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Listening to Blinded by the Light is like a game of telephone, purple monkey dishwasher. I remember a skit on one of those short-lived Canadian sketch shows, Vacant Lot, where 4 guys are arguing about the lyrics to that song. “Ripped up like a douche, you’re gonna throw away the night.” The incomprehensibility of the lyrics unites people with a common bond. No one knows what the lyrics actually are, and never will.

But sometimes you do find out that that ludicrous lyric is not as you always heard it. It’s actually something much more plausible, and mundane. It’s so disappointing when that brilliant, nonsensical line in a song is just something trite, phoned in at the last minute.

For instance, in that Alanis Morrisette song, You Oughta Know, I always thought it went like this:

It’s not fair to remind me
Of the cross-eyed bear
That you gave to me.

I thought it was a poignant line about a toy the guy won her at a carnival. It painted a very sentimental picture to me. They’re having a fight, and he’s like “Come on, baby, remember when I won you that bear you wanted at the Skeeball booth? Then we went on the Ferris wheel and made out?” And she’s trying to stay mad at him, but he keeps reminding her of the good times. But then I found out it was actually this:

It’s not fair to remind me
Of the cross I bear
That you gave to me.

That sucks! I mistook ‘I’ for ‘eye’ and it changed the meaning of the lyric entirely! What was once quirky and vulnerable is now some grandiose statement about her suffering of biblical proportions. Ooh, she’s so burdened by the dude, and she can’t take it. Boo hoo.

Man, what a fucking bringdown.