Word imperfect

Singer-songwriter Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, known to have mumbled a lyric or two. (Frank Micelotta/Getty Images)

Internet giant Yahoo recently launched a new component of its popular music website that’s being hyped as the Cadillac of song lyric archives. In the past, lyric seekers have had to endure innumerable junky sites offering dubious transcriptions based on someone gluing their ear to a speaker.

Now, there will finally be a legitimate one created in co-operation with the big music publishers and providing accurate words to all your favourite tunes for free. Or so the claim goes.

As someone who has spent too many idle hours prowling the net to find out exactly what Kurt Cobain is singing in Smells Like Teen Spirit (was it really something about an avocado and a rhino?), I was elated by the news. Too often my forays into lyricland have been more annoying than enlightening. After braving a plethora of pop-ups as jittery and in-your-face as a used car salesman cranked up on Red Bull, I'd be left with several contradictory versions of a song, while in the process my computer acquired more spyware than James Bond.

I decided to drop everything and take Yahoo Music’s new lyrics machine for a spin. During my test drive I was looking for three key features: variety, comprehensiveness and accuracy. What I didn’t expect to find was some absurd Victorian-style prudery.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with …

Variety

The site’s main page boasts a Top 10 of the lyrics most searched, a not-surprising list of recent hits like the Fray’s How to Save a Life and Nelly Furtado’s Say It Right. What about those of us whose interests reach beyond the current AM radio fodder? Although I was tempted to go straight for the obscure, like the words to that masterpiece of mope, The Black Cassette by New York emo legends My Favorite, I decided not to expect too much right off the top and instead asked for the lyrics to Arcade Fire’s latest album, Neon Bible.

Seemed a fair request: an indie act, sure, but a hot one with a growing international fan base. The Montreal band’s songs are occasionally spiced with French — would Yahoo get them right?

It turned out that there was only one AF lyric on the site — the monolingual No Cars Go.

Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, whose songs are absent from Yahoo’s new lyrics service. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

OK, maybe I should stick to the mainstream. Here, I was more successful. I found lyrics to songs by Johnny Cash and Ozzy Osbourne, Beyoncé and David Bowie, Coldplay and Madonna (although her selection was pretty skimpy). But my search for Sting, who’ll be issuing his lyrics in a book in the fall, was a bust, only yielding some songs that he’d covered. Same thing with prolific Canadian icons Joni Mitchell and Neil Young.

How about Elvis Costello? Mr. Diana Krall also has a huge back catalogue to draw on, surely he’d be represented. Eureka! There was a long list of his songs, but when I began looking for a particular fave, 1982’s Beyond Belief — a torrent of delicious wordplay — it wasn’t there.

That started me on my test for …

Comprehensiveness

I immediately thought of R.E.M. There’s a band with another hefty songbook and, like Costello’s, Michael Stipe’s lyrics are the kind you want to scrutinize. Once again, though, all I found was a list of songs R.E.M. had covered. Getting frustrated, I skipped ahead a generation to Avril Lavigne, if only to see whether the transcription of Sk8er Boi also used those cute 8s. It was there, sans numerals, as were the other songs from her first two albums, but not from her latest, The Best Damn Thing. Are Yahoo’s lyrics providers a bunch of slackers, or was this about rights?

Gracenote, a California-based digital-media company, is responsible for building the Yahoo lyrics database and negotiating the licensing agreements with publishers. So far, it has about 400,000 lyrics by 9,000 artists, and boasts that it has forged deals with the big five: BMG, EMI, Sony/ATV, Universal and Warner/Chappell.

But obviously there are still Grand Canyon-sized gaps in its collection, whether you’re a fan of au courant pop tarts or major Gen X artists.

Curious, I e-mailed Ross Blanchard, Gracenote’s vice-president of business development, to ask him about the omissions. He told me the database is still a work-in-progress and there were a few reasons why some prominent artists' songs aren't yet there. “In some cases we have agreements with the applicable publisher, but still need to secure permission from the artist's management, the artist themselves or the artist's estate,” he said. “In other cases we haven't yet concluded licence agreements with their publishers, often for the same reasons.” He said Gracenote was expecting significant new signings in the near future. Fair enough. Now back to the website.

At this point I realized I’d been unwittingly ageist. What about all those internet-savvy grandparents? Would your web-surfing grandmother finally be able to savour the inimitable lyrics of Tin Pan Alley alumnus Neil Diamond? No dice, grandma. A search under his name brought forth none of Diamond’s diamonds — no Sweet Caroline, no I’m a Believer — just (sigh!) another selection of cover tunes.

One of them was Elton John’s Rocket Man, that wistful space-age ballad beloved of William Shatner and Stewie Griffin. I clicked on it, and discovered another flaw in the service. Namely …

Censorship

When Rocket Man comes to the line, “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids/In fact it’s cold as hell,” Gracenote gives us, “it’s cold as ****.” What? They’ve bleeped out “hell”? I hadn’t considered the lyrics might be censored.

How did they deal with hip hop? I quickly typed in “Wu-Tang Clan.” Sure enough, the clan’s seminal rap was so riddled with asterisks it looked like the PMRC had put out a hit on it. Ol’ Dirty Bastard must be turning in his grave. (Or should that be, Ol’ Dirty *******?)

Raekwon of the Wu-Tang Clan, rappers known for pushing lyric boundries. (Scott Gries/ImageDirect)

OK, I appreciate that a widely used website might shy away from printing the F-word and the N-word, but come on, “hell”? And it gets worse. Did you know that one of Iggy Pop’s best-known songs is called **** for Life? Yes, “lust,” the driving force behind 90 per cent of all rock songs, dare not speak its name on Yahoo. I felt as if I’d stumbled upon some Twilight Zone website from the 1950s. What’s the deal, Ross?

“A built-in filter ‘bleeps’ out explicit lyrics unless the user turns it off,” Blanchard explained. “Publishers flag explicit lyrics and Yahoo also does extensive searches to ensure that they are not seen by anyone who has this filter on.”

That got me thinking about the most notorious of all song lyrics — the legendary Louie Louie. The Kingsmen’s 1963 version of Richard Berry’s '50s R&B song, sung by marble-mouthed vocalist Jack Ely, became a frat-house classic thanks to rumours that its indecipherable lyrics were unspeakably salacious — at least for 1963. The song was even the subject of an FBI investigation, which came up blank.

Today, theoretically, all the G-men would need to do is go to Yahoo. Wrong. The real Louie Louie lyrics, which are, in fact, squeaky clean, can’t be found on the site, even though there’ve been endless cover versions. This brought me to my final criterion …

Accuracy

News stories on the new service focused on how listeners would no longer be bedeviled by lyrics mumbled, distorted or shrieked to the point of incomprehensibility. They usually cited bonehead mistakes. (Really, did anyone ever think Roy Orbison was singing “Only baloney”?) But the real test comes with cryptic lyrics that even repeated, sedulous listening has failed to untangle.

For this, I went to the songwriting supremo, Bob Dylan, whose oft-complex words, delivered in his trademark nasal whine, have baffled many a fan. I always used to wonder what the **** he was saying in the last line of the last verse of Precious Angel, one of those Dylan ballads replete with biblical imagery. The way I hear it, it goes: “Let us not be enticed/On the way out of Egypt, through Ethiopia, till the judge will holler ‘Cripes.’” Or something like that.

I found the song on Yahoo, but, lo and behold, it was stumped too, merely marking the phrase in question with “incomprehensible” in brackets. How lame is that? I went to the official Dylan website and, at long last, attained enlightenment. It’s “On the way out of Egypt, through Ethiopia, to the judgment hall of Christ.” Hey, let’s see a little more effort Yahoo! The answer was blowin’ on the net.

Clearly, the Yahoo database needs a major tune-up before serious lyric freaks are going to view it as the last word on words. My final search brought me back to Nirvana’s Teen Spirit, and this time, thankfully, they got it right: the Cobain lyric is “a mulatto, an albino/a mosquito, my libido.” Then I scrolled through the other Nirvana songs onsite to find another fave, Pennyroyal Tea from the chart-topping album In Utero. Was it there? No.

Oh well, whatever, nevermind.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites - links will open in new window.