Killing me Softly with Insults: On Hearing What You Want to Hear in Music

WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY TATI NGUYỄEN

WE APPLY OUR own meaning to songs as they become soundtrack to our lives—the atmospheric cue to a first kiss, the score to a Turneresque sunset, or the groove to a “dance on the bar” moment on the wildest night of our summer. They are beyond our objectivity, digging their vibrations indelibly into our brains, hearts, and hips, and we are forever changed.

Let's rewind a few decades to a quintessential Roberta Flack song. Released in 1973, Flack's Killing Me Softly with His Song was an instant classic. Flack heard the original 1972 Lori Lieberman version on a flight from Los Angeles to New York, listened to it multiple times, and determined to make it her own. Lieberman had written it after hearing Don McLean's Empty Chair, but the version that would shatter the charts belonged to Flack. I was not yet living in the United States when the Flack version reigned supreme over the AM airwaves, yet after being covered by the Fugees in the mid-1990s, both versions were now ubiquitous, and I was destined to collide with the song's irresistibly hooky chorus:

Wait. Did I hear that correctly? The actual lyric is (as you probably know) “Killing me softly with his song,” and I had no awareness of my error. Like many listeners, I was having a mondegreen moment. Mondegreen refers to the mishearing or misinterpretation of words, often in poems or lyrics. The 1954 term hails from American author Sylvia Wright, when she misheard the line of an 18th-century English poem “laid him on the green” as “Lady Mondegreen.”

For years, I never gave much thought to why I had adjusted the original Roberta Flack lyric to “killing me softly with insults.” Reflecting on the plot line of my romantic life at the time of the song's resurgence, it seems less foggy. Navigating the complexities of postcollege dating in a Brooklyn duplex, I traded my hard-earned independence for a promise of

“WHEN OUR BRAINS REPLACE THE ACTUAL LYRIC OF A SONG WITH AN ERRONEOUS SUBSTITUTION, IS THIS A MERE MISHEARING? OR IS SOMETHING MORE AKIN TO FREUDIAN PARAPRAXIS AT PLAY?”

intimacy with a boyfriend; let's refer to him as MC (for Man Child). Our coupled life became entangled in a chaotic living situation, complete with housemates. Within a few months of cohabitation, our bedroom became a convenient proving ground for his virility with a French au pair. Scarcely admitting his guilt, MC proclaimed that he was actually the victim; I was too busy pursuing my own creative endeavors via a short film tour to pay enough attention to his needs. Seducing another woman would make him feel better about his insecurity complex, and thus we could resume our living-together arrangement as if nothing wrong had happened. In hindsight, my use of the word “insult” seems tepid. Killing Me Softly did not have a lyric that sounded enough like “castrate” or “neutralize” to enter my mondegreen fantasy version. Schade.

When our brains replace the actual lyric of a song with an erroneous substitution, is this a mere mishearing? Or is something more akin to Freudian parapraxis at play? I don't need to consult The Psychopathology of Everyday Life to connect the dots on my mondegreen. A song is a reference point; a composition in conversation with oneself, and as the written message of a lyric permeates our being, we are prone to rebellious acts of creative rewriting and interpreting. Songs are perpetually recreated in the ears of the listener, and my twisted version of Killing Me Softly at the time of a tumultuous breakup certainly seems like a slip of the unconscious, a wounded expression of a betrayal of trust.

Observing mondegreen in other listeners can also be enlightening (or at least entertaining), like a Surrealist game of telephone where the original source is distorted though the sheer act of being shared. My husband tells a story from his childhood about a neighborhood friend with a brand-new Sony Walkman, the very first to hit the market. This lucky kid would strut the suburban Long Island streets with headphones on and radio blasting, singing along at the top of his lungs to the Beatles' “Strawberry Peels for Dinner” (Strawberry Fields Forever) and the Bee Gees' “Bald-Headed Woman” (More Than a Woman) to name a few of the mangled classics. Without more context, we have no idea where these bold recreations spouted from, or what vivid subconscious imagery might accompany the outrageous poetics. A riddle we'll never solve.

It's safe to guess that all misheard song lyrics do not exist on the same depth plane of a true Freudian slip. In the Mondegreen Hall of Fame, Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze (“'Scuse me while I kiss this guy!”) and Juice Newton's Angel of the Morning (“Just brush my teeth before you leave me, baby”) are so popularly misconstrued that they've become veritable clichés. Sometimes as listeners, we're just not paying that much attention. Although when our guards are down, aren't we potentially more susceptible to the rebellious eruption of subconscious lava? I'd like to think of songs as audio Rorschach, experienced uniquely by everyone, and open to deeply personal interpretation. Next time when listening, tune out to tune in. Free associate and the rest of your mind will follow. The raw power is not in the rational realm; music is a legal hallucinogenic. Listen fearlessly and let your wildest animals out of the yard. Taking a cue from Grace Slick:

Tati Nguyễn is a visual artist, storyteller, filmmaker, and arts educator; her multicultural perspective continues to shape her work. She holds an MFA from Cal Arts and a BFA from Cooper Union and currently works as the creative media specialist at Pratt Institute.

First published online August 2024.