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Comment by Declanomous | Hacker News Reader

>My daughter brought home a record of "LOUIE LOUIE", and, I, after reading that the record had been banned from being played on the air because it was obscene, proceeded to try to decipher the jumble of words,

>The lyrics are so filthy that I can-not enclose them in this letter.

When I read things like this it makes me sad, because my imagination is nowhere near as active as this.

The lyrics on the following page don't even make sense. How does "Away we go"/"We gotta go" become "crab her way down low"? What does that even mean?

>This land of ours is headed for an extreme state of moral degradation what with this record, the biggest hit movies and the sex and violence exploited on T.V.

I'm surprised this letter didn't outright say the record was trying to make his daughter sleep with people of different races. What a tool.

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"When I read things like this it makes me sad, because my imagination is nowhere near as active as this."

It's actually a fun exercise, and educational. Make a list of some dirty nasty words you'd like to find in Louie Louie. Or even some innocent ones. Make it 10 or 20, let's say, but try to avoid the real lyrics. (Don't look them up in advance, though, that will scramble the results.) Read it over a few times to familiarize your brain with what's in there. Now listen to the song. I virtually guarantee you will now hear at least some of those words in there. When you are actively listening for something, you tend to hear it.

Since no-one else has used the word so far in this discussion, see also the idea of Mondegreens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen

The irony is in order to match those patterns you'd have to have all that info floating around in your head before listening to it, meaning the people who were offended had far dirtier minds than the casual listeners who were supposedly being affected.

More likely your associating that style of music and the artist to that image. Essentially your hearing what you want to hear.

Matt Parker (standupmath at youtube) does a presentation he calls "Clutching at Random Straws". It doesn't, as far as I can recall, specifically deal with Mondegreens, but about 38 minutes in he does a fun demonstration of how perception is a process of actively patternmatching for what we expect: https://youtu.be/sf5OrthVRPA?t=2297

The phenomenon of alleged "backward masked" lyrics is very similar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYG2oZXSvdE

I love Mondegreens, but I feel the Mondegreens I fall for are way more pervasive.

Try as I might, I still hear "Starbucks Lover" instead of "Star Crossed Lovers" in T. Swift's Blank Space, and "Galileo" instead of "Gotta Let Go" in Dynamite by Taio Cruz.

It's actually "Got a long list of ex-lovers." First time I heard it I was sure I was hearing "Got a lonely Starbucks lovers" or "Got a lovely Starbucks lovers" which didn't even make sense!

Sometimes they sing the words differently. I've noticed other bands doing this.

I.E. "refresherator" instead of "refrigerator" on "I Want My MTV" by Dire Straits.

Are you sure you're not just mishearing this? (And the song is "Money for Nothing", by the way.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_for_Nothing_(song)

I'd imagine that at the time, this sort of music and the fads/styles it inspired were threatening to overly paranoid and inflexible parents, much in the way hip hop, baggy/saggy pants, and other symbols of "degraded" culture are seen more recently...

...which, of course, is a large part of the appeal to younger folks who are drawn to things that are decidedly set apart from (or contrary to) the culture and styles of their parents. I remember when I was a teenager, I really did like a lot of the music and styles of the grunge/alternative trend, but in retrospect, I'm sure a big part of it was that it was specifically not what my parents identified with so it felt more like something of "ours".

The whole cultural identifier thing works both ways when it comes to signaling in-groups and out-groups. Choosing to set yourself apart from where you originate is on some level a rejection of that origin and can be either a gesture of independence and strength or an attack on what someone else holds to be valuable.

The funny thing is that the filth was all inside her head.

It's "grab", not crab.

Thanks, I was having trouble reading some of the photocopies. Too late to edit now however.

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