Songs where the songwriter confuses A with B

iirc the original liner notes lay out a narrative that more or less matches bernard snowy's summary

Just got the iPhone joke, that’s pretty funny.

xxxxxpost some towns have multiple jails.

They might have been on work placements

I always figured that jail was a metaphor for being grounded.

One thing we can be sure of, there's gonna be trouble.

In "Do You Believe in Magic" by the Lovin' Spoonful, the line

I'll tell you 'bout the magic and it'll free your soul
But it's like trying to tell a stranger 'bout rock and roll

confuses literal and figurative language. It's not like trying to tell a stranger about rock and roll; it is that. He's literally talking about rock and roll to someone he doesn't know.

pic.twitter.com/rfcsKSUxYL

— potato bun (@erewhonsmoothie) August 15, 2023

the chef's kiss here, really, is using a child's cartoon to defend this error

squidward plays a clarinet tho

It's also funny b/c even if he had correctly named a wind instrument, there's a lyrical confusion in conflating the literal and figurative meaning of "blow"

Recommendations for hip-hop without adagio (or these other tempos)?

Recursive confusion: Squidward actually plays the clarinet, not the flute.

what's the matter jimbeaux, don't you know how to reed?

Embouchure hope we get this sorted out

I fucked up, but it do sound good.

baby i'm scared of you by womack & womack probably one of my favorite songs ever but this always irked me:

But my heart is nothing like those locks
And your formula's not my brand of stock
Like little red riding hood, you're the fox
Oh baby I'm scared of you

Men are all canids

elliott smith uses the wrong pronoun for the hindu god shiva in "son of sam"

Shiva opens her arms now
To make sure I don't get too far

what i find interesting about this is that i'm pretty sure that line is recycled from something he wrote when he was in high school - so in all that time he either didn't learn shiva's gender, or just chose to stick with the line cause it sounds better

has parallels with another early lyric -

The mighty mother with her hundred arms
Swept all aside

so maybe this theme of powerful many-armed female deities was something he liked to stick with?

there's a lyrical confusion in conflating the literal and figurative meaning of "blow"

"she play the skinflute all night..."

ACUTALLY, one "blows" into the "edge" of a flute, so....

that's probably the funniest mea culpa I've ever read honestly

he blames his A&R guy, then blames everyone who heard the song for not telling him, then admits he got the idea from Spongebob Squarepants, then gets the instrument wrong anyway? amazing

stupid sexy squidward

also I think he's implying he thinks Squidward is the yellow one?

First of all, who's his A&R? A mountain climber who blows an electric guitar?

i used to know a girl named shiva, maybe ES did too

she worked at Red Lobster but he didn't remember

In “Konichiwa, Bitches,” Robyn says “I’ll hammer your toe, like a pediatrician.”

Surely she means podiatrist?

thinking her childhood doctor might need some investigating

or maybe she was referring to that lil reflex test they do only they don't hammer your toe it's your knee

I'll squeeze your balls and make you cough

Like a podiatrist

I'll examine your throat like an EMT

I'll squeeze your balls and make you cough

Like a podiatrist

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Wednesday, August 16, 2023 12:52 PM

Lost Lulu lyric

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1200x675/p01h6z6b.jpg

gd this revive delivers

"To Sir With Love" would be a great entrance song for Trump

more like "Tosser with Golf Glove" amirite

Like a basketball player

baby i'm scared of you by womack & womack probably one of my favorite songs ever but this always irked me:

Like little red riding hood, you're the fox

I played a trivia boardgame yesterday ("Linkee") where Little Red Ridinghood was the answer to the given cluewords "wood", "red", "grandmother", and "fox".

I got it right having remembered your post!

Lil Yachty confirmed not a Danny Brown fan

In "The Smithsonian Institute Blues", Captain Beefheart confuses dinosaurs with prehistoric mammals.

In the Small Faces song, "Rene", at one point the eponymous heroine is described as "groping with a stoker from the coast of Kuala Lumpur". Here Steve Marriott is confusing Kuala Lumpur with a city that is actually on the coast.

"in that fucking journey song steve perry sings that his character was "born and raised in south detroit". there is no area in detroit referred to as south detroit, though there is a neighbourhood called southwest detroit

― 《Myst1kOblivi0n》 (jim in vancouver), Tuesday, June 22, 2021 5:12 PM (two years ago) "

Maybe he was born in Windsor, Ontario (sometimes jokingly referred to as South Detroit)

Another thing that runaway lied to him about

don't stop believin, hoser

"I ran the phonetics of east, west, and north, but nothing sounded as good or emotionally true to me as South Detroit," he told the reporter. "It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve learned that there is no South Detroit. But it doesn't matter."

Also, if you get on a train at midnight (or any time, really), it has a specific route and destination. You have, presumably, purchased a ticket. Maps are widely available. You can't just go "anywhere."

Like, Antarctica or the Moon or Madagascar. Very difficult to reach by train.

"The Night Chicago Died" is about a shoot-out between the Chicago Police and gangsters tied to Al Capone. It was inspired by the real-life Saint Valentine's Day Massacre,[2] although that involved Capone's men killing seven of Bugs Moran's gang members and had nothing to do with the police. No confrontation large enough to leave around one hundred police deaths ever happened. Al Capone was arrested in 1932 for income tax evasion.

The song's events supposedly take place "on the East Side of Chicago". Chicago has three commonly referred-to regions: the North Side, the West Side and the South Side. There is no East Side, as Lake Michigan is immediately east of Downtown Chicago. While there is an area of Chicago known as "East Side", it is a neighborhood on the Far South Side on the Illinois/Indiana state line. East Side is also several miles away from where Capone lived on Prairie Avenue in Chicago. Furthermore, in the 1920s, East Side was known for being a quiet, residential, and predominantly Eastern European neighborhood—a sharp contrast from the site of the bloodbath described in the song.

Songwriters Peter Callender and Mitch Murray said in interviews (most notably on Beat Club shortly after the song's smash success) that they had never been to Chicago before that time, and that their knowledge of the city and that period of its history had been based on gangster films. (Callender defended his interpretation of Chicago's geography by saying, "There's an East Side of everywhere!")

As reported by History.com:

"...in England there were at least a few young men that didn’t have all the facts straight, and in the 1970s their pop group from Nottingham turned their romantic misunderstanding of American history into a historically dubious yet gloriously catchy hit record. Though it was never intended for the American market, Paper Lace’s "The Night Chicago Died" crossed the Atlantic and became a #1 hit on the U.S. pop charts..."[2]

Paper Lace sent the song to the mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, who greatly disliked it.[3] A member of Daley's staff is quoted as saying that Paper Lace should "jump in the Chicago River, placing your heads under water three times and surfacing twice. Pray tell us, are you nuts?”[4]