Mispronunciations in music

My wife pronounces it "meer" also. Must be a Midwestern thing.

 

Ooooh, one of my pet peeves -- I hate when people pronounce "mirror" as one syllable ('meer') in order to make a rhyme or rhythmic fit.

 

I've never personally heard anyone pronounce it like that, and it's certainly not how "most" people pronounce it.

 

My fave, from "Coal Miner's Daughter":

The work we done was hard
At night we'd sleep 'cause we were tired (pronounced "tard")

 

it fits the song so perfectly, i absolutely love that line

 

The word "can't" is pronounced with a short "a" (like in father) in the following two songs:
The Rolling Stones - "You Can't Always Get What You Want" (when sung by the London Bach Choir during the first 50 seconds)
The Buggles - "Video Killed the Radio Star" ("We can't rewind/We've gone too far")

~Ben

 

Phil Collins could probably tell you why some people pronounce it that way.

 

Most? Over the years I've only ever heard a few people pronounce his name incorrectly.

 

In the deep south "tired" does kinda rhyme with "hard" (at least closer than it does anywhere else).

 

Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen manage a truly amazing mangling of the word 'etiquette' in their version of 'I Wanna Be Like You' -- it ends up as something like 'ettikeet' so that the last syllable can rhyme with 'feet'.

 

I am an anti-Christ
I am an anar-KYE-st

 

Yep, post #2 mentioned it.

 

You don't need to tell me twice to get out of that!

 

That's how "can't" is pronounced in UK English. It's "dance" / "dance" all over again (though so many English singers defer to US pronunciation with that one that it's less common than it should be.)

 

That one has always puzzled me, too - particularly as he had the song's author sitting opposite him in the control room as he put the vocals down.

Presumably, Jimmy Webb was too intimidated by Harris to offer his dissent - or maybe he liked it that way?

 

The Eagles - "Life In the Fast Lane" - Henley pronounces "cruel" as "cru-ell". Doesn't bug me at all, but definitely not the accepted pronunciation!

 

Which is the correct pronunciation of 'Bowie knife', at least.

 

But if you're aiming to produce a natural-sounding vocal line for an English-speaking audience circa 1980, it probably pays to pronounce the words in a way that's conducive to that, as opposed to being fastidious about the nuances of the pronunciation of a foreign name in a pop song.

 

"Massacree" is a real word -- albeit a dialect word -- that doesn't mean the same thing as "massacre." It's probably best known from the Arlo Guthrie tune, obviously.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/massacree

 

Manfred Mann's Earth Band's version of Blinded by the Light. "Like a deuce" is pronounced like a douche.

 

Base & bass.

 

Otherwise, you'll pretty much disallow any foreign names from being sung about, as different languages' sound systems are different. 'Arigatou' is five syllables and doesn't actually rhyme with 'Roboto'. Chuck Berry doesn' pronounce Beethoven's name anything like the German. Queen don't say 'Galileo' like the Italian. Falco should really have pronounced 'Toronto, Canada' like 'Tronno', even though he was singing in German.

 

Vasco Rossi mis-pronounces "rewind" as "ray-wind":

 

Also, the 80s Italo-disco act Radiorama inaccurately pronounced "Aliens" as "alliance":

 

I listen to a lot of bands from Sweden and you'll run across some interesting pronunciations when they sing in English. While listening to a song by Witchcraft the other day I noticed he added an extra syllable into the world "compliment" and it came out "comp-li-ah-ment".