Everyone mishears song lyrics sometimes. Most of us go through life without ever finding this out until some day we sing the wrong words in public. Drunken (or not) sessions with friends, karaoke or simply driving in the same car at the same time are all situations in which this might conceivably occur.
There’s a word for this phenomenon, the ‘Mondegreen’. Writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in a 1954-article in which she explained that for years, she had been mishearing the line ‘and laid him on the green’ (from the ballad The Bonny Earl of Moray) as ‘and Lady Mondegreen’. Mondegreens are not restricted to poems and songs, but these do seem an exceptionally rich source comprising them.
Perhaps the most famous mondegreen in the world is from the song Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix. Audiences, who first heard Hendrix sing the song, might well be excused for feeling a bit surprised when they heard the line
‘excuse me while I kiss this guy’ (and had Hendrix indeed done so the world might have been a vastly different place). It turned out that he was merely singing the line ‘excuse me while I kiss the sky’.
Hendrix receives some competition from the song Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival. At various points within the song the line ‘there’s a bathroom on the right’ seems to pop up. The actual line is, less amusingly, ‘there’s a bad moon on the rise’.
Bob Dylan famously misheard the line ‘I can’t hide’ from The Beatles’ I Wanna Hold Your Hand as ‘I get high’. The story goes that when he finally met them, Dylan offered the band cannabis, and was most surprised to find that the fab four were (at the time) unfamiliar with drugs. And while on the subject of The Beatles, the song Come Together contains a line that probably ought to be ‘hold you in his arms, yeah, you can feel his disease’, but it certainly sounds like ‘hold you in his armchair’. It is most confusing.
It feels like stretching the definition to allow for mondegreens across languages, but if we may be allowed to, some of the funniest examples arise from doing so. A few years ago, a YouTube video titled Benny Lava took a song from an Indian movie and subtitled it with whatever the YouTube user thought the lyrics sounded like in English. The results were hilarious, with the hero and heroine dancing enthusiastically to a song that apparently contained such lines as ‘who put the goat in there?’ and ‘have you been high today?’
The Britney Spears song If You Seek Amy is a deliberate mondegreen (read out the title quickly and all will become clear). This is quite clever, though a number of people have employed similar gags before – including James Joyce, who in Ulysses manages to include both ‘if you see Kay’ and ‘See you in tea’. At least, Spears is in august company.
— bluelullaby@gmail.com