Maybe I should start paying more
attention to these things.
I went running Saturday morning (in shorts again, I might add), as I
do many mornings a week. And as I do many mornings a week, I was
listening to music on my iPod while running. It was actually nice
listening to my iPod while running yesterday morning, as my iPod
contains no Christmas music, and while it IS the season for tunes
like that, it's just nice to get away from their omnipresent nature
for a little while.
Anyway, one of the songs that popped up
when I was running was Van Halen's “Beautiful Girls”. I haven't
heard the song for awhile, and the thing I first noticed was that,
for a Van Halen song, the guitar is really buried in the mix. I
mean, you can barely hear it at some times, which is weird when you
consider that the part is being played by one of the greatest guitar
players ever. There are times when the high hat (a cymbal) is louder
than the guitar, and it just seems strange to me that the song was
mixed that way.
I was still trying to figure out why
the song was mixed that way when the song neared its end, and David
Lee Roth sang a line. Now, normally I don't listen to Van Halen
songs for the lyrics—that would be like eating ice cream for
calcium content—but this particular line stuck out at me. The
line?
“Get your cell phone down”.
Now, that line in and of itself isn't
strange. There have probably been many songs with lines like “Get
your cell phone down”. It only becomes weird when you realize the
song was recorded in 1979, a full decade before cell phones even
became available to the general public.
Does that mean the members of Van Halen
were psychic when they wrote the song? That's what I was wondering
when I went back and listened to Roth sing the phrase over and over.
I mean, was it possible? Did the group's members have a wormhole
into the future, and brought back the concept of cell phones a full
decade before they came into use? Did they plant that cryptic line
in “Beautiful Girls” just so someone in the 21st
century would notice it and and then start to obsess about it, all
while running along the shores of Lake Superior on a gloomy morning?
Uhm, no. Upon listening to the line
for the 9th or 10th time I finally realized
that David Lee Roth was NOT singing the line “Get your cell phone
down”. Nope; after listening to the line for the 9th or
10th time I realized that was David Lee Roth was singing
was THIS line--
“Get your self on down”.
Go ahead, say it real fast to yourself.
See what I mean? While it may sound like “get your cell phone
down”, that's not what you're saying, and it's not what David Lee
Roth was singing. I, like people who have mis-heard lyrics for
decades, was hearing something that wasn't there. The members of
Van Halen weren't psychic. They didn't have a wormhole to the
future. They weren't singing about cell phones.
Oops. My bad.
Maybe I should just give into the
holidays and listen to Christmas music while running the rest of this
week. After all, you can't misunderstand lyrics in Christmas tunes,
right? I mean, they're simple, like in “Rudolph the Red-Nosed
Reindeer” when they sing about “Olive, the other reindeer”.
You can't mis-hear a line like that, right?
8-)
(ps—thanks for all the nice notes
regarding Friday's blog, another thing I discovered while running. I
appreciate them!)
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