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“Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.”

--John “I Used to Be Cruel to my Woman, I Beat Her and Kept Her Apart from the Things that She Loved” Lennon

All my life I’ve misheard song lyrics, and probably you have, too. It’s fun. Misheard lyric anecdotes are charmful reminders of human fallibility. Often the misheard lyric has its roots in childhood, and the now adult misrememberer is corrected and feels a little embarrassed (not too embarrassed, one hopes) about being wrong for so many years. Remember all those youtube videos about misheard lyrics? It’s cute, silly. Fun.

Recently my mother came to the realization that the duck and cover drills she took part in as a child in Cold War America were security theater and not practical safety advice. Probably if a nuke fell on her town she would have died. She turned 57 this year.

I think about nuclear war a lot. The Samson Option weighs on my mind a lot. The Iranian Prime Minister dying in a helicopter crash last month seemed like a prelude to World War III.

Some silly misheard lyrics of my own, removed from context:

Tied to machines that make pee

But if you go carrying pictures of German Maus, y’aint gonna make it with anyone anyhow

It’s just some petrified wood, it’s not so baaaad, yeah

Fun fun fun. Well, listen up, babies: I think misheard lyrics are not merely silly trifles but instead Something Important. Or can be, anyway. So often I prefer my misheard version of a lyric to what is actually being sung, and the preference isn’t superficial. I think misreadings and misunderstandings of art in general can be beautiful and valuable.

In college I took an intro literary studies class and was pretty enamored with this one girl. (Get used to that phrase.) She made a post on the class forum one day about some Nick Cave exhibit she went to for another class. She’d formed her own interpretation and was disappointed to find that Cave had his own very firm understanding of his work and was pretty dismissive of other readings. She went to a Q and A, I guess? Anyway, I responded to this post, empathizing with how disappointing it can be to learn a work of art you found resonant is actually not at all what you thought it was. I alluded to the Death of the Author. The professor was so impressed by the reference that he took time in class to try and explain Barth’s essay. His explanation entailed (as many of his did) very elaborate chalkboard diagrams that felt easy to follow as he was explaining but became incomprehensible when you stepped back to look at the big picture. I then realized how little I actually understood Barth, as well as the extent of my pretentiousness. Later, in a one-on-one conference, this professor (who I remember fondly, to be clear) recommended I read Derrida. I am of the opinion that no one should ever tell anyone to read a postmodern philosopher ever, especially not a pseudo-precocious undergrad.

Kurt Vonnegut once clowned on Allen Ginsberg a little when talking about his poem “Howl”:

Ginsberg’s closest friends, if I’m not mistaken, were undergraduates in the English department of Columbia University. No offense intended, but it would never occur to me to look for the best minds in any generation in an undergraduate English department anywhere.

What was I talking about? Misheard lyrics. Okay. I probably didn’t say this in my response to this girl who I semi-frequently thought about while masturbating, but what I was really thinking about after reading her Nick Cave anecdote were all the lyrics I found personally resonant that I’d actually misheard.

Here is a little mini sampler of what I’m talking about, with context and elaboration.

First, from “Wake Up” by Arcade Fire. The lyric as I heard it:

And children, don’t grow up. Our bodies get bigger, but our hearts get torn up.

How sad! Impossible advice. Just the concept of children and childhood get to me. The death of innocence! And do I detect some dissociative undertones? So easy to read the line as a warning about puberty, one’s body being out of their control. Gender dysphoria etc. A wonderfully hopeless little line. The stuff about hearts getting torn up is pretty cliche, grandiose, pretentious...but it’s Arcade Fire, a band who sing about “darkness” and “light” all the time. The Beatles sing about love, the Chili Peppers California. It is their nature.

Here’s the real lyric:

If the children don’t grow up our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up.

Ugh. That one word changes the whole sentiment! It’s so…practical! Realistic! You can’t be a kid forever. Accept that and you won’t be so broken as an adult. The use of “our” instead of “your” is awkward. He’s using the pronoun to include himself amongst the children? I guess? Whatever. It’s not like I’m totally opposed to the sentiment of the true line. It actually shows up later in the song: “We’re just a million little gods causing rainstorms, turning every good think to rust. I guess we’ll just have to adjust”. Good line. Salvaging a tragedy through optimism. Makes the preceding one a little redundant, you think? Fuck Win Butler, that goddamn creep.

Struggling to think of another example. Let’s leave it there for now.