What's Your Best Misheard Lyric?

Concrete jungle wet dream tomato

Natasha Vargas Cooper, writer

I thought Van Halen’s “Panama!” was “Animal!” And every time David Lee Roth said “Panama,” I thought it was “animal.” Cause why the fuck would there be a butt rock song about a tiny Central American country mostly known for effective infrastructure??? Animal makes more sense. It makes it a better song. I found this out within the last two years on Twitter. I’m not proud.

Logan Sachon, writer

My high school Latin teacher experienced a condition whereby he couldn’t understand song lyrics; it was like they were in another language. But he loved music, and his favorite song was “Nights in White Satin” by The Moody Blues. The song was dear to him because he understood it to be called “Knights in White Satin,” a phrase that made sense, he said, because medieval knights wore a tunic made of linen or silk under their armor. When he learned the song was about sex in a bed with satin sheets, he rejected the premise; for him, it remained a song about medieval warriors wearing silky undergarments. And for me now, too.

Christina Rentz, Merge publicist

Caribou, “Odessa”: The chorus is “She can sing, she can sing,” but in my office, we can’t stop hearing “Chicken steak, chicken steak, chicken steak.” I have now ruined the meaning of the song for everyone! And I am hungry.

Katie Heaney, author, senior editor of BuzzFeed

At the family dinner table when I was around 11 or 12 years old and my younger brother Joe was nine, he announced that he thought it was strange that his elementary school would allow Queen’s “We Will Rock You” to be played before a student pep rally. (I always envied his assigned seat at the end of our table, opposite my dad, because I felt like it lent itself to making pronouncements.) Everyone turned to look at him. “What?” “Why?” He scoffed. “I mean, it’s kind of an inappropriate song.” My dad was like, “Huh?” and the rest of us, even my brother Dan, who was seven, exchanged skeptical looks. “‘Waving your bladder all over the place’??” said Joe. “Pretty violent.” Anyone else among us would have been mortified to be corrected by the entire family at once, but Joe is and always has been the chillest among us.

Caryn Rose, writer and author

One day in the mid-’70s, my father comes home from work one day and is in the kitchen singing a song that sounds vaguely familiar. I have been music-crazy for almost as long as I can remember. So it was with a reasonable amount of confidence that I inquired, “Dad, what song is that you’re singing?”

“It’s this great song I heard on the radio: ‘Like A Greasy Bear.’” He bellowed the chorus: “Like a greasy bear, like a greasy bear.”

I am appalled at this error, the same sort of indignation that would have me throwing pillows at the TV while watching any type of music documentary where they got something wrong. You cannot be wrong about music. “Dad, that is not the name of the song,” I said. Understand that my father managed to somehow ignore rock and roll in the ’50s and his idea of a good radio station is 1010 WINS. He still held his ground. “It absolutely is.”

“Dad, bet you my allowance double or nothing that this is not the name of the song.”

My father refused the bet because he (and I quote) “did not want to take advantage of me.”

Of course, we now had to wait for the moment where the song would come on the radio while a neutral third party (a.k.a. my mom) was present. This took what seemed like forever, but was probably only a few days. It was agonizing. I’d hear the song in my room but my father wouldn’t be there or my mom wouldn’t make it to whatever location in time.

We were driving back from New York on a Saturday when I heard the intro of the song come on the radio. I bounced to attention in the back seat, shushing my brother and sisters. “This is it, this is it!”

My father reaches over and turns up the radio with a smug grin. I wait breathlessly through the first verse until the first chorus. As it comes to a close, and the band begins the second verse, my father gives my mother a look that says, “Please now confirm that I am correct.”

Instead, my mother responds: “Jerry, you are crazy. There is nothing in that song about a bear. Pay your daughter her money.”

The song in question? “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” by War. (I guarantee you will never hear it the same.)

To his credit, although my father would often offer his unsolicited opinions on whatever music I was listening to, he never ever argued with me about pop music ever again, and took my burgeoning music scholarship seriously from that moment onward. And although I hope my father is with us for many, many more years, as God is my witness, I am going to figure out how to play that song at his funeral.

Jill Menze, writer/editor

Jennifer Lopez and Ja Rule, “I’m Real”: Apparently I’m not the only one to have misheard this lyric, but when your best friends are a bunch of bitchy J. Lo-worshipping queens, an error of this magnitude is enough to get you banned from group Will & Grace marathons indefinitely. For years, from 2001 to an unforgettable evening in 2012, I did, in fact, think the correct response to Ja Rule’s opening question, “What’s my motherfuckin’ name?” was “Are you Ellie?”

Yes, I realized it made no sense, but I didn’t put much thought into the lyrics by a man who once taught me “every thug needs a lady.” So, Ellie it was, and Ellie it remained. Then my mind was blown. In a very basic #throwback move, two friends and I spent a night watching Laguna Beach DVDs, drinking margaritas and taking the occasional Ja Rule-themed music break. I “Are you Ellie”-ed the shit out of J. Lo’s line, which was met with stares that rival the best NeNe Leakes GIFs. “Did you just say…Ellie? As in, the name?” “Yes?” I sheepishly replied. “Is it…NOT Ellie?” Cue their uncontrollable laughter while I sat there legitimately confused. What the hell else could she be saying? “NO!” I was informed. “It’s R-U-L-E, as in Ja Rule!”

I felt like everything I knew to be true in this world was a lie. Up was down. Down was up. You could tell me Juicy Couture was back in style, and at that moment, I’d believe it. In any case, I looked like a fingers-to-your-forehead Loser, and I’ve yet to live it down. Case in point: To this day, I’m in no fewer than three people’s phones as “Ellie.” But it’s OK, cause they ain’t makin’ or breakin’ me.

Devon Maloney, writer

For the longest time my best friend growing up and I believed the song “Master of the House” from Les Misérables was called “Monster in the Ass” (the song is sung in a Cockney accent, so this makes more sense than you’d think at first glance). We’d stomp around her parents’ living room dancing to it and giggling until we cried. I honestly don’t remember how I learned the correct version, other than becoming a theatre geek a few years later in junior high and quietly realizing that, given the context of the whole musical, it probably had nothing to do with monsters or butts.

Jen Doll, author of ‘Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest’

Sia, “The Greatest”: Recently I was in a spin class and I don’t even know what song was playing [at the time], but it had this refrain that sounded like “Donkey love! Donkey love! Donkey love!” and at some point the instructor told us, “Listen to the lyrics of this song, and DON’T GIVE UP!” So I guess it wasn’t donkey love, though that would have been aspirational in a different way I suppose.

Also, as a kid I thought, “Shot through the heart and you’re to blame, you give love a bad name” was “Something something something, something something something, you give love in Amerrrricaaaa.” Which makes zero sense but again with the ears.

Lauren Beck, director of music programming of Northside Festival

Back in my days of youth and innocence, I thought the “Masturbation’s lost its fun” line in Green Day’s “Longview” was “Applications lost their fun.” In my defense, at that point in the song, Billie Joe is complaining about how his mom is bugging him to get a job, so it contextually made perfect sense.

I can’t pinpoint how I came to learn the actual lyric, but I do distinctly remember listening to the song with my older sister in the car before she dropped me off at ballet class and telling her how funny I thought that particular line was — job applications suck, haha, so true. (I knew nothing about having a job at that age, but I could assume that filling out applications was indeed no fun.)

She awkwardly did not return the laugh, in retrospect, probably not wanting to be the one to teach her little sister about sexual self-pleasure. Can’t blame her.

Jessica Morgan, Go Fug Yourself

I sincerely thought the line in Kenny Loggins’ song “Danger Zone” was “I WENT TO the Danger Zone,” when in reality it is, “HIGHWAY to the Danger Zone.” I had heard that song like…I dunno, 3,500 times since Top Gun came out in 1986, and I didn’t realize this fact until literally one year ago while I was driving and it came on the radio. It only took me 30 years. In my defense, “I went to the Danger Zone” seemed like a totally reasonable — if EXTREMELY STRAIGHTFORWARD — thing for someone to be singing in a song called “Danger Zone.”

Nadia Chaudhury still hears “I love Jane Krause” whenever she listens to Sia’s “Cheap Thrills.”