This time nothing as groanworthy as the Four Sturges, you’ll
be pleased to know, but we’re still pretty much in the same territory, the same
mangled and disreputable suburbs of language.
One of my Christmas presents this year was a CD called
“Pressure Drop”, the best of Toots and the Maytals. I don’t know much about
this Jamaican band, although I rather like them, and not long ago I watched a
documentary about them. It’s my habit when listening to a record for the first
time not to look at the titles, sleeve notes or anything extra-musically
informative. I prefer to concentrate on the music; I like to be surprised and
intrigued solely by what I hear. “Monkey Man” and “54-46 was my number”
presented no surprises, and no intrigue, just pleasant and familiar songs.
“Streets of Ealing” was more puzzling, however, so having listened to the whole
CD, I checked the cover. Mm. No track called “Streets of Ealing”. Very strange,
although in precisely that part of the disc where I thought I might find it,
the tenth track, was a song titled “Spiritual Healing”. Ah ha ! The rare and fortuitous stumbling-upon of a so-called
mondegreen, a creative mishearing. Well, that really made my day.
Songs
are well known as potentially rich sources for mondegreens, a special type of
wordplay, a subset of the pun, I suppose. The Japanese, who tend not to do
things by halves, have raised the mishearing of song lyrics, and their
substitution by ludicrous ones, into a whole art form called soramini. I have a lot of time for
contemporary Japanese subcultures, but we don’t need to travel that far to
indulge the habit, nor do we need to be so deliberate.
Accidental
mondegreens are best, the unpredictable ones, although painfully contrived ones
also have an appeal of sorts. Perhaps the most agonising specimen of the latter
was that magnificently irritating song, originally recorded in the 1940s -
which works best with an American accent and was still on the radio during my
childhood - “Mairzy doats and dozy doats”. As in “and liddle lamzy divey”. I’m
sure you know the one. For a long time I didn’t appreciate that it was a deliberate
exploitation of the idea of the mondegreen because (a) I didn’t know that was
the word for it (b) I didn’t realise that the song actually was such a thing. I
simply heard it as a phonetic string of meaningless sounds. Fine, so it’s a
song about mairzy doats, not sure what they are, but no matter, and not much
more mysterious than “re turnasenda” or anything else that was bouncing over
the Atlantic airwaves in those happy days when America was great and didn’t
have to worry about being great again. In any case, pedantically, “Mairzy doats”
isn’t a proper mondegreen, because the lyrics don’t make any alternative sense;
they’re merely inappropriately chopped up and re-glued word fragments.
Be
that as it may. Fast forward a few years to our own take on the English
language, an entirely different kind of Mairzy sound, and one encounters the
Beatles’ "a girl with colitis goes by", from 'Lucy in the Sky with
Diamonds'. Or more conventionally “a girl with kaleidoscope eyes”. Well, it
makes about as much sense, but the whole point of a successful mondegreen is
that it does have another discernible meaning, however improbable or peculiar.
Presumably, sadly, there are girls with colitis and occasionally, well, they
pass by. So it’s the real thing, then, a proper mondegreen.
Beatle-related
ambiguities, being Beatle-related, have been much discussed (artichokes/arty
jokes, armchair/arms yeah), though they’re not as puzzling as K T Tunstall’s
apparently estuarial “So to Leigh-on-Sea” (more prosaically “Suddenly I see”), Herman’s
Hermits’ “she’s a muscular boy” (“she’s a must to avoid”), Bowie’s inspired “on
a merry cast orchard brow” (“on America’s tortured brow” – whatever that means – from ‘Life on Mars?’), or
many of the incomprehensible consequences of Elton John’s unique vocal blending
of Pinner and the Deep South. Several websites explore this sort of thing (or thang,
as Sir Elton would no doubt say), although many of the examples they quote are
only slightly erroneous variants on the original and thus not particularly
funny or inventive. Former Roxy Music frontman Bryan – “let’s stick together” -
Ferry had a singing technique which, appropriately enough, tended to fuse the
end of one word with the start of the next. This could be a fruitful technique
for artificially generating mondegreens.
We
live in less carefree times. Given our ability to google anything, and to find anything,
there are implications for the validity of knowledge, per se. If you can find absolute nonsense online, which you most
certainly can (present company excepted, of course), with nothing to indicate
that it is nonsense, then it’s mildly
unsettling, to say the least. Can one perhaps find on the web an entire
Borgesian music library of utter falsehood, a parallel lyrical universe of fiendish
mondegreens; and how does one know that it is
false? How can one tell which is which? For instance, the alternative
cheese-fixated lyrics to the Eurythmics’ hit “Sweet Dreams”:
Sweet dreams are made of cheese
Who am I to diss a Brie?
I’ve travelled the world and the Cheddar
cheese
Everybody’s looking for Stilton
Well … To be honest, the original version is better, if you will halloumi my opinion. If one can so badly misunderstand songs with perfectly sensible and innocent lyrics, what chance for more sensitive texts - religious or political pronouncements, for instance? What should we believe, who should we trust? Even in our irreligious times there persists the London Transport (or TfL) version of the Lord’s Prayer, one of the oldest contrived multiple mondegreens, a myth more suburban than urban, the one that begins “Our Father, which art in Hendon, Harrow Road be thy name, thy Kingston come, thy Wimbledon, in Erith as it is in Hendon” and goes on to plead “Give us four bus passes” and “lead us not into Brent Station”. But at least it doesn’t try to tempt us into Ealing. For that we need Toots.
