insight into the underlying nature of linguistic processing, how our minds make meaning out of sound, and how in fractions of seconds, we translate a boundless blur of sound into sense. One of the reasons we often mishear song lyrics is that there's a lot of noise to get through, and we usually can't see the musicians' faces. Other times, the misperceptions come from the nature of the speech itself, for example when someone speaks in an unfamiliar accent or when the usual structure of stresses and inflections changes, as it does in a poem or a song. Another common cause of mondegreens is the oronym: word strings in which the sounds can be logically divided multiple ways. One version that Steven Pinker describes goes like this: Eugene O'Neill won a Pullet Surprise. The string of phonetic sounds can be plausibly broken up in multiple ways—and if you're not familiar with the requisite proper noun, you may find yourself making an error.
Other times, the culprit is the perception of the sound itself: some letters and letter combinations sound remarkably alike, and we need further cues, whether visual or contextual, to help us out. In a phenomenon known as the McGurk effect, people can be made to hear one consonant when a similar one is being spoken. "There's a bathroom on the right" standing in for "there's a bad moon on the rise" is a succession of such similarities adding up to two equally coherent alternatives.
Finally along with knowledge, we're governed by familiarity: we are more likely to select a word or phrase that we're familiar with, a phenomenon known as Zipf's law. One of the reasons that "Excuse me while I kiss this guy" substituted for Jimi Hendrix's "Excuse me while I kiss the sky" remains one of the most widely reported mondegreens of all time can be explained in part by frequency. It's much more common to hear of people kissing guys than skies.
Other times, the culprit is the perception of the sound itself: some letters and letter combinations sound remarkably alike, and we need further cues, whether visual or contextual, to help us out. In a phenomenon known as the McGurk effect, people can be made to hear one consonant when a similar one is being spoken. "There's a bathroom on the right" standing in for "there's a bad moon on the rise" is a succession of such similarities adding up to two equally coherent alternatives.
Finally along with knowledge, we're governed by familiarity: we are more likely to select a word or phrase that we're familiar with, a phenomenon known as Zipf's law. One of the reasons that "Excuse me while I kiss this guy" substituted for Jimi Hendrix's "Excuse me while I kiss the sky" remains one of the most widely reported mondegreens of all time can be explained in part by frequency. It's much more common to hear of people kissing guys than skies.
I got a hell of a good laugh when my wife told me that her and a friend thought that was what Jimi Hendrix said when they first heard Purple Haze. I never knew anyone else who thought that. Actually this is the first time I've heard about anyone thinking this, other than her and her friend.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I distinctly hear: "The beat goes steady like a firm cock..."
I meant this, sorry:
http://www.amiright.com/misheard/stories/blacksabbath.shtml
Are you reeling in the yeast
Stowing away the thyme
Are you gathering up the cheese
Have you had enough of mine
We Found Dove In A Soapless Place
Summation 2
I used to wonder why Sting would brag about his billiard skills (besides just his stalking) in "Every Breath You Take". "I'm a pool hall ace / with every breath you take".
Another long-time favorite in this way is "Benny and the Jets". In that case, though, it was hard to figure out in spots what Elton was singing at all. It turns out the most difficult section translates to "Get about as oiled as a diesel train".
Oh, and let's not forget this gem from Devo's "Whip it": "Tattoo detective" translates to "Try to detect it." Personally, though, I like my version better...
For years, my ex had been singing:
She never drinks the water, makes you order "fresh and pay"...
until I pointed out that it was probably French Champagne.
In the garden of Eden, baby.
Grandaddy of them all i'int?
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
I've got a black magic woman and she's trying to take a pebble out of me.
Michael Winslow of Police Academy fame
I don't think that's what TFA was talking about. In the Ozzie case, the dad found the son dead and a song named "suicide solution". None of the lyrics could be misunderstood to sound like he was advocating suicide. The grieving father saw the title and jumped to conclusions.
Free Martian Whores!
My personal favorite is from "Bad Moon Rising" by Creedence Clearwater Revival: "There's a bathroom on the right" instead of "There's a bad moon on the rise."
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
We'd have less of this with better sound reproduction.
When you move into a 'high end' system a lot of things become clearer. Going back to when Hendrix's " 'scuse me while I kiss...", that came out in the late 1960's. Our home stereo was record player amp combo that folded up like a suitcase. Our other source of music was whatever car radio, AM only, there was. By the 1970's people had Japanese receivers with a million buttons---some of the buttons actually did something useful. Few people ever graduated to anything that was hi-fidelity.
Sir Paul McCartney in an interview a few days ago expressed sadness that he puts a lot of effort into making a song with good sound quality, and people today listen to it on an ipad with cheap earbuds. Nothings changed.
I think this was intentional in Family guy.
The Censors it is Laugh and Cry.
To the listeners it is F'ing Cry
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Most Indian languages are written exactly as they are spoken, no silent letters. They also have very strict rules about how the pronunciation changes when say, a "n" follows a "ga" or "cha" or "ta" or "tha" or "pa". In fact Hindi would reduce "N" to a dot, because the preceding consonant would unambiguously define the pronunciation of the n, even though n has three different glyphs representing the labial, palatal and the dental versions of it.
Steven Pinker mentions some African languages using seven tenses instead of the usual present, past and future. Jared Diamond mentions some Pacific Island language that has words for "towards the sea" and "away from the sea", as in "there is a speck of dirt on your seawards cheek"
The richness of the languages and constructs are astounding. And most of the 6000 languages of the world are moribund and are expected to go extinct soon.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
A classic bluegrass tune "I Wonder Where You Are Tonight" by Jim & Jesse.
Often heard as "I'll Wear Your Underwear Tonight".
The fire engine guy.
The Vacant Lot on Blinded By The Light
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Speaking of the richness of languages, TFA oversimplifies some important language tendencies too.
For example, Zipf's law (which is also linked in TFS) has little to do with "familiarity" or being "more likely to select a word or phrase that we're familiar with."
It basically is just an observation that the statistical ranking of word in most natural languages is inversely proportional to its frequency. From the Wiki article:
Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc. For example, in the Brown Corpus of American English text, the word "the" is the most frequently occurring word, and by itself accounts for nearly 7% of all word occurrences (69,971 out of slightly over 1 million). True to Zipf's Law, the second-place word "of" accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words (36,411 occurrences), followed by "and" (28,852). Only 135 vocabulary items are needed to account for half the Brown Corpus.
Yes, I suppose one might get out of this that "we tend to choose words we're more familiar with," but Zipf's law is a MUCH more specific constraint on distribution of word frequencies. And it's more a statement about what word frequency distributions ARE rather than how we come to choose words or what we may be "familiar with," unless by "familiar with" you just mean "occurs more frequently."
Moreover, there is some research that has shown a distribution somewhat like Zipf's law will emerge even in texts generated with artificial random "languages" composed of random letters... which makes the claims about how we're making conscious or sub-conscious choices about "familiarity" even less likely.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
She's got electric boobs, and mohair pubes, you know I heard it from a Pakistani...
A few weeks ago an older relative asked me "What's all this We're up for Mexican Lucky about?" I was admittedly boggled.
Turns out he thought We're up all night to get lucky sounded like a nice riff about gambling across the border.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
When I was a kid, I thought there must be some special lure to get you to go to one of Disney's attraction. I'm talking about Janet Jackson's Epcot Bait.
Hold me closer, Tony Danza... aw, Elton, you're a big softie.
Which reminds me, there's a version of "Levon" by Jon Bon Jovi that's pretty good. It's kindda fun to see how he tries to make Elton's 'garage' (rhymes with 'carriage') work when he says in the American way (rhymes with 'barrage'.)
The Steve Miller band stumped me for years with "big old jet airliner," though I had no idea what he was saying. My best guess was Jeb O'Brian, whoever that was.
In my 20s I spent a LOT of time listening to and writing down lyrics for my cover band and finally figured that one out (and no, I didn't have the album, in fact, I rarely had the albums, thank you very much - not really my favorite music, but I played it).
And in some cases it's purely a matter of poor enunciation and the singer not really caring that the sounds coming out of their mouth sound nothing like the words are supposed to.
Better known as 318230.
When I was a kid, I thought "Silent Night" telling me to "sleep in heavenly peas".
Then there was the hymn "Gladly the Cross I'd Bear", which I thought was about Gladly, the cross-eyed bear.
Shania Twain - That Don't Impress Me Much
...could just be most singers are mumbling and the damned music is too loud.
Now, excuse me while I look for my fucking hearing aids.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
"In the American way." You mean not killing the French pronunciation like the Brits do. Garage, filet, foyer, valet...
Hold me closer, Tony Danza...
That one always translated to me as sounding like "Fleas on my dog"
The iPad's sound chip has phenomenal fidelity, as does most digital hardware. (Although laptops often suffer signal noise due to unshielded signal lines outside the chip.) If he thinks we're getting poorer quality than in the 60s, he's mad. An iPad can produce a higher quality recording than anything the Beatles ever produced.
On the other hand, if he's talking about his recent material, sound quality is meaningless if the song is unlistenably crap.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
As a kid I always wondered what the hell submersibles had to do with free will.
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
There is at least one released version of "Purple Haze" where he sings something very similar but instead of proclaiming to "kiss _this_guy" he sings "S'cuse me while I kiss _that_ guy."
It's the "Live at the Sandiego Sports Arena" version on the Jimi Hendrix Experience box set.
The words were difficult to understand due to the lead singers braces just having been retightened.
http://www.snopes.com/music/so...
Wrapped up like a douche, another boner in the night.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
The song (always 17 by Harry Chapin) says "truly" a bunch of times like "truly she's the only hope we've seen"... Her name is Julie, and her mom didn't find out she heard the lyrics wrong until Julie was in high school.
I give you, "Ken Lee":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Last summer I saw my nephew for the first time in a couple of years (he was about twelve years old) and found it eerie when he sang "Judy In Disguise" as "Judy In The Skies".
I'd made the same misinterpretation at his age; watching him sing those same wrong lyrics was like a time warp. First time I felt that weird "oh we've got some of the same 'DNA stuff' floating around in us" feeling. Wouldn't surprise me if it's because our brains are wired up quite similarly in some key places.
Ah fucken...
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
It is 'Watergate does not bother me, does your conscience bother you, tell the truth'.
One of my favorites is "Hands to Heaven" by Breathe -- which is mostly a mawkish 1980s power ballad, until the chorus swells and...
"Tonight I may just tweak your ass..."
Whoa! Getting a little raunchy there aren't we?
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
So far there's only one reference to kissthisguy.com and it's about a particular mondegreen in a particular song. I think the summary does us all a disservice by not tying this site into the discussion. It's a site all about the topic.
It would be interesting to test for any correlation between political philosophy and tendency to mishear song lyrics. I am reminded of a study some years ago that found conservatives are more easily startled than liberals, in general.
It's bound to take your life.
There's a bathroom on the right.
I think this was intentional in Family guy. The Censors it is Laugh and Cry. To the listeners it is F'ing Cry
I can see how someone might hear Fing Cry, but I always heard Laugh and Cry. I mean, Laugh and Cry is much more common a phrase than F'ing Cry. and why F'ing Cry doesn't fit in context at all. "Lucky there's a man who positively can do all the things that make us F'ing Cry"? Why are we lucky there's a guy that can make us cry? Laugh and cry, yes. Just cry? No.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
NASA used to employ stenographers to record meetings, who would then transcribe their notes. I remember reading some transcripts that repeatedly mentioned "chief horses", and it took me a few moments to realize it was "G-forces" being mentioned.
cheap earbuds
This was the OP's point. And just because the iPad has a DAC, that doesn't mean perfect fidelity in today's terms.
We had a debate in a "Current Events" class in high school about violent lyrics. As a heavy metal fan, this was important to me. Unfortunately, at the time, I wasn't very familiar with the words to "Suicide Solution", and one of my classmates had transcribed only one verse, showing how it was "advocating suicide". (To keep this semi-relevant, I'll also add that he said the lyrics were hard to understand and took him a while to discern.) I told him he was taking it out of context, but unfortunately I couldn't remember the full context of the song. He just shrugged as though context didn't matter, when, in fact, "Suicide Solution" is probably something everyone should listen to and think about. I wanted to kick myself when I remembered the theme of the song.
The debate accomplished nothing other than teaching me that I need to be as familiar as I can with the music I love, because people have a lot of misconceptions about it. I still get very strange looks when I say I listen to metal. I've even gotten my wife into some of it - I catch her singing Ozzy songs now and then, things she never listened to before she met me, and she's gone with me to Rush and Queensryche concerts. :) Of course, in recent years, "Crazy Train" and Judas Priest's "Electric Eye" intro have appeared in minivan commercials, so it's apparently not quite as bad as it supposedly once was.
You're gonna miss me by my taco.
Thirty four characters live here.
I remember hearing "Please Molly Dodd" when I was a kid, partially explained by some show with the title character Molly Dodd being on the air that my mom used to watch.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Even with good earbuds and a good DAC, most people listen to songs that have been lossily compressed to 1/10th their original size and don't sound nearly as good as the original. Same with the radio now days. Everything seems to have been digitally altered from the original.
like the One-Eyed Gott
The Censors it is Laugh and Cry.
To the listeners it is F'ing Cry
Look that up in your Funk and Wagnall's.
sigh I know, only people over 50 will get that one. The rest of you, get off my lawn.
At the time I first heard "Rock the Casbah" I didn't know the word "sharif" so there was no chance at all that I would not mishear that lyric.
How can I have sex without you (which actually kind of makes sense...)
Another (more well known mishearing):
Blinded by the light, Revved up like a deuce
I hear something like "...wrapped up like a douche". I just can't take that song seriously... it's the douche song.
The lossy compression really doesn't lose a lot acoustically. Some harmonics and some complex high-frequency sounds (like cymbals) are affected, but this is highly dependent on bitrate and codec. At 192Kbps, AAC doesn't lose much at all.
The biggest issue is the overuse of range compression effects on the original master recording to make the sound more punchy. Listen to a Beatles recording vs. anything recent. Look at the waveform of any popular music and you'll see an almost solid block with no variation. It's meant to sound loud, not sound good. Partly so that all parts of the song survive in a noisy environment like your car, and partly to accommodate junk speakers.
The host of the long-running Milwaukee Public TV show Outdoor Wisconsin is named Dan Small. On most shows, it sounds like he introduces himself with the line "Hi! I'm Damn Small." Once you've heard it that way, it's really hard to hear the "Dan" instead of "Damn".
Now *that* is some fine A++ wegyu-grade irony, there. I truly applaud you for your achievement. I'm not familiar with the song, but reading the lyrics which can easily be found online, I see that you've cherry picked line 23 from a song which appears to about alcoholism being a slow road to death. It also makes some observations about what drives those people to it. So, yeah, it's pretty handily misinterpreted by those who gain joy in anonymously shitting up internet discussions and basically being generally unpleasant people.
Time to eat a fly...
If you do an A B X test, people will consistently prefer loud over quiet, even if the volume difference is small. People still listen to songs on the radio, and if your song is not loud enough, it will not get popular.
This could be trivially avoided if the radio stations did automatic gain adjustment based on a proper model of how humans perceive sound.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I remember hearing The spoof version, "there's a bathroom on the right", during one of those Christmas marathon broadcasts, many years ago in LA and it sounded like John Fogerty was singing it himself. On the Hendrix song, if you have a smidgen of brain left to think that he was high on some sort of dope non-stop, kissing the sky is not so impossible to hear from his words. Also a guy of his reputation singing lyrics with gay undertones is unthinkable in my never so humble opinion.
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
Everybody in my family was a precocious reader -- me, my wife, my kids were all reading on an adult level while we were still quite young. So consequently we *all* have words we mispronounce because we learned them from reading before we heard anyone use them. It wasn't until I was in high school that I realized my word "sub-tull" and the word "suttle" I sometimes heard were one and the same -- "subtle".
The family will be sitting around and someone will use an unfamiliar word, then there will be a brief pause while everyone else envisions the phonetic spelling of the mispronounced word.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Reminds me of the old quest catchphrase "Committed to Service Inaction" that you'd hear on TV commercials.
The next version of the commercial they changed the pacing so that it was "Commited to. Service. ... In. ... Action" in a really halting speech.
The next version of the commercial, they either dropped the phrase or changed it entirely. It just wasn't possible to say it clearly.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
It's much more common to hear of people kissing guys than skies.
In THIS day and age yes. In the day and age he made the song hell no. Never even dawned on me to think he says guy. But there are plenty of songs with hard to hear clearly words.
Jack of all trades,master of none
OM f'ing G... I remember being like 8 years old driving from LA to Victorville and hearing that song and asking my mom why they'd sing about a "bathroom on the right". She just laughed and told me it was "bad moon on the rise" and kept laughing and laughing and laughin. All these years I thought I was the only one. Thank god for this article. Now I know I'm not alone or weird. I don't have to kill myself now as all my reasons for being depressed stemmed from this one incident and now that I know others heard it too I feel so much better. Guess I can take the suicide hotline off my favorites list now...
For years I interpreted that as "Awesome, shoot your own way".
For me, Stevie Nicks with her "just like the wide ranger" (white-winged dove). That song has some others, but I don't remember them now.
The above explanations for mondegreens seem very consistent with the recent understanding of neuroscience.
All perception of the world requires inference, as the signals coming into the brain are ambiguous, conflicting and noisy.
For instance, the brain tries to reconstruct a stable 3 dimensional perception of the world from constantly moving and imperfect 2 dimensional projections.
An increasing number of studies show that the low-level processing in the brain is surprisingly similar to Bayesian inference. In particular, it demonstrably relies on priors learnt from the environment (for example, vertical lines should be interpreted as corresponding to longer distances than horizontal ones) and by fusing sources of information (for example, the ambiguous local motion detected in one part of the image is reconciled with other ambiguous local motions into a perceived motion of objects).
For anyone interested, I'd recommend some material by Stanislas Dehaene.
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
I don't know if I've ever figured out any of the lyrics to that song.
OK It's probably cheating because it's misinterpreted in a different language, but ... http://www.rathergood.com/elep...
I'd forgotten that site existed. Love it!
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
Now *that* is some fine A++ wegyu-grade irony, there. I'm not familiar with the song, but reading the lyrics which can easily be found online...
Indeed they can - now. You have to remember, grasshopper, the internet did not exist for most people until the late nineties/early two-thousands. Comprehensive lyric sites came even later. So for most of rock history, if the lyrics weren't printed somewhere on the album, you were left to figure them out yourself, as best you could.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
via Straight Dope http://www.straightdope.com/co... ;
Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo!
Don't we know archaic barrel
Lullaby Lilla Boy, Louisville Lou?
Trolley Molly don't love Harold,
Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!
Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Polly wolly cracker 'n' too-da-loo!
Donkey Bonny brays a carol,
Antelope Cantaloupe, 'lope with you!
Hunky Dory's pop is lolly,
Gaggin' on the wagon, Willy, folly go through!
Chollie's collie barks at Barrow,
Harum scarum five alarm bung-a-loo!
Dunk us all in bowls of barley,
Hinky dinky dink an' polly voo!
Chilly Filly's name is Chollie,
Chollie Filly's jolly chilly view halloo!
Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Double-bubble, toyland trouble! Woof, woof, woof!
Tizzy seas on melon collie!
Dibble-dabble, scribble-scrabble! Goof, goof, goof!
IDK, it still sounds like, "kiss this guy" whether I'm listening with my McIntosh, or my MacIntosh. But certainly it's an improvement over the six-inch car speaker, powered by an AM car radio, which I first heard it on.
There are a lot of Stones songs, in particular, whose lyrics I never would've figured out without the internet. And I've had high fidelity equipment all my adult life. Not that learning the lyrics has helped - the mondegreens have been burned into my brain for decades now.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
Yeah, if you listen to Jazz or Classical recordings from the fifties, they can be quite amazing. It seems it took some studios a while to figure out how to record amplified instruments, so there are a lot of bad sounding pop recordings from the early sixties. The Beatles don't belong in that category, though. Also, a lot of songs were mixed to "pop" on car radios, which at that time consisted of an AM radio, and one cheap speaker, so if you listen to them on an actual hifi...ouch! Certainly you can tell the difference between a modern recording, and an older recording, but much of this difference is due to differences in production techniques, rather than recording quality or ability, per se.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
"Two chimps in a wicker basket, you think that's really clever, don't you boy?"
My local radio station JUST played that song, with a disclaimer that it had nothing to do with Tony Danza!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
45 and over, apparently. :-/
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
It's not the electronics, it's the earbuds. And the popularity of crappy Beats Audio 'phones hasn't helped either.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Ok, I'll admit it, the lyrics I heard from Dexy's Midnight Runners was "Come on my knee". I knew it was wrong but that's what I heard.
Listen to a Beatles recording vs. anything recent.
Except that recent Beatles rereleases have been remastered with extra compression. In fact, I read an article once on "the compression wars" which compared multiple releases of Beatles (or was it Rolling Stones...?) recordings to chart the phenomenon.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
The main difference, though, isn't about equipment quality, it's about art and craft, and getting it right first time. Digital makes it too easy to "fix it in the mix", and therefore encourages too much fiddling with the recording after the fact. Also, any amateur recorders now expect the equipment to do the job, but never learn how to use the equipment properly.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
people
And if you do an A/B test, most "people" can't tell the difference between Coke or Pepsi. These are not smart people.
Automatic gain adjustment will only make the peaks of the song hit the same level. They're all mastered to somewhere between -0dB and -3dB. If that source song is Mozart, there will be high peaks, but very low valleys. Dynamic Range Compression, on the other hand, is what makes songs sound the same volume throughout. And applied algorithmically, this can sound terrible.
However, FM radio stations already do this, due to the inherent transmission problems you'd have otherwise. Compare the same song between FM radio and MP3/CD and there's a world of difference in range.
5th grade as 1965 for me. Don't recall ever having Funk and Wagnalls in the classroom in any grade - always Thordike-Barnhart. My lawn is currently buried beneath a couple of inches of snow. You can play oin it it you'd like.
Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
And if you do an A/B test, most "people" can't tell the difference between Coke or Pepsi. These are not smart people.
Limiting sales to smart people is not going to get the record company execs any yachts.
Automatic gain adjustment based on proper human hearing models would limit the volume of the range compressed songs, even the peaks. I.e. non-compressed songs would be allowed higher peak volume.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I always preferred, "There must be a ninja, playin' with my heart"
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
If every song is a flay line, they are all the same perceived loudness too.
Flat.
I had a bunch of third-generation copies of cassettes (yes, *cassettes*, dammit!) of Blue Oyster Cult albums back in high school. Never could figure out the damned lyrics. They *sounded* like "mistress of the salmon salt", and "the queenly flux, eternal light", but they couldn't be. Those phrases and most of the others I thought I heard made no sense. But try as I might I couldn't twist the sounds into anything coherent.
Then they invented the Internet, and I could look up the lyrics online.
Fuck.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
"An' Di wiill always love Hugh" Princess Diana was a hot news topic when Whitney's version of the song was released.
You could pretend to be in your late thirties - I am,and remember when Laugh-In was shown on some network in reruns (Nickelodeon's Nick at Nite, maybe).
Otherwise there's partial half-wavelength cancellation with sound bouncing off the wall, at about 110 Hz for 2 feet.
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I hear lots of stuff in music just in earbuds that I don't hear on car radio speakers..
The misunderstanding of "Bad Moon Rising" predates Weird Al. It's more common among women.
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As I get older I hear more of these, and in many cases it's poorly thought-out writing. Mike Opelka of The Blaze calls his show "Pure Opelka". For several weeks I wondered why he called himself "puerile Pelka."
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Oh God, me too!
Yes, if you listen casually to early Black Sabbath music, it sounds like a celebration of evil, but if you listen carefully it's actually Christian music. Hell, Iron Maiden's two minutes to midnight is an anti-abortion song. Twisted Sister was hauled in front of Congress for the "bloody" song under the blade; the song is about undergoing surgery.
Free Martian Whores!
one of mine is a phil collins song, that i have no idea what he is really singing, but it sounds like 'paper plate, paper plate!' to me...
Your first mistake is in listening to a Phil Collins song in the first place.
Your second mistake is assuming that a Phil Collins song makes sense.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Unfortunately, it doesn't, so you don't.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Yes, if you listen casually to early Black Sabbath music, it sounds like a celebration of evil, but if you listen carefully it's actually Christian music. Hell, Iron Maiden's two minutes to midnight is an anti-abortion song.
Wow, I never thought I could dislike heavy metal more than I do already
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
"Rape me, rape me, rape me - oooohhh!"
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
HAh! I can still remember the inventive lyrics I came up with when in a semi - cover band. Unfortunately, none of the stuff we picked had the lyrics handy..
Yes, if you listen casually to early Black Sabbath music, it sounds like a celebration of evil, but if you listen carefully it's actually Christian music. Hell, Iron Maiden's two minutes to midnight is an anti-abortion song. Twisted Sister was hauled in front of Congress for the "bloody" song under the blade; the song is about undergoing surgery.
ER..calling it that might just be a wee bit of a stretch... ;-)
I'm a rocket man burning down the streets of a hysterectomy. - That's what I thought the words where when I was about 6yo
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
"Feliz' Navy dad". presumably his ship got home for Xmas.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
How else would you characterize this song from their third album?
"After Forever"
Have you ever thought about your soul - can it be saved?
Or perhaps you think that when you're dead you just stay in your grave
Is God just a thought within your head or is he a part of you?
Is Christ just a name that you read in a book when you were in school?
When you think about death do you lose your breath or do you keep your cool?
Would you like to see the Pope on the end of a rope - do you think he's a fool?
Well I have seen the truth, yes I've seen the light and I've changed my ways
And I'll be prepared when you're lonely and scared at the end of our days
Could it be you're afraid of what your friends might say
If they knew you believe in God above?
They should realize before they criticize
that God is the only way to love
Is your mind so small that you have to fall
In with the pack wherever they run
Will you still sneer when death is near
And say they may as well worship the sun?
I think it was true it was people like you that crucified Christ
I think it is sad the opinion you had was the only one voiced
Will you be so sure when your day is near, say you don't believe?
You had the chance but you turned it down, now you can't retrieve
Perhaps you'll think before you say that God is dead and gone
Open your eyes, just realize that he's the one
The only one who can save you now from all this sin and hate
Or will you still jeer at all you hear? Yes! I think it's too late.
Free Martian Whores!
I must say I am impressed by the radio person that manage to connect the song title Is this reebook or nike? with the intended song.
When you are sure of something, you probably are wrong (search for "Unskilled and Unaware of It").
Just discovered this yesterday - the real lyric is: "Kýrie, eléison, down the road that I must travel".
What the hell does Kýrie, eléison mean? It's, "Lord, have mercy" in Greek.
And all these years, I liked the song because it had a frickin' laser in it.
We need more songs with lasers.
It's a long way to the shop. If you want a sausage roll.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I thought it was "Just like the whirlwind does..."
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.