Misheard Lyrics

Today as I was driving in my car and began singing Jesse McCartney’s song Shake. There is a line in the song which goes Shorty hittin' me up /Says she wanna re-up/ Knows I got the best in town. In my mind I heard and then sang Shorty hitting me up/Says shes Gonorrhea / Knows I got the best in town. This got me to thinking about lyrics that are often misheard. I have a very good friend who without fail would always mess up the lyrics to songs. I would reply “why are you signing the song if you don’t know the lyrics?” But this incident proves to me that mishearing/mis-singing the lyrics can happen to anyone (ps can anyone tell me what “re-up”means??). As my mother could tell you when I was younger I used to belt out the lyrics “Im your Fetus Im your fire” when listening to Venus by Bananarama.

This got me thinking about some of the most misheard lyrics around. The first song that comes to mind is Def Leppard’s Pour Some Sugar on Me. As many people can attest, I find that any song by Def Leppard is frankly not understandable. But Pour Some Sugar On Me is particularly incomprehensible. There was even a T-Mobile commercial that made fun of this song for its often misheard lyrics. Another song that came to mind was The Pussycat Doll’s When I Grow Up. The Pussycat dolls sing When I grow up/ I wanna see the world/Drive nice cars/I wanna have groupies. This line is particularly misheard as “I wanna have boobies.” I also think that Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody is one of the most misheard songs of all time. It has that whole fast pace-higher pitched section that is difficult to understand by even the most skilled lyricist.

In a previous post I spoke about songs that were censored for their titles, but did you know that some songs get censored for their misheard lyrics? Often times if the word is ship, and can be confused with s*** then it can be bleeped out or left out of a song for the radio. For example The Black Eyed Peas song Don’t Phunk With My Heart was changed to Don’t Mess with my heart because of the fact that phunk sounded too much like the f word (most likely the BEP’s purpose in this song).

In order to avoid a complete botching of song lyrics or an unnecessary censorship label one should take more care in annunciation or in writing the lyrics in the first place. If you want to see some really funny misheard lyrics and their accompanying stories check out The Archive of misheard lyrics http://www.kissthisguy.com/funny.php. My favorites include a botching of Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love “Might as well face it/You’re a d*** with a glove” and Bee Gee’s Stayin Alive [ah, ah, ah, ah] “steak and a knife, steak and a knife.”

What are your most misheard lyrics?