Today I am “working” from home, my media serving device of choice set to Shuffle.
I’ve just listened to the above CCRE track – Sweet Hitch Hiker – how very David Brent. The none-more-Seventies title isn’t what struck me though, it’s the way Mr Fogerty adds another syllable to the chorus in order, I guess, not to disrupt the rhythm. So we end up with “sweet ah hitch hiker” and It’s not tucked away in one line, it’s the backbone of the chorus. He’s throwing it my face. After the first one it’s all I can think about when I listen, to the point where I actually start to dread the arrival of the chorus. No mean feat in a song lasting just 2:55.
Elton John did this too of course on ‘Sacrifice’ – “sac-er-ee-fice” – which I was surprised to be told was his first ever number one UK single.
Any others? Can we poke some fun at other dictionary manglers?
Elton is the worst. Crams Crocodile into one note.
Liam Gallagher springs to mind – “is it myyy imag-in-aysheeyunn”
The Cars’ Just What I Needed…”I don’t mind you coming here, and wasting all my time time”
And from the same song
“As long as it was deep – yeah”
Hmm, that’s probably another thread – great yeahs in music
In fact, shouldn’t George just have been singing “Wake me up before you go” – was the extra “go” just to fill out the line?
I think in this case he was looking for a rhyme for with ‘hanging on like a yo-yo,’ but the extra go serves two purposes. What a clever chap.
I have heard the phrase “go-go dancers” so I have always taken it to mean she’s going off dancing, to go-go. And he wants to with her.
I suspect the go-go came before the yo-yo in George’s writing process.
Either way, he cunningly got away with it.
“Hanging on like a yo-yo” is a pretty good simile.
Just as a sidebar, your majesty – I really disliked Wham! at the time because I was about 15 and all of my friends hated them but the girls thought they were dreamboats etc i.e. Not Serious Enough. But Wake Me Up…was irresistable on first listen. It’s a masterpiece – an absolute classic. I loved pretty much everything they did after that.
“This is a chemist, not a joker shop”
Yes, it scans now but …. “Joker Shop”…..bah!
Really? Isn’t it just “joke shop”?
Nope he definitely says Joker shop
No need for that is there? Joke Shop would have been fine.
They could have got away with ‘Joke shop” but it scans better with the extra syllable I think.
Do they sell the pompatus of love?
Pompatus until you can feel it
Pompatus
When you don’t really need it
Pompatus jam
Pompatus
While your feet are stompin’
Well well, there’s a misheard lyric- had no idea he’d been on tenterhooks – I always thought it was television. Followed by “and it isn’t where it’s at”. Us home taping/mate’s record cadging folk – criminally deprived of lyric sheets.
Bit of a Mark E Smith isn’t it? Joke-ah shop.
‘You shout it when you’re dancing on the- err- er danclefloor’
Dylan does it all the time -stretching things out ridiculously to fit the metre, Paul Simon would buff the lyrics for six months so they fitted just so. Dylan…”meh”
Bob’s “casual” way with metre was parodied nicely by Tom Lehrer way back in ’65 in ‘Folk Song Army’:
We are the folk song army,
Every one of us cares.
We all hate poverty, war, and injustice
Unlike the rest of you squares.
…
The tune don’t have to be clever,
And it don’t matter if you put a couple extra syllables into a line.
It sounds more ethnic if it ain’t good English
And it don’t even gotta rhyme
.
In the U2 song “The Unforgettable Fire” – after most of the dramatic music calms down, Bongo sings the last few lines
“…and if the mountains should crumble or, er, disappear…”
Yes I know – Irish accent – but I’m not having that. No one says “or-er” instead of “or” unless they’re trying to get a song lyric to scan properly. Nothing wrong with it BTW, it’s a tremendous song.
The gold standard is Toto’s Africa:
“As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengetiiiiiiiiiiiiii”
Cross-ref with a recent thread – I love that song! Duff lyric though, as you rightly say.
In a similar vein, I hate it when the wrong syllables are stressed in a lyric. A horrible example is in Ruby by the Kaiser Chiefs:
“Due to LACK of inTREST, TomorROW is canCELLED”
All stresses in the wrong place. This is just lazy, stupid writing which could have been sorted with a bit of effort. Pathetic.
Don’t dizgard me…
Ditto Tracy Jacks by Blur –
(Tracy Jacks) got stopped by the PO-lice
(Tracy Jacks) and ES-corted back home
That whole song is an example of lazy, stupid writing isn’t it? I reckon the Kaiser Chiefs exhausted their stock of decent lyrics in I Predict A Riot, which contains the only known use in a song of the long word for a native of Leeds, Leodenesian (note: check spelling…).
What was that song? Big hit back in the day – kept going on about ‘cen-TRI-fugal motion’?
Faith Hill – This Kiss.
One of the reasons Jamaican music is so far ahead is the fact that, while the rest of pop plods up and down the single dimension of the number line, the JA guys and gals long since expanded their sound using imaginary numbers. You tootle to the left or to the right with your common-or-garden “I”, but we travel out into a new dimension of musical space with “I and I”. Armageddon? Sounds serious! But Armagideon gives you that extra beat to dwell on the endtime catastrophe and is just bigger.. What, in the whole of the cosmos, could be more impressive than Jehovah’s Throne? Why, Jehov-i-ah’s Throne of course!
And of course “War inna Babylon“ etc
(Though I think “I and I” has a spiritual dimension, distinct from the singular pronoun.)
Indeed. Alas, I could find no “tongue in cheek” emoji to punctuate my post..
In cases where a suitable emoji can’t be found, one can usually get away with it by ending with a flourish, i.e. Jazz Hands 👐👐👐
Isn’t there a cod-reggae Clash song where they rely on this bogus extra-syllable stuff – ‘Armagideon Time’ or something like that? Did they pick up an edition of the ArmaGideon’s Bible somewhere, where the end of the world had been giiven a cuddlier name?
I expect better of you Colin! Armagideon Time was recorded by a The Clash but it is a cover which naturally originated in the extra-dimensional mind of a Jamaican..
(With four “i”s in his name, as it happens)
He wore spectacles?
Monocle, mon, on him eye and eye
Cod-reggae be damned. It’s a fine a piece of reggae recorded by a white British band, along with the two dub versions they recorded of the song which were titled Justice Tonight and Kick It Over
Style Council. I really like it when you speak like A child.
Oh yes! The surprisingly stressed syllable is a whole new box of crackers.
From that par of the world again, I’ve often wondered whether the differing pronunciations of “Caribbean” are down to its syllables being stressed differently depending on in which song the word is employed…
Our USA cousins tend to stress the second syllable of Carribbean.
Also, the first word of Hong Kong, which just sounds wrong.
Chris Martin found that the best way to make lines scan was to simply repeat the same word, despite the fact that he ends up rhyming ‘part’ with, well, ‘part’.
And the hardest part
Was letting go, not taking part
Was the hardest part
I put it to you good people that this is the laziest lyric in popular music history.
David Gates was quite upfront about making a line scan with ungrammatical stretching in Bread’s ‘Baby I’m-A Want You’ (second line: ‘Baby I’m-A Need You’). Mission statement: Hits I’m-A Writing Them.
That song gets a pass for the magnificent misheard lyric:
Your loving and affection
Gives me an erection
They rebalanced things, though, on (from memory) the same album by DROPPING a syllable from ‘This Isn’t What The Governmeant’.
In Loretta, Townes van Zandt sings:
Dances like a diamond shines
Tells me lies I love to believe
The trouble is, the second of these two lines is one syllable too long, so Townes turns “believe” into a one-syllable word and pronounces it “bleev”.
I recall being fascinated in the early 80s by Motorhead singles having three-syllable refrains, or key three-syallable words that formed the oft-repeated hook: ‘Mot-or-head’, ‘Killed By Death’, ‘Ace of Spades’, et al. This meant, inevitably, that the line ‘It’s a bomber’ became, in the song, ‘S’a bomber’.
The sainted Swindonian with his “um-bi-lical”… anyone who says it like that must be from the planet Yoorunus.
John Lydon rhyming anti-christ and anarch-ist
(not one of Glen Matlock’s favourite Pistols moments)
Dave Mustaine bottled the forced rhyme and sang it straight on the Megadeth version – he also changed tehe “or just another country” line to “and other c*ntlike tendencies”
(oo – hark at you potty mouth David)
Ian Dury – There Aint Half Been Some Clever Bastards
Einstein can’t be classed as witless.
He claimed atoms were the littlest.
When you did a bit of splitting-em-ness
Frighten everybody shitless
I think that Dury lyric is very clever, Trevor.
The title track from Cory Hanson’s 2016 album “The Unborn Capitalist From Limbo” is one I can’t listen to, because he sings “cappi-talist” to make the lyric fit the music. Drives me nuts!
‘Anar-KYST’ in ‘God Save the Queen’ is pretty annoying.
Bucks Fizz….My Camera Never Lies, a pretty blatent….”my camer er a ah oh” and later…”my camera er ah a er a her oh…ah oh”
also….piece of the action…..”to get a piece of the acshheeeonn”
awful mangling but I forgive Cheryl baker because I fancy her.
Not really what we’re talking about, but any excuse to quote Roger Miller
Roses are red
Violets are purple
Sugar is sweet
So is maple syrple
Howard Jones was on TOTP 1983 at the weekend, singing his bit hit What is Lurhurhurhurhurhurve (Anyway).