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Let’s blame the high school musical — not the film series, but a real live show, which my youngest teenager line-danced her way through at the end of the summer term. The kids at her secondary staged Footloose, that slightly crazed, early-80s tale of small-town American repression, best known for its title song and Kevin Bacon’s unlikely gig as a leading man.
All the licences to Oliver! had been used up, it seems, so this throwback, complete with check shirts, cowboy boots and Bonnie Tyler holding out for a hero, was what we got instead. After the disappointment of not being able to help our daughter rehearse some of the best lines in theatre (“Oi Fagin, these sausages are mouldy”, “Shut up and drink yer gin”), it was several weeks of watching her learn the moves while we mangled the lyrics.
For the record, the main number, a celebration of cutting loose on the dancefloor, did not storm the charts all those years ago with the line, “Please, Louise, cut me off at the knees”. But once we had sung it a few times, as an acceptable approximation, it stuck. It’s the family “arrangement”, if you like. And why not? If you are shamed by friends or family about a similar habit, as you potter and pirouette around the kitchen singing along to tunes old and new, then my advice is to just “Shake it Off”, as Tay-Tay would say. Bakers gonna bake, bake, bake, bake, bake, to paraphrase Ms Swift, and we need to feel uninhibited while we do it.
“Those aren’t the words at all,” as the diva herself observed with a well-maintained stony face in a charity parody. And sure, making stuff up when you can’t decipher or remember the correct words may grate on some ears, but really, who does it hurt? The Hawaiian songwriter Jack Johnson is not in the back seat of our car as we all warble along to a tune we have renamed “Red Wine, Big Steaks, A Pile of Cheese” (or, if you are being picky: “Red Wine, Mistakes, Mythology”). Admittedly it might give him aural indigestion if he were there to suffer it.
Growing up, mangled lyrics were a regular feature of the chart countdown shows that accompanied my Sunday-afternoon homework marathons — perhaps this is why I cling to the silliness. Insisting that Desmond Dekker’s “Israelites” is better renamed “My Ears Are Alight” was a running joke on Capital FM during that era. Who can forget the plangent tones of Paul Young’s “Every Time You Go Away (You Take a Piece of Meat With You)”. Being daft is allowed, and it delivers on nostalgia for my ’80s bedroom, with its Habitat rug and David Bowie posters. Innocent times.
Of course I would never dream of disrespecting the sainted David’s lyrics — we all have a red line. But anyone else is fair game. Apparently Abba’s “Chiquitita” is one of the most often misheard: “Take your teeth out, tell me what’s wrong”. Nice. Especially in the age of the perfectable, ageless Abbatars of the Voyage stage show.
There is even a name for these misheard, misrepeated imposter snatches of song: the homophonous phrase replacing original lyrics is known as a mondegreen. How appropriate, and now that I know I’m practically named after the phenomenon, I’m fighting the case for the defence even harder.
Harmony can suffer when people become obstinate about contesting the official lyrics (not me of course). The man of our house only found out this summer that Sister Sledge have not been confused about an unclear disco competition result all these years, and have definitely not been singing “I wonder why . . . he’s the greatest dancer” (the actual line is “Oh, what, wow”). This discussion got fairly heated. But weird private reinterpretations are just the humble non-showbiz person’s cover version.
And literary tradition embraces borrowing from and distorting your influences. Some may think it’s gilding the lily to try to improve on a Nobel laureate’s words, but my final example, donated by an FT colleague, is so marvellous it ought to be a clincher. Bob Dylan himself would surely fall silent and marvel at the beauty, the pastoral mood and spiritual connection with nature conjured up by this, perhaps the greatest mondegreen of all time. Get out your guitar and sing along, please, nasally: “The ants are my friends, they’re blowing in the wind.” Case closed.
Miranda Green is the FT’s deputy opinion editor. Robert Shrimsley is away
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