Kiss This Guy

You've all been there. Someone shoves a karaoke mic into your hand at a bar you might have been patronizing a tad too long, and suddenly you're crooning off-key to the Supremes. Or the Barenaked Ladies. Or even, God help us all, Destiny's Child (and you're certainly not ready for this jelly). But then it hits you: Everyone's laughing their respective asses off and it's not because you're vamping like a reject from Divas Live. You've committed the ultimate sing-along sin: the mondegreen, a misheard phrase in a well-known song or saying. For fellow sufferers of this brand of public humiliation, I present the lyric archive KissThisGuy.com (after the oft-misheard Jimi Hendrix lyric, "scuse me, while I kiss the sky") so you can double-check your words before the big concert. Or at least share the misery. You can search for misheard lyrics by artist or song, tell the world about your own embarrassing moment of revelation and marvel at the number of singers who need serious lessons in enunciation. Though the surplus of entries under The Beatles and Radiohead come as no surprise (sometimes I don't think you're supposed to understand), you can hardly fault people for thinking that Bob Marley wants them to "stand up for your rice," or that he "hopes you like pajamas" too. Some will have you laughing out loud, imagining Tina Turner singing that love is "a second hand in motion" or that Gwen Stefani wants it known that "it's all your fault/ I screamed my balls off." Others, however, are truly groan-worthy, like the "Cheerio-girl," Madonna feeling "like a virgin, touched for the thirty-first time," or that Dusty Springfield reminisces about the "son of a creature-man." Amazingly, 62 percent of submissions like their versions of the songs better than the artists'. There's even a whole page dedicated to Springsteen's "Blinded by the Light" (it's "revved up like a deuce/ another runner in the night," folks.) Hours of humiliating fun, but don't linger too long, or you'll begin to doubt the higher brain functions of the human race. After all, as Simon and Garfunkel once sang to Mrs. Robinson: "Look around you/ all you see are simple-headed guys."

—Diana Peterfreund

This article appears in Jun 12-18, 2002.