Excuse me while I kiss this guy

In my entire life, I’ve never met anyone who actually knew what the heck Aretha Franklin was singing about in the chorus of her song “Respect.”

 

Which is actually kind of impressive, when you consider the fact that “Respect” is one of those tunes everyone kinda knows, at least in passing. Over the decades, it’s become one of those ditties – like Elvis’ “Jailhouse Rock,” or the ever-painful “Gilligan’s Island” theme – that’s absorbed into the minds of first-world youths by some kind of mysterious osmosis, spreading with the alarming speed of a mutant virus. Babies born while the song is playing display a jaw-dropping acceleration of their linguistic skills, as they turn to their doctors or midwives and say, “Aw, change it already, I’m sick of this one.”

 

Most everyone, including fictional genius babies, know the words up to a certain point. “R-E-S-P-E-C-T / Find out what it means to me / R-E-S-P-E-C-T …” and then everyone just kinda shrugs their shoulders and mumbles something about greasy peas. For years I thought Franklin was singing, “Take down TCP,” but I never had any idea what a TCP was, or why it needed taking down. I just assumed she was singing about acid. Have you really listened to music from that era? They were all singing about acid.

 

It’s a famously confusing line, but the fact is that misheard lyrics are all over the place. Singers, especially in rock music, will oftentimes slur their words in order to squeeze a little extra juice out of the melody. Usually that’s all well and good, and in some cases preferable, since rock lyrics frequently range from embarrassing to oh-my-goodness-who-ties-your-shoes.

 

But when a song gets stuck in your head, and you’ve been singing it to yourself all morning, it’s helpful to know what the words are; otherwise your mind just keeps repeating the part it knows, like a skipping record, and before long you start to wonder what the straight jacket will feel like pulled taught across your chest. Catchy songs are the main culprits here, because not only are they designed to lodge deep inside one’s brain like an itchy splinter, but the vocalists of these bubble-gum tunes never seem to want to enunciate anything. Modern-day singers in particular sound as though some producer in the recording studio just woke them up out of a dreamy slumber. “All right, Gaga, snap out of it! You’ve gotta sing the second verse! That’s the one where you croon about having sex with the entire Venezuelan lacrosse team. Go!”

 

Thanks to the Internet, unknown lyrics are a less frustrating phenomenon. A few keystrokes, and you can finally figure out what Bono is babbling about in the chorus of U2’s “Mysterious Ways.” (Spoiler alert: It’s “She moves in mysterious ways,” not “Shamu the mysterious whale.”)

 

All too often, though, we’ll get the lyrics wrong without ever realizing it – at least until we’re called out in embarrassing fashion by someone with a better ear for slurriness. Case in point: My mother was a fan of country singer Kenny Rogers when I was a child, and she’d play his greatest hits collection on the old lumbering stereo unit in the living room while she did light housework. The song “Ruby” caught my ear one afternoon. Looking at the lyrics online just now, I see that the tune, rather oddly, is about a man pleading for Ruby to stay with him despite his having been paralyzed from the waste down in the Vietnam War. (Always a fun, jaunty subject for a country song.) As my six-year-old self was listening to it, I heard Kenny-boy mumble one final, barely audible line before the music faded into silence. The real line goes, “Oh Ruby / God sakes, turn around.”

 

Singing it out loud one afternoon, I belted what I thought the line was: “Oh Ruby / I’ve got six children.”

 

Like that would help his case any.

 

In all the times I had hummed that tune to myself, it never once occurred to me that I might be getting it wrong. On this occasion, though, my mother fell to the floor, laughing so hard I thought she might rupture important internal organs, and I thought, “Hmm, maybe it’s time to read the ol’ lyric sheet.”

 

To spare myself any further embarrassment, I finally looked up the long-misunderstood lyric to the Aretha Franklin song, which places me alongside roughly three other people who know what the hell she’s singing. Turns out I was only one letter off; the line reads, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T / Take down TCB.” The acronym “TCB,” says the all-powerful Internet, was once a popular abbreviation of the phrase “taking care of business.” Like a pre-email, pre-Facebook version of OMG, only incrementally less lame.

 

So that’s one mystery solved. Still unresolved is why TCB needs taking down, where it would be taken down from, or how one would go about taking it down in the first place. It’s a lyric that may not make any actual sense, but I think we can forgive Ms. Franklin this one time. We’ll just chalk it up to all that acid.