“Kansas City”: a song about terrorism on Halloween?
If you look at lyrics on Spotify, you may end up confused
Recently Spotify added a feature that shows the lyrics to pretty much any song in the app. For many, but not all of them, the words are even synced up to the music so that you could sing along karaoke-style.
Not that I ever would, of course.
I was hoping that this would help me learn the words to songs that I like but have never taken the time to listen closely to all of the lyrics to. But…sometimes the lyrics in Spotify are…a little off.
Putting aside the fact that a lot of songs actually have published lyrics to them, I can completely understand when the person figuring out the lyrics mishears or mistypes something here or there. For example, I noticed right before posting this that for James Taylor’s song “Mexico” (yes I listen to old music!), the lyrics on Spotify say he sings “baby Jane” instead of “baby James” (referring to himself).
Sometimes it’s hard to tell what a singer sang. Sometimes even the singer doesn’t remember what the lyrics are! And sometimes Spotify gets it right.
This is what it looks like on Spotify. This is a grab of the only part of the song that’s fairly close to what he’s actually singing.
But other times, it’s obvious that no sane human has vetted the lyrics that appear on Spotify. And that’s the case for Paul McCartney’s live version of “Kansas City”, a classic song covered by dozens of artists over the years, including the Beatles.
When it came up on Spotify, I clicked to see the lyrics. Most of the words they have in there have nothing to do with what’s actually being sung, and many of them make absolutely no sense.
It’s like they ran the lyrics from an unknown language into English using Google Translate, then read it out loud to Siri for her to transcribe it and mess it up even worse.
And somehow, we end up with a song about terrorists, Halloween, and possibly crushing babies.
It’s true it’s a live performance, and Paul’s not enunciating well at all, but there’s no way anyone would seriously think these are the words.
Anyway, here’s a few ridiculous/funny examples and the link to the song on Spotify so you can have a listen for yourself, or if you search for Paul McCartney Kansas City live on other services, it should come up.
If it’s too small on your device, clicking here will blow it up for you (as in make it bigger, not explode it like the terrorists in the New Kansas City song might!)
So my advice is, if you want to know the lyrics of the song, try finding the artists’ website or at least googling them instead of looking on Spotify (and to be fair, it says at the bottom of the lyrics that the words are provided by Musixmatch).
Or if you have nothing better to do and want to “get too crazy”, pull up the lyrics on some songs that come up on Spotify and see what crazy things speech recognition and/or barely sentient humans think the words are.
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