Wednesday 2 October 2013

Misheard Lyrics

It would appear that failure to consume enough alcohol can damage your hearing and/or impair your cognitive functions:

From The Daily Mail:

Almost one in five songs in modern top tens contains a reference to booze (1) – twice as many as ten years ago and almost three times as many as 30 years ago...

The study attributes the rise of alcohol-related lyrics to an increase in the amount of U.S songs becoming popular in the UK. It uses Katy Perry's Last Friday Night, a still from the music video pictured, as an example and claims the song links drinking to confidence and success...

By 2011, the proportion of songs that glamorised alcohol by linking it to confidence, sociability or good looks clearly outweighed those that blamed it for hangovers and health problems.(2)


1) If you add up the number of pop songs which refer to booze, drugs, sex, violence or arson and/or include swearwords/smut then it probably adds up to about seven or eight out of five. So what?

Vague references to "doing it all night" (it always puzzles me what they are "doing all night". Worrying about a job interview? Revising for an exam?) would bring that to nine or ten out of five.

2) "Last Friday Night" is probably the worst example they could have chosen, it strikes me that the lyrics are all about the hangover:

There's a stranger in my bed
There's a pounding in my head
Glitter all over the room
Pink flamingos in the pool
I smell like a minibar
DJ's passed out in the yard
Barbie's on the barbecue
This a hickie or a bruise?
Pictures of last night
Ended up online
I'm screwed
Oh well
It's a blacked out blur
But I'm pretty sure it ruled
Damn...


And so on and so forth. We've all been there.

It's quite a well written song actually and includes an impossible saxophone solo. The verses are in the first person singular, present tense and the chorus in the first person plural, past tense. They could have given her credit for that at least.

1 comments:

Tim Almond said...

My favourite booze song is "It's Five O'Clock Somewhere" by Alan Jackson.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPCjC543llU