2.05.2009

YOUR WHAT WILL DO WHAT?



One easy way to determine if your mind is unraveling is to simply answer the following question: Have you been left sleepless without the psychotically-intense acid nightmare-rock of The Mars Volta to coo you into peaceful slumber for, say, five straight nights this week? If you said yes, welcome to the tenuous final step on the descent into Batshit Insanity. But as I prepare to hop down and join the other gibbering troglodytes, I'm reminded of a previous brush with madness and TMV's role in bringing me back. 

We all know that most of the world's popular music is sung in English, but what might be news to native English speakers is that listening with a foreign ear results in hilarious instances of misheard lyrics. Wait that's not the right term; more accurately, the phonetics of English (or whatever) occasionally join to sound like a phrase in another language. Such was the focus of a recurring segment on this variety show in Japan. One week, a viewer submitted a tune from At The Drive-In's Relationship of Command, in which now-TMV vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala, though singing in English, appears to bellow "I'm not a fuckin' virgin!" in slangy Japanese. Along with the re-enactment, which depicted a scuffle among taunting junior high boys, that shit was a real knee-slapper. Wow it's much less funny in print. Fuck sorry.

But we can make up for the loss in translation with a similar occurance on The Mars Volta's 2008 return from suckiness The Bedlam In Goliath. Bixler-Zavala again delivers a direly-needed guffaw with a easily misheard lyric, this time in album finale, which has the incriminating title "Conjugal Burns." The correct lyric is "I got a pain inside that'll rip through the very fabric of time." But um it sounds like he says ... well, check out the crappy live clip of "Conjugal Burns" (above). If that's too muddled, get the goddamn record cuz it rules. Either way, ouch. And ha ha hahahahaha!


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