Songs where the songwriter confuses A with B

Maybe it's like "being with you is such a rush, it feels like we're driving even though it's rush hour and we've been motionless for 15 minutes in bumper-to-bumper traffic."

I thought she was making a contrast: "This rush hour is actually great!"

Not a songwriter but there is a reasonably famous William Carlos Williams poem that goes

Your thighs are appletrees
whose blossoms touch the sky.
Which sky? The sky
where Watteau hung a lady's
slipper.

And numerous explicators have pointed out that WCW was probably thinking of a painting by Fragonard ("The Swing"), not Watteau.

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49758842643_2c60422232_b.jpg

It's so nerdy and yet it's the ur-example of "confusing A with B"

Me, I feel like we could delve a bit deeper on the misattribution of Mary Magdalene as a penitent prostitute, but the horse has left the barn on that one

If we're going to bring in poetry, then this glorious poem by Kay Ryan got past the New Yorker factchecker, despite getting the basic biology of tree growth wrong

Tree Heart/True Heart
The hearts of trees
are serially displaced
pressed annually
outward to a ring.
They aren’t really
what we mean
by hearts, they so
easily acquiesce,
willing to thin and
stretch around some
upstart green. A
real heart does not
give way to spring.
A heart is true.
I say no more springs
without you.

Ryan has subsequently disowned the poem :(

not a song, but the original short video that Hank Azaria did for the show "Brockmire", he was using Godfather references in his sportscasting, and at one point said "Barzini's a pimp, he never coulda outfought Santino!", and I was angry because the line is "Tattaglia's a pimp"...and then in one of the episodes, they had the same piece of dialogue, but he'd fixed the reference!

From She's Gone:
_Think I'll spend eternity in the city
Let the carbon and monoxide choke my thoughts away_


I know they were just trying to fit the rhythm of the song, but I'm pretty sure carbon on it's own isn't toxic, and one oxygen molecule isn't stable by itself.

Of course, if they'd spent more of their Philly youth in chemistry class (rather than standing on a street corner singing around a trash can on fire), then they wouldn't be Hall & Oates.

I think "Inertia" by the Wonder Stuff fits here. It's not completely wrong that a heavy object given a sufficient force and momentum will keep moving for a while and it would be hard to stop it, but they seem to think inertia means you can't stop moving.

It doesn't?

*mean you can't stop moving?

well it can do but also means it's really hard to start moving

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXnoWb88Jr4

Ha!

In "The Dean and I," at the moment of a critical confession of love, 10cc proclaim that "The elevator in my heart has gone AWOL, AWOL, AWOL, AWOL." Which sounds cool, but doesn't really make a lot of sense:

* This is the only use of the "elevator" metaphor in the song, and it's a concept (going AWOL) that has no particular association or clear meaning with regard to elevators.
* At a stretch, they might be suggesting that the elevator is not where it's supposed to be, like it's dropped rapidly or something, which would fit the emotional stakes of the situation, but is just really labored to my ears. Nobody either in or waiting for the elevator would ever proclaim "This elevator's gone AWOL" upon realizing it's plummeting to the bottom of the shaft.
* MAYBE they want to suggest that the elevator has flown up and out of the heart's building, like Willy Wonka's Great Glass Elevator. After all, the song was released just two years after the original Wonka film, and one year after Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator hit bookstores. But nothing else in the text supports this reach.

My conclusion: they meant to say "haywire."

think they need to see a cardiologist quickly

Now explain what the rest of the song is about.

Not sure that this one fits exactly with the theme of this thread, but it strikes me as the same kind of sacrifice of sense for the sake of the rhythm or the rhyme:

"Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
Somewhere in this town"

Uh, yeah, it's gonna be somewhere in this town . . . at the jail.

There might be more than one jail in the town.

Hackd iphone could be anywhere.

xxp great minds…

I always had trouble with this classic by Thin Lizzy:
"Tonight there's gonna be a Jailbreak/Somewhere in this town!"

"Somewhere in this town?" Ummmm.....the jail, maybe?

― Alex in NYC, Wednesday, January 2, 2002 5:00 PM (twenty years ago)

There is nothing new under the sun.

"Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak, somewhere in this town"

I'd imagine it'll be taking place at the jail, Phil. Great track though, and great band.

― does it look like i'm here (jon123), Tuesday, December 3, 2019 4:21 AM (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

The whole town is like one big jail, and the name of the jail is Society

Singer doesn’t know where the jail is exactly

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