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Songs whose title doesn't appear in the lyrics

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    #26
    Originally posted by Janik View Post
    That phrase gets spoken by a vocoder type thing as backing vocals, doesn't it?
    Ooh, really? I've never noticed if it does.

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      #27
      Apparently it's "I may be paranoid, but I'm not an android", so it's questionable whether it counts or not. Either way it's very much background and really indistinct, which is probably why the two key words are the only ones my ears resolve. Comes just after the first verse, IIRC.

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        #28
        Ah, I know the bit you mean. Cheers.

        Also by Radiohead:
        Pyramid Song
        The National Anthem
        Motion Picture Soundtrack
        Exit Music (For A Film)
        Kid A
        Idiotheque
        There There
        2+2=5

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          #29
          The Biscuit

          1966 and all that
          Lilac Harry Quinn
          Uffington Wassail
          Tyrolean Knockabout
          Surging out of Convalescence
          Fix it so she dreams of me

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            #30
            The Biscuit

            1966 and all that
            Lilac Harry Quinn
            Uffington Wassail
            Tyrolean Knockabout
            Surging out of Convalescence
            Fix it so she dreams of me

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              #31
              Randy Scouse Git - The Monkees
              Alternate Title - The Monkees

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                #32
                More Biscuit

                Upon Westminster Bridge
                On Reaching The Wensum
                Multitude
                Floreat Inertia
                M6-ster
                This Leaden Pall

                There's probably more. I'm slightly surprised how many of their tunes don't contain the title in the lyrics considering how wordy they are.

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                  #33
                  The Message - Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five

                  But there must be at least twenty million of these, no?

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                    #34
                    Atmosphere - Joy Division

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                      #35
                      About half of Simon and Garfunkel's oeuvre.

                      If we include anything called rhapsody, symphony, song (etc) we'll be doing this forever. Need some draconian rules, I reckon: utterly baffling/disconnected titles only.

                      Thankfully/Yorkshire is a good shout. No idea what that meant.

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                        #36
                        A majority of tracks on Therapy?'s Troublegum would count.

                        Originally posted by Janik View Post
                        White Rabbit includes both 'White' and 'Rabbit' but doesn't pair them up.
                        In the same subset, Metallica - Enter Sandman.

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                          #37
                          More Dylan :

                          Love Minus Zero/No Limit
                          She Belongs to Me
                          Bob Dylan's 115th Dream

                          It's All Right Ma, I'm Only Bleeding contains the 'It's All Right Ma' part in its lyrics but not the 'I'm Only Bleeding' part.

                          REM - So. Central Rain (though some versions of the title have the 'I'm Sorry' chorus line in brackets) and E-Bow the Letter.

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                            #38
                            Originally posted by tee rex View Post
                            If we include anything called rhapsody, symphony, song (etc) we'll be doing this forever.
                            Add Blues to that list. Subterranean Homesick and many, many others.
                            Last edited by Janik; 24-04-2018, 18:33.

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                              #39
                              Originally posted by tee rex View Post
                              Need some draconian rules, I reckon: utterly baffling/disconnected titles only.
                              Limiting the number was what I was going for back on page one with the 'don't have the song title but do have the album title' thing back on page 1 (Come On Eileen doesn't count as it falls on the first part of that, btw). So far we have only three I think [now four, see below], rather than dozens.

                              One related version would be songs that many people assume are called by their most famous lyrics but are actually called something else. Particularly if that something else isn't mentioned in the song. Things like Brain Damage also (wrongly) known as Dark Side of the Moon. Edit - Which would fit for both my sub-categories, of course.
                              Last edited by Janik; 24-04-2018, 18:51.

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                                #40
                                The Who's Baba O'Riley fits the thread criteria, and I've also heard/seen it misnamed as Teenage Wasteland, which does of course feature in the lyrics.

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                                  #41
                                  Originally posted by Janik View Post
                                  One related version would be songs that many people assume are called by their most famous lyrics but are actually called something else. Particularly if that something else isn't mentioned in the song. Things like Brain Damage also (wrongly) known as Dark Side of the Moon. Edit - Which would fit for both my sub-categories, of course.
                                  See also Good Riddance by Green Day, which many people assume is called 'Time Of Your Life'.

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                                    #42
                                    Ha, yeah, that. Not just don't know the title, but completely fail to understand the song which is dripping with contempt for its subject. The BBC used it as background music for a montage on Steve Redgrave after his fifth gold medal in 2000. Or at least I assume this wasn't a subtle message...

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                                      #43
                                      That song is often listed with the incorrect title added in brackets to it, in much the same way as Rupert Holmes' Escape (The Piņa Colada Song).

                                      The aforementioned Train in Vain was deliberately not titled with the chorus line "Stand By Me" to avoid confusion with the Ben E King song. Ditto 4 Non Blondes' What's Up, where they figured Marvin Gaye had already asked "What's Going On?".

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                                        #44
                                        Originally posted by tee rex View Post
                                        If we include anything called rhapsody, symphony, song (etc) we'll be doing this forever.
                                        Not necessarily, in those categories. The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony springs immediately to mind as one where the title is present and correct. And indeed if we look at Richard Ashcroft's solo output his very debut was called A Song For The Lovers, which also features in its lyrics.

                                        But yes, you're onto something in general there of course. Examples with non-appearing titles spring to mind from Song For Whoever to Song For The Siren to Love Song For A Vampire. There's definitely something to be said for narrowing the submissions down to titles that have nothing apparently to do with the subject matter at all – but then on the other hand it swiftly becomes just a thread about (probably obscure) song titles that are more or less weird for the sake of it.

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                                          #45
                                          Originally posted by jwdd27 View Post
                                          That song is often listed with the incorrect title added in brackets to it, in much the same way as Rupert Holmes' Escape (The Piņa Colada Song).
                                          Hang on, the full Green Day title is Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life), isn't it? I'm fairly certain it appears that way on the album tracklisting.

                                          More distressing though is how it seems to have appeared on the single sleeve, where the 'incorrect' bit is swapped to appear front and centre as the main title, with the (properly) unbracketed bit relegated to the brackets afterwards instead:

                                          Last edited by Various Artist; 24-04-2018, 22:44.

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                                            #46
                                            The idea of a sub-thread for lines "that people think are the title but aren't" is in principle a good one, though I worry where it could lead. On TV Tropes there's a page for these, which has probably literally hundreds of allegedly 'common' examples where you just want to bang your head against the desk crying "Oh come on, surely nobody can really think it's called that".

                                            Speaking as someone who slightly wants to throttle the speaker everytime I hear mention of, for instance, Tina Turner's song "Simply The Best" [sic], I end up in despair about how so many people could be so thick.

                                            Edit: found it – the page is wittily entitled Refrain From Assuming, because the phenomenon tends to apply to lines in the chorus. Baba O'Riley is the example used in the trope description. But as I say, you barely have to start into the alphabetical list before you encounter something like this:
                                            The Bryan Adams song is "Summer of '69", not "Best Days of My Life."
                                            Bananarama never made a song called "Your Desire" nor did they ever do one titled "Goddess on the Mountaintop" or "She's Got It". However they did cover Shocking Blue's song "Venus."
                                            "Eleanor Rigby" from Revolver is not "All the Lonely People" or "Look at all the Lonely People."
                                            blink-182: The band does not have a song called "Say It Ain't So." That song is called "All the Small Things."
                                            Blur's "Song 2" is often called "Woo Hoo" after the chorus.
                                            I mean, who really thinks these things? Really?

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                                              #47
                                              I can just about believe the Eleanor Rigby one has some prevalence. If you've only heard the song and never seen an album listing, that is what you would assume the title was. Or if your relationship with songs is simply to remember a tiny snatch of the chorus then it would probably distill to "Look at all the lonely people dum-dee dum-dee dum-dee dum-dee dum-dee"
                                              And Song 2 for that matter, which could well be known as that "Woo Hoo song that gets played at sports stadiums". I'll bet Seven Nation Army gets miss titled similarly or possibly is even thought of as an unnamed rhythm originally cooked up by Sports crowds wanting something as a basis for a chant.

                                              Oh, and TV Tropes appear to have done all of these already, don't they?

                                              VA, fair warning, look away now, it will save your head from exploding.



                                              On their non-appearing title page, it has this:- some people think Bohemian Rhapsody is called "Scaramouche".

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                                                #48
                                                The Chad Who Loved Me by Mansun popped up on the iPod this morning.

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                                                  #49
                                                  Queens of the Stone Age - You Think I Ain't Worth a Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire

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                                                    #50
                                                    Rockefeller Skank - Fatboy Slim.

                                                    This is relevant here in three ways:

                                                    a) It's a song that doesn't include the title within its lyric.
                                                    b) It's a song that sometimes finds itself mis-titled. (A friend of mine thought it was called 'Funk Soul Brother' until about three years ago.)
                                                    c) Quentin's already been getting a lot of mileage on OTF this morning.

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