Hi there! I'm still recovering from my recent surgery. Rather stiff today--some of those exercises are painful! Since it's been a couple of weeks, I thought I'd share something I stumbled upon that I originally posted exclusively to Facebook on 1 April, 2023. The concept still fascinates me to this day--and I still have the same paranoia I express at the end of the "sermon". Sadly, in that time, Brad has retired his blog. Please enjoy, nonetheless.
"Footloose. Pet goose. Picked a fight with a moose. Cheese. Stiff breeze. Look out there are ten bees!"
--new and improved lyrics to an '80s classic that I was never really fond of to begin with
This
week's sermon was inspired in part by a conversation I had with my
friend Brad Pickens to whom I've referred in past ramblings. Brad is an
Episcopalian minister in Michigan. We've known each other for at least
(wow!) 35 years. Like me, he also writes a weekly missive (that can be
read at thepriceofacorns.com--this is his busy season at his day job,
so he hasn't written anything in a few weeks). Back in January, he
wrote about mondegreens, the technical term for misheard song lyrics.
For years, he had been quite taken with a lyric from a popular song that
got a lot of radio play when we were younger and he had to take
afternoon naps. After, apparently only recently, discovering what the
song was (the 1983 classic "Islands in the Stream" by Kenny Rogers and
Dolly Parton), he realized that one line of the song was not what he
understood it to be as a child, hearing it on the radio when he was
supposed to be napping. Brad had what I thought was a profound
observation. He wrote, "Here's the thing. I'm a lot happier with my
version of my naptimesong and it's the one I'm going to keep with its
strange places and mystic inhabitants. Islands only exist in relational
stuckness to one another. Better to have even a passing connection
through worlds where you see the stranger and recognize yourself in
their strangeness. That's how blank spots become the middle of
everything once we learn to recognize shared humanity wherever we go.
And besides that, it was about the same time that I found a record that
had songs by Marty Robbins, Johnny Cash, Willie Horton, and Dolly on her
own and there's no need to go back to Kenny after that." I'll post
the link to his thoughts in the comments section if you would like more
insight than I can provide here.
Many
years ago, sportscasting legend Bob Costas had a late night talk show
called "Later" on NBC that aired after Carson and Letterman (just to
give you some idea about how long ago this was). Unlike his lead-ins,
he typically only featured one guest per episode which, if nothing else,
made for a more in-depth interview. It was actually a very good
program and it was nice to know that Costas could intelligently carry on
a conversation about something other than sports. One night, he
interviewed Paul McCartney. Sir Paul told him about the first time the
Beatles met Bob Dylan. They were backstage rehearsing. During a
run-through of "I Want to Hold Your Hand," Dylan was surprised by the
line "It's such a feeling that, my love/I can't hide, I can't hide, I
can't hiiiiide!" He apparently said to them, "Oh, man, I thought that
was 'I get high, I get high, I get high.'" Some time later, Costas was
interviewing John Mellencamp and related that story to him. Mellencamp
said, "Well that's what I always thought it was." Guess what? That's
what I always thought it was too!
I have always been fascinated by mondegreens. I actually have a book of them titled Scuze Me While Kiss This Guy (there are a couple of sequels as well, the only one of which I remember is He's Got the Whole World in His Pants).
For thirty years, I thought Hall & Oates sang "Private eyes know
what to do." When the song was originally released, this made perfect
sense to my then seven-year-old brain. Every private detective I saw
from Jim Rockford to Thomas Magnum, and later Remington Steele seemed to
know what to do. In the early 2010s, the cast of the television series
"Psych" (which was about a private detective who pretends to be psychic
but just has a photographic memory and an obsession with '80s pop
culture, particularly John Hughes films), advertised their upcoming
season by recreating the video to "Private Eyes." It was only then I
discovered, much to my surprise, that "Private eyes ARE WATCHING YOU,"
which is considerably creepier than my version when I stop to think
about it. What's weird is that on the off-chance I hear the song today
and catch myself singing along, I still sing it incorrectly, more out of
muscle memory than an aversion to the correct lyrics. Perhaps, like
Brad, I'm a lot happier with my version. Perhaps I may just stick with
it.
I'm
also going to throw this philosophical quandary out there: is it
actually a mondegreen if it's a homophone? Phonetically speaking it is
still being sung correctly, even if the person singing it has a
completely incorrect interpretation of the lyrics in their head. For
example, in the cowboy classic "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" (specifically Gene
Autry's recording), it took me a moment or three to realize that he
sang "I'm a roamin' cowboy." When I first heard it, I thought he said
"I'm a Roman cowboy." I immediately had a vision of
Julius Caesar on horseback with spurs on his sandals, a six-shooter in a
holster tied around his toga, and a laurel wreath around the crown of a
ten-gallon hat... perhaps even twirling a lasso. I still want to see
someone carve this out of marble. Of course this also begs the
question, how do you say "Whoopy-ti-yi-yay" in Latin?
I've
known since I read Brad's reflections that this was fodder for one of
my own weekly rants and that I would be doing this sometime in the near
future--I was kind of leaning toward some CCR because John Fogerty has
never been the most coherent singer)--but a bizarre event happened this
week. Suddenly and quite inexplicably I got Dean Martin's hit "That's
Amore" stuck in my head. Looking back on it, I suppose it's not
completely inexplicable--after all, I did watch Moonstruck a few
days earlier which features the song over both the opening and closing
credits. But that's not the weird part. The weird part is that, for
some reason, my brain wanted to sing one word in the song incorrectly.
And I don't know why. I've always known what the correct lyric is.
I've never misheard it before. In fact, it played on the drive home
from work a few weeks ago and when I was singing along, I sang it
correctly. Not only did my brain want to sing it wrong, but it also
wanted to give it a northern Indiana twist which was, needless to say,
highly amusing. And now I'm worried that every time I hear it I'm going
to inadvertently sing, "Scusami, but you see, back in old Nappanee,
that's amore!" Because, really, what's so romantic about Napoli
(Naples), Italy, anyway?
So this week please enjoy the one and only Dean Martin with his first album for Capitol Records, 1953's Dean Martin Sings.
Until
next week, stay safe, be good to your neighbours, and don't go 'round
tonight, it's bound to take your life, there's a bathroom on the right.
Yours in peace, love, and rock and roll!
The Reverend Will the Thrill
(a.k.a. "The April Fool")
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