It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That String

Sometimes lyrics are just meaningless phonemes

A lot of people are passing around an article on the internet today about the Backstreet Boys and how the mystery surrounding the lyrics to one of their songs has been REVEALED!!!

Backstreet Boys Finally Confirm The Most Famous Legend About Them

This article continuously refers to a “legend,” as though there were some mystical tale or anything legendarily unauthenticated about the nonsensical lyrics. The only thing no one had really done was talk to the band members about it (as if band members know anything about lyrics, lol). The Huffington Post caught up with the bandmates “during a promotional interview for their new commercial with Chex-Mix.” Yes, the snack mix. These days you do promotions for commercials, and that’s how reporters have to get their other, actual information.

The band members were essentially, like, yeah the JIVE Records executives wanted to change the lyrics to make sense, so we hired people who did just that, and then opted for the original version. That’s it. That’s the whole story! And you know what, it doesn’t really matter that there is no drama to this story because the only reason anyone clicked this link is to listen to the alternate version of the song, which makes better sense, but sounds worse. Why? Because we got used to a version that had been ingeniously written by a Swede, essentially backwards. In this 2015 post for The New Yorker (promoting his then-new book) John Seabrook wrote about Martin’s tactic of writing lyrics to fit the melody:

But, while knowing English is clearly an advantage to songwriters and producers seeking success in the U.S. and the U.K., a lack of facility with the finer points of the language is equally important. Swedish writers are not partial to wit, metaphor, or double entendre, songwriting staples from Tin Pan Alley through the Brill Building era. They are more inclined to fit the syllables to the sounds — a working method that Martin calls “melodic math” — and not worry too much about whether the resulting lines make sense. (The verses in “I Want It That Way,” for example, completely contradict the meaning of the chorus lines.) Fans of Cole Porter may see this development in roughly in the same spirit that “Downton Abbey” fans might view “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” — with horror — but one can argue that this very freedom from having to make sense lyrically has allowed the Swedes to soar to such melodic heights.

This makes perfect sense to me. First off, the Swedes are actual pop geniuses because their ears and hearts are free from the narrow constrictions of restrictive English grammar. (Though every Swedish person knows how to speak English, I would wager that songwriting English is a higher level of fluency, much like “business Spanish” or “sex-club German.”) Have you guys ever heard of a band called Alphabeat? Their song “Fascination” is A+ makes-you-wanna-kick-off-your-shoes-and-pony bubble-gum pop:

Perfect, right? The lyrics make no sense whatsoever. Here they are in full:

Easy living,
Killed the young dudes,
In the high boots
Teenage,
In the pace age,
That’s when love burns,
Now it’s your turn.

Fascination
Fascination
It’s just the way we feel.

Fascination
Fascination
It’s just the way we feel. (yeah)

We love this exaltation (whoa oh, o-o-oh)
We want the new temptations (whoa oh, o-o-o-oh)
It’s like a revelation (whoa oh, o-o-oh)
We live on fascination.

Passion,
Is our passion,
In the moonlight,
On a joyride
Easy living,
Killed the young dudes,
In the high boots. (oh yeah)

Fascination
Fascination
It’s just the way we feel (come on).

We love this exaltation (whoa oh, o-o-o-oh)
We want the new temptations (whoa oh, o-o-o-oh)
It’s like a revelation (whoa oh, o-o-o-oh)
We live on fascination.

Fashion is our passion
In the moonlight on a joy ride
He said , let them
Killed the young dudes,
In the high boots
Fascination
Fascination
It’s just the way we feel (come on)

We love this exaltation (whoa oh, o-o-o-oh)
We want the new temptations (whoa oh, o-o-o-oh)
It’s like a revelation (whoa oh, o-o-o-oh)
We live on fascination.

The word is on your lips, say the word
The word is on your lips, say the word
The word is on your lips, say the word
The word is on your lips, say the word
The word is on your lips, say the word
The word is on your lips, say the word
The word is on your lips, say the word
The word is on your lips, say the word
The word is on your lips, say the word
The word is on your lips, say the word
The word is on your lips, say the word
Fas-ci-na-tion!

We love this exaltation (whoa oh, o-o-o-oh)
We want the new temptations (whoa oh, o-o-o-oh)
It’s like a revelation (whoa oh, o-o-o-oh)
We live on fascination (o-oh).

Say the word now (fa-sci-nation)
Say the word
Come on say the word now (fa-sci-nation)
Come on (fa-sci-nation)

High boots! Amazing job, Anders Bonlokke. You know what else this reminds me of? Adriano Celentano’s “Prisencolinensinainciusol,” a gibberish song that is in neither Italian nor English (except for the expletive, “all right!”), but some gibberishly in-between “ecstatic nonsense,” which, if you sort of let your mind wander, sounds as though the words are there but you just can’t discern them. The fault is yours, because this song sounds so confident, so you just let go and let it wash over you, and it is perfectly good:

Conceptually, it’s also like this snippet of text that made the rounds on the internet in the early aughts:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

The human mind does not hear every word of a lyric by itself, but the song as a whole. This is why when you listen to Fiona Apple you’re like “HOLY SHIT!!!!!” and your mind is blown. Her lyrics have lyrics.

But back to the Backstreet Boys song. Now that you’ve listened to the regular version of “I Want It That Way” for so many years—screamed it at karaoke and found yourself humming quietly “tell my why-EE” in grocery aisles—this alternate version (stupidly titled “No Goodbyes”) just sounds wrong:

Your brain has imprinted upon the old version and that is the only one that feels right, even though it doesn’t make sense. That’s because it’s written in what Anthony Lane dubbed “Eurovision English:”

an exquisite tongue, spoken nowhere else, which raises the poetry of heartfelt but absolute nonsense to a level of which Lewis Carroll could only have dreamed. The Swedes are predictably fluent in this (“Your breasts are like swallows a-nesting,” they sang in 1973), and the Finns, too, should be hailed as early masters, with their faintly troubling back-to-back efforts from the mid-seventies, “Old Man Fiddle” and “Pump-pump,” but the habit continued to flourish even during those periods when the home-language ruling was in place, as cunning lyricists broke the embargo by smuggling random expostulations into their titles and choruses. Hence such gems as Austria’s “Boom Boom Boomerang,” from 1977 (not to be confused with Denmark’s “Boom Boom,” of the following year), Portugal’s “Bem-bom,” from 1982, and Sweden’s “Diggi-loo Diggi-ley,” which won in 1984. The next year’s contenders, spurred by such bravado, responded with “Magic, Oh Magic” (Italy) and “Piano Piano” (Switzerland). Not that the host nation relinquished the crown without a fight, as anyone who watched Kikki Danielsson can attest. Her song was called “Bra Vibrationer.” It was, regrettably, in Swedish.

Ain’t nothing but a mistake. And I want it that way.