Saturday, August 22, 2009

I do know Mandinka

OK, for years I have loved laughing at misunderstood song lyrics. You know, "there's a bathroom on the right" and so on. My friends and I have spent hours pouring over the book 'Scuse me While I Kiss this Guy and its sequel and howling with laughter.

From a reference on Aunt Becky's blog and my recent efforts to digitize my music and join the modern world, I just realized the following:

Safe to Love - does not exist. It is Slave to Love (Brian Ferry)
Lunar Love - does not exist. It is instead With Our Love (Talking Heads)
Nowhere Man - that's right - the lyric and song title are really Love Went Mad (Elvis Costello)

Um, I have been singing along in error to these songs for twenty odd years.

When we read the book mentioned above we came across songs that each of us swore we heard wrongly, or swore we heard correctly and we could only laugh at the poor schmucks who thought Led Zeppelin really would have a lyric like
and there's a wino down the road
I should have stolen Oreos


while acknowledging I never did hear the correct version:
and as we wind on down the road
our shadows taller than our souls


And when Sinead O'Connor sings I do know Mike Ditka, I am convinced.

Is this why I can't understand my husband when he talks to me?

What do you guys hear?

4 comments:

  1. So IS it Mandinka? I have always, always wondered what the hell she was talking about. Although, since Prince wrote that song, it may very well BE Mike Ditka.

    Thanks for stopping by Sweet Life yesterday! :).

    ~Andrea's Sweet Life
    http://blog.sweetlifesite.com

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  2. I knew it couldn't be right to think that England Dan and John Ford Coley would say "I'm not talkin' 'bout the linen" but since I was a kid and I knew they were talking about being in love, I thought it was maybe possible I didn't understand what was going on. Then one day I heard it as clear as a bell: movin' in.

    Ah, so much more sense!

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  3. Yes Andrea, it IS Mandinka. And this makes sense because . . . and I always heard "I'm not talkin' 'bout the linen" too - I totally forgot that one.

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  4. I always liked Bananarama's I'm Your Penis, but I never could figure out how they got away with such explicit lyrics...

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