Pedants and incorrect song lyrics

[UnquietDad]

Does anyone else hear Gloria Gaynor on "I Will Survive" singing "you think I'd lay down and die" and want to scream at the radio "it's LIE down, you stupid woman!!" ?

Also Paul Weller on the Jam's "English Rose": "For nothing can ever tempt me from she." EH??

And Morrissey on "Sweet and Tender Hooligan" - his fans think he's erudite, but anyone who says "eck-setera" should be shot...

Yet English Rose is forgiven imo, it being such a super tune !

Aren't song lyrics more akin to poetry than grammatically correct English though? An awful lot of poetry bends the rules to breaking point

DS2 (9) had the audacity to correct the grammar of "I Can't Get No Satisfaction" yesterday .

ooh, that reminds me was listening to some Beatles the other day ( wel every day as dd 5 is huge fan)and George says 'somethink' instead of 'something'.

I am pleased that by the time he released a single actaully called 'Something' that he had been corrected!

wow uqd, you need to chill

Mind you. There's no excuse for the utter cr*pness of the rhymes (and possibly grammar) in "cool for cats"

I don't mean I literally scream at the radio! Things aren't that bad... yet.

I hate when German songwriters write in English and don't get their grammar checked.

Big hit a few years ago, a guy called Max Mutzke sang this song

Just can't wait until tonight babe
till i have you by my side babe
Just can't wait until tonight babe
for being with you

Aargh, made my toes curl everytime I heard it.

Nothing to do with artistic licence that one.

aaah

yeah but cool for cats is a poem of its time, of a teenager, and that's how they speak.

Saying that you could pretty much say every rap song was incorrect in some way.

Glen Tilbrook is a great songwriter.

Yes, but I do cringe at rap too. All that "ah wuz jammin wit ma homeez on a Saturday night an' we wuz feelin rel good an feelin all right an' we wuz hangin' in da hood an checkin' out da pussy" crap. Learn to spell. Then learn to speak. Idiots.

pmsl

uD thats sooooooo Rapaphobic of you. and ting.!

I'm sure TT D'Arby sings "you should of stayed" in "Sign Your Name" towards the end. If so, he deserves to be eviscerated.

I'll forgive Paul Weller for the English Rose 'she' because I love that song...

'Sweet Dreams My LAX' by Rachel Stevens:

'If I was in your shoes/I'd worry of the effects'

ABOUT the effects, woman!

It would even be acceptable to say ' 'bout the effects'.

A quite good, perky pop tune ruined for ever because I'm a pedant.

Yes, let's not get pop "idiom" confused with bad grammar. The odd "'bout", and even "ain't" and "don't wanna" and so on are perfectly acceptable. Not like the examples I'm trying to give/get.

Moonlight Shadow:

"4 AM in the morning..."

GRRRRRRR

There's a Corrs song (I think it's 'Everybody's searching for intimacy') where she sings 'Now baby it's just you and I'.

Drives me insane because it's hyper-correction - where someone is trying too hard to be correct and they actually get it wrong and sound stupid. That's far, far worse than just being over-colloquial in a song and singing the thing most people say even if it is wrong ('should of' etc).

m&J - yes!! How could I have forgotten that one? I mean, there's not even a poetic reason for it - "4 o'clock in the morning" would scan just as well!

kathy - I bet there are many other examples of hyper-correction. I can think of one: Bryan Adams in "Run To You":
"She says her love for me could never die,
But that'd change if she ever found out about you and I"

aagh!!

is this one? , 'don't be fooled by the rocks that i got'

shoudln't this be 'that I have'

then she could have followed with 'I'm still Jenny trashy chav'

I won't agree most people say "should of", though! It's one thing I will man the barricades about until I die!!

UD - but Bryan Adams was trying to rhyme I with die... me wouldn't have done the job

There's a similar one in Embrace's "Gravity", written by Chris Martin:

"And then I looked up at the sun and saw the sky
And the way that gravity pulls on you and I"