Mark Raboo speaks of the moment when he wished the floor had opened and swallowed him, and all because of some misheard lyrics.
The 24-year-old was jamming with a rock band when a guitarist launched into the opening chords of The Who classic, I Can’t Explain, and he joined in on vocals.
”The real lyrics were ‘A certain kind, can’t explain’,” says Raboo.
”But I misheard them as ‘Been circumsised, can’t explain.’ The laughter ended that cover pretty quickly…”
For Lisa — her last name understandably remains under wraps — public death by ridicule occurred when she took the microphone at a karaoke party to celebrate her 20th birthday.
Her nemesis, in front of 250 guests, was Marvin Gaye’s Sexual Healing.
The real lyrics (”Darling, you’re so great/I can’t wait for you to operate”) had always been understood by Lisa to be ”Darling, you’re so great/I can’t wait for you to ovulate”.
”Hilarity ensued,” Lisa recalls bleakly.
Mark and Lisa are casualties of something called a mondegreen: when you mishear a lyric in a song and even if the words seem a bit daft or total nonsense, they simply stay in your head and you always sing them that way.
Until now, mondegreens were obscure. They were a closet of private shame and humiliation that few wished to open up to the world.
But the arena of internet, with its mixture of openness and selective privacy, has changed all that.
Mondegreens are now a tribal phenomenon, breeding numerous collectors’ sites on the internet where victims, including Mark and Lisa, register their self-mangled versions of pop lyrics and compare them, sometimes with dismay, to what the true lyrics were.
There is even a popular book, ‘Scuse Me, While I Kiss This Guy (named after a widely-misheard line in the Jimi Hendrix song Purple Haze –”’Scuse me, while I kiss the sky”).
The book’s compiler, Gavin Edwards, has a treasure chest of mondegreens.
Remember the opening line to David Bowie’s Space Oddity? Could it really have been ”Clown control to Mao Tse-tung”?
What about that raw song by punk group The Clash, Rock the Casbah, misheard by some sad individual as Rock the Catbox? And The Eurythmics’ Sweet dreams are made of cheese”? Or that memorable line in the Beatles’ Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, when ”The girl with colitis goes by”?
Then there is that Bob Dylan protest song with the refrain, ”The ants are our friends/They’re blowin’ in the wind,” and the Cuban song Guantanamera, which some mondegreen victim, presumably not a Spanish speaker, construed as ”One-ton tomato.”
Spare a thought for the unfortunate who misheard a line from Irene Cara’s Flashdance (”Take your passion and make it happen”) and spent much of his life singing it as ”Take your pants down and make it happen.”
Pop music is not the only source of mondegreens. Hymns and national anthems are also a rich vein, and many of the victims are the innocent young.
Jon Carroll, a San Francisco Chronicle columnist and mondegreen collector, says the most frequent submission to his Center for the Humane Study of Mondegreens is ”Gladly, my cross-eyed bear” — a distortion of an old hymn, Gladly My Cross I’d Bear.
He also recounts the wee lad down under who sang his national anthem (Australians all, let us rejoice) as ”Australians all love ostriches”.
Why are they called ”mondegreens”?
The term was invented in 1954 by a writer, Sylvia Wright, who described how she had misheard part of a Scottish ballad, The Bonny Earl of Murray.
”They hae slay the Earl of Murray/And Lady Mondegreen,” was how Wright interpreted a stanza.
For years, Wright mused about the enigmatic Lady Mondegreen who had died so tragically with her liege.
Only later, much later, did she discover that the villains had slain the Earl of Murray — and laid him on the green. – Sapa-AFP