Yes, hundreds upon hundreds of websites CAN all be wrong One day a couple of years ago I happened to hear an old song called “The Endless Enigma,” by Emerson, Lake & Palmer, that I remembered from when I was a teenager. Listening to it again reminded me that there was a line in the lyrics that I’d never been able to understand: I’m tired of ________, with tongues in their cheeks… This …
Not just stress: the actual intervals between the beats need not be constant. This is sometimes called swing.
Them sometimes in compound time beats, commonly the second of each group of 3 may be effectively missed, so instead of (say) 6 evenly spaced beats you have four, but the first of each pair double length.
Related to this you'll sometimes find the first and third beats of 4 time lengthened, occasionally even to such an extent that the rhythym is closer to 12 time with the missed beats as above.
Of rock bands Thin Lizzy were major users of compound time sigs, which is one thing that gave them their distinctive feel. Much mainstream rock is rigidly stuck in 4 time, but Lizzy often played in 6, 9 and 12 time.
Its a very complex topic!
The big question is why 3/4 music and /8 music sounds 'lilt-y'. Further, why does a stress on the 2nd and 4th beats of 4/4 make it reggae/ska/polka and make you want to move funny?
I've often wondered that myself, especially about the reggae groove. I'm sure a trained musicologist or music historian could explain it, but otherwise it's a mystery, at least to me; the accent on 1 and 3 makes me want to jump up and thrash my head up and down and play air guitar, but the accent on 2 and 4 makes me want to just sit back on the couch and take a bong hit.
Then, there's Don Powell's heavy kick-drum groove on all those old Slade records. Cum On Feel The Noize and Mama Weer All Crazee Now were awesome tunes, but they would never have been as great without Don doing that solid-four boot dancing groove. Compare it to Quiet Riot's cover of Noize from the mid '80s, where the drummer's just playing a straight-ahead rock'n'roll groove.
How all those lyric sites out there seem to have copied from each other because you do see the same misreading come up time and time again.
A quite unrelated mystery is how I seem to understand lyrics much more easily now than I used to...Might just be better sound reproduction hardware of course, but I suspect there might be more to it than that.
"how I seem to understand lyrics much more easily now than I used to"
I've often wondered why I understand many previously incomprehensible lyrics when I listen to them while driving. It can't be a result of better sound quality, as several of the cars in question have had iffy audio and high ambient noise levels.
My theory is that while driving requires heightened alertness, the auditory and semantic content of the activity is low, so there is spare capacity for parsing lyrics. This looks pretty mad now I see it written down - can anyone think of a better explanation?
You may be right about spare capacity, or it may be that conscious parsing of speech differs from unconscious parsing, so something you can't understand when you try to listen suddenly fires the right neurons when you simply hear it.
I'm told that there's a known effect whereby you can be sitting in a room doing something and suddenly someone in the background mentions your name. At that point, despite not having been listening to the conversation you are aware of the whole sentence *prior to* the bit where your name was mentioned (and presumably also prior to the point at which you became consciously aware of the conversation).
How all those lyric sites out there seem to have copied from each other because you do see the same misreading come up time and time again...
My all-time favorite was Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Bad Moon Rising". It took me several years before I realized that John Fogerty was not saying "There's a bathroom on the right".
Oddly enough, though, I got Jimi Hendrix's "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky" line right off, the very first time I heard "Purple Haze". Go figure.
@Robert E A Harvey, so you've never heard the other version of Lucille.
I once worked in a hotel and when the band got bored they usually started singing their own version of lyrics:-
"You pick your nose before your meals,
Four hundred children and a crap in the fields."
Icon: The reason why most of the audience never noticed.
A lot of people are constantly looking for subtext with their favorite stars. It's really no different from the people who breathlessly tell everyone about Harry and Hermione's eye-flirting in this one scene. With the gay rights movement just gearing up, you'd better believe a lot of people were looking for validation.
Welcome to the open source world, why bother writing some code when you can search for some and paste it into your project.
I wonder how many bugs or security holes that causes.
Sometimes you really need to actually write stuff or work something out yourself. Same goes for lyrics :)
I wonder how many bugs or security holes that causes.Very few, actually, and their effects tend to be well-contained.
You see, just knowing that other people are going to point and laugh if you get it wrong, is a pretty good incentive to get your coding right.
If a project containing badly-written code becomes sufficiently popular, some other programmer keen to make a name for themself will rewrite the badly-written section and either submit it upstream, or call their refactored version a fork (depending whether they want their name at the front of the credits, or just an easy life).
On the other hand, if a project containing badly-written code is not widely used, then its effects are going to be limited anyway.
But hey, don't let the facts get in the way of a dig. Thomas Edison never did, even when it was beyond obvious that alternating current was the future .....
There are so many music tracks on the net where a misattributed authorship has spread widely. Even where a YouTube poster seems to have been corrected hundreds of times, they don't fix the error e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BydBT6pEqz4 which has repeated misinformation to over 2 million viewers.
You then see people writing (again and again) - oh I've always loved X's music, when there is no resemblance between X's music and the track posted.
Mind you, with the dominance of iTunes where the composer of music no longer matters, the error pages start to win out.
There are many times finding the misattributed song has lead me to the actual artist. At least the internet makes it easily searchable when you have incorrect information and are trying to find what you are looking for. It was a real pain in the ass back in the day trying to sing to someone else to see if they could figure out the song you were talking about.
Oh, and my favorite "There's a bathroom on the right" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Moon_Rising_(song)
Over the years I've purchased many books of tab that had massive (and blatantly obvious) errors in them. I rapidly decided it was easier in the long run to not be so lazy and learn songs by ear. At least that way the mistakes are my own....
You shouldn't really need the score unless its some weirdo jazzy thing with sus9 major 15th chords or something. Even a mediocre muso like me can grab the chords and so on out of most songs with a bit of practice. And back in the day it was the most practical way to do it anyway. Buying dots for more than a few songs would have been a big lump out of the strings budget...
This is not an Internet phenomenon. There have always been sources you can trust, and sources you can't. It's nothing new. That's why in science and medicine for example, the peer review "chain of trust" is fundamental. (Of course, it too breaks down sometimes.)
So the Internet just gives us more and quicker, not better. But I thought everyone knew that..?
For many years the statue "Here am I - send me" by Kathleen Scott was often taken to be of her young son - the later naturalist Peter Scott. The reasoning was that it was a war memorial for the school he was then attending - and he was often a model for his mother.
Only one source on the web cited his 1967 autobiography where he denied being the model. Kathleen Scott's diary extracts in her autobiography show that when she started that work she simply referred to "the model" rather than "Peter".
The word of mouth prior to the internet had obviously propagated a misconception by one, or several, people. The fiction was obviously more appealing to people's sentiment than the facts.
Remembering the "Gladly" mondegreen still makes me smile.
A young girl had taken her somewhat aged teddy bear to church. As sometimes happens to such much loved bears, one of his eyes had fallen out at some stage to be replaced with one not quite the same as the original, giving him a slightly lop-sided appearance.
The vicar asked her what the bear was called. "Gladly." she replied. "What a curious name," said the vicar, "How did he come to be called that?" "He's named after one of my favourite hymns," said the girl, "You know the one. Gladly, the cross-eyed bear."
Kinda like when people actually figure out the words to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lola_%28song%29
My rather conservative nephew was singing the song with the lyrics all wrong and was rather redfaced when I told him to go look them up. I still get a chuckle out of that.
Yes, the same errors "lifted" and copied everywhere. Even worse is the pop-over ad: "Click here to get <song> as a ringtone." Woo! 1994 lives! (ftw: Google preview -> cache -> text only version.) Small smile for the sites that add the line "Lyrics by <site>" to the centre of the lyrics.
Yes, the Internet is a cesspool, from wikipedia to forwarded emails debunked by snopes.
A few people with misnamed mp3's suddenly spread through the masses so Electric hellfire clubs cover of "sunday bloody sunday" got mislabeled as MDFMk. Even funnier is a whole loiad of songs being reclassed as KMFDM remixes and the owners of said files refusing to believe they were not as "they had every album" (despite the fact these songs appeared on none of the bands albums
I'm a professional music educator, and I see students make errors based on mistaken transcriptions all the time. Not just internet transcriptions, though: sometimes they transcribe something themselves and don't quite get it right. Often the problems are in the piano reductions put out by the publishers. I found my first mistaken time signature years ago in the sheet music for Sky's first album, and there is what seems to me a very questionable transcription of the rhythm of 'Recorda Me' in one of the Real Books.
As far as the internet goes, I seem to remember a while back looking at online tabs for 'Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree', and I couldn't find a single one where I could agree with the chords given.
I have a dream that one day someone will open source the entire history of recorded music – the origial stems, that is – so that we can go back and listen exactly what the keyboard player was playing in bar 7 that day. Oh, plus the original autograph scores to every movie ever made :)
...As far as the internet goes, I seem to remember a while back looking at online tabs for 'Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree', and I couldn't find a single one where I could agree with the chords given...
I shudder to think of how many young guitarists out there are trying to learn old Jethro Tull songs from tablatures or fake books, given how Ian Anderson was famous for writing songs with torturous "designer chords". Back in college, when some of my friends who played in local cover bands were trying to learn Tull tunes, the most commonly-heard question seemed to be "How the hell does he play this stuff?"
Ill see your Jethro Tull and raise you a Steely Dan.
At least with a bogus tab you can kinda use it to work out whats wrong and thereby get the correct chord/voicing in the end.
Much more irritating - try finding a tab for chuck e's in love - loads of hits, all for just the intro (the piss easy bit)
...which curiously enough reminds me of the story that when the makers of Mamma Mia asked Björn and Benny what the backing tracks actually *were* the reply was "Er, dunno exactly, we just played lots of stuff and mixed it all up until it sounded right", followed by many weeks of sitting listening to tapes with the original sound engineer to try to reverse engineer what the hell had actually made it onto the album.
So if you really want to know what the keyboard player was playing in bar 7 that day, I think you should get hold of the original tapes and beg the assistance of M. Fourier.
Far from just the internet, I've come across factual errors in paper-based books, sheer weirdness on some e-books owing to bad transcription (not entirely sure the transcriber's first language was English) and really bad errors in TV documentaries. I remember working as an advisor on a history one but was told by the directors assistant that he wasn't going to use a particular, absolutely critical source, because "that wasn't the story he wanted to tell". The end result was therefore complete bollocks and misrepresented the facts, but is now the "popularly" accepted version (if you get your history from TV that is ;-)
There is a school of thought that suggests that some errors are introduced intentionally by the publishers, and are used to identify the original source of copies of printed works.
This is particularly said of music manuscripts, so that if someone copies by hand some sheet music still in copyright into Sibelius or Rosegarden to produce 'clean' copies, supposedly free of copyright, the publishers can still identify and take appropriate action.
I keep reminding members of the choir I sing with what they can't do when it comes to music copyright. All I can say is thank heaven for the library service in the UK, who can loan/rent out multiple copies of music to choirs and orchestras at reasonable rates to reduce the temptation to buy one copy and just photocopy it.
There is a school of thought that suggests that some errors are introduced intentionally by the publishers, and are used to identify the original source of copies of printed works.
I know this to be true because there was an album documenting "secret marks" which were small alterations made in limited-edition collotype prints of old master paintings, at the publishers I worked for. Neither the process nor the procedure had been used by the company for decades, but we still had copies (stock even!) of those beautiful prints and the slight alterations which would give away a copy.
For the legal pedants: the paintings themselves, of course, would be long, long, out of copyright. However, copyright exists in the reproduction itself too. Want to publish this print too? Fine... but go and do your own negotiation with the gallery for physical access and get your own transparency made, and work from that, not our print.
Many ebook transcriptions come from OCR+spellcheck, and are only updated if enough people report problems. I've found that professional versions are no better than your average pirated transcription/scan, and some pirate communities exclusively deal with proofread versions that are actually better than the selling copy.
Of course, real books have plenty of editing failures, too, so it's hardly unexpected....
The mishearing song lyrics has a long and distinguished history. So distinguished, there's even a word for it.
However, in the particular instance: try listening to it through headphones - it's at about 3:30 into the track¹ and (if you crank it up to 11) comes over loud and clear.
I suspect a worse source of error in the internet / smartphone age is autocorrect.
[1] Return of the Manticore, side 3 track 3.
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