Media Research Failure/Music

Who really wants research getting in the way of their rock & roll, after all?


 * The Ottawa Citizen described U2 as "a Brit band". Apparently, the editor of that paper forgot that since 1922, Ireland is no longer part of the United Kingdom.
 * In a very famous outtake, American Top 40 radio presenter Casey Kasem flipped out and ranted about U2; "These guys are from England, and who gives a shit?"
 * A recurring problem with Irish musicians (and indeed other celebrities). MTV has referred to Westlife as British (you would think they at least should know better).
 * "The Prince of Denmark's March" by Jeremiah Clarke is incessantly called "Purcell's Trumpet Voluntary". (The prince referred to is not Hamlet, but Queen Anne's husband.)
 * Near the end of October 2010, a French TV show commentator openly criticized Hatsune Miku. The Cowboy Bebop moment comes from the fact that when Tania (the commentator in question) talks about Miku, they broadcast a recording of a live performance, showing Megurine Luka. Afterwards, Tania proceeded to compare PoPiPo (one of Miku's most famous songs) with "Baby Lilly" & "René the Mole" (a pair of French phone ringtones), then proceed to call the former (PoPiPo) "horrific", all while openly mocking Miku. A Facebook group was formed shortly thereafter.
 * Beware the sinister cult of Emo! It refers to self-harm as an "initiation ritual" into the cult of Emo, and says that "The Black Parade" is a mysterious afterlife that Emo people believe they go to when they die -- instead of being the name of an album by My Chemical Romance.
 * To be fair, the album title does refer to the afterlife... specifically for the lead character of the Concept Album, as it's based on the idea that the afterlife reflects your strongest memory and said character's strongest memory being when his father took him to see a parade.
 * And it's especially fun since My Chemical Romance hates being called "emo."
 * A song by Local Anxiety, "Forgive Us, We're Canadian" was written when they got a review complaining about "too much Canadian content" in a political show.
 * When Snoop Doggy Dogg was on trial for murder, a local newscast referred to him as "Snoopy Doggy Dogg". Granted, the stage name was originally inspired by the Peanuts character, but...
 * A similar newscast insisted he was "Snoopy Dogg Dogg".
 * A broadcast of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade identified Snoopy as "Snoop Doggy Dogg". Figure that one out.
 * As if its actual musical credentials weren't already questionable, Rolling Stone created a bunch of confusion by claiming that Outkast's "Hey Ya" was in 11/4, an almost unheard-of time signature for a mainstream pop song. The more plausible interpretation (endorsed by The Other Wiki and other web sources) is that it's in 4/4 with occasional bars in 2/4.
 * To clarify why that throws Rolling Stone's musical credentials into a snit, not to mention the writer's ability to do math: combining measures of four and two gives tens or long threes (sixes, but divided differently) with possibly the occasional fourteen. (why not eights or twelves? they have their own rules, and if they don't follow them they're something else)
 * Rolling Stone probably got this wrong by counting the fourths in the verse - giving 22 (4x5+2) and then dividing by two (for no apparent reason).
 * During the controversy over Hasbro's plans to sell a series of Pussycat Dolls dolls, the watchdog group who started the campaign against them claimed in a press release that "Don't Cha" "alludes to group sex." Several media outlets picked up on this and made it sound like the song itself was about group sex. This all came as a surprise to people who'd actually heard the song. As near as anyone can figure, the supposed allusion is an extremely tortured interpretation of the line "I know she ain't gon' wanna share."
 * Kids in The Hall theme song creators "Shadowy Men from a Shadowy Planet" are often referred to as a "surf band". Hence, their song "We Are Not A Surf Band".
 * For high hilarity, check out the US media coverage of the rise of Beatlemania. When the first reports of The Beatles and their massive British success started trickling across the ocean, it was portrayed as some sort of quasi-religious cult centered around a bunch of untalented losers who sing "yeah yeah yeah" over and over. When they hit America, many people struggled to understand what made the music so different. It sounded like rock-and-roll, but everyone knew rock-and-roll was that 50s fad that ended when Elvis went into the Army.
 * The Ambassadors of Funk produced an album titled Super Mario Compact Disco, in which they sang rap-based tunes about the Mario games. Throughout the album, they mistakenly stated that Princess Daisy from Super Mario Land was Mario's love interest, and even worse, their song about Super Mario Land 2 claims that Wario has "got the Princess bound up as captive", despite the fact that neither Daisy nor Peach not any other princess was even in that game.
 * People keep on writing Meat Loaf's name as one word, when it's actually two.
 * His early promotional material flip-flopped on this as well.
 * The artist that appears to suffer from this trope most consistently is "Weird Al" Yankovic. A huge amount of humourous music, especially music available for download on P2P services, is misattributed to him. This is something of a sore spot with the artist. He has gone on record saying that he doesn't mind people sharing his music; but strongly dislikes the misattribution, mainly due to the lyrical content. Although a frequent user of Double Entendre, he still makes an effort to keep his work family-friendly. Interestingly, the majority of the mislabled songs are the work of another, almost as well-known, parody musician, Bob Rivers and his Twisted Radio show. Rivers' work is decidedly less family-friendly than Weird Al's; and often includes profanity and sexual references.
 * It's still common to see "The Legend of Zelda" attributed to System of a Down. The song is actually an Overclocked Remix song by Joe Pleiman, and System of a Down have denied having anything to do with the song in interviews.
 * In a similar bit, a great many weird German songs are attributed to Rammstein for no better reason than they are simply in German. Among the most Egregious offenders is a song called "Juden Hasst" ("Jew Hate"). They've been slammed as such a great many times, but it just bears repeating: Rammstein is not and has never been a pro-Nazi band.
 * All Germans Are Nazis, don'tcha know?
 * See also Music to Invade Poland To.
 * Dutch Comedian Frank van der Plas, AKA "Ome Henk", did a parody of Aqua's Barbie Girl that appears all over the internet as "Rammstein Barbie Girl Cover". It's not even in German.
 * Neither is the above mentioned "Juden Hasst", which is actually the beautiful song "Mladshaya Sestrenka" by russian band Lube and, guess what, doesn't have anything to do with jews or WW 2.
 * This isn't helped by the fact that some enterprising soul set recordings of Adolf Hitler speeches to Rammstein's "Sonne" and uploaded the result to P2P networks as "Vampire" or "Sieg Heil." The original song is just pure boxer entrance music.
 * The Brazilian network responsible for the Rock In Rio III broadcasts had some of those "about the band" blurbs. During Oasis' concert, it said "they've grown bigger than the band that influenced them, Blur". Not only the bands are contemporary, but they had a rivalry famously called "Battle of Britpop" (with Oasis' guitarist/songwriter Noel Gallagher going as far as wishing Blur's singer and bassist to "catch AIDS and die"). And to top it all off, neither band sounds anything like the other.
 * The book Encyclopedia of Indie Rock has several glaring errors in almost every entry, as if the authors had no clue what they were writing about. Among these:
 * Confusing which members of At The Drive-In formed the bands Sparta and The Mars Volta.
 * Including entries on James Blunt and Flyleaf, neither of which could be considered indie rock at all (the book's introduction tries - and fails - to convince readers that these artists are indie rock).
 * A passing mention that an associate of the band Camper Van Beethoven had recorded an acoustic version of "Pink Floyd's classic "Stairway to Heaven". Aside from the misattribution, this may be a mangled reference to Camper Van Beethoven's "Stairway To Heavan (Sic)", an instrumental that's completely unrelated to the Led Zeppelin song of almost the same name.
 * In the same entry, there is a reference to a "new" Camper Van Beethoven song called "Tusk" which "might be an allusion to the Fleetwood Mac album of the same name". This was apparently a mangled reference to the band's affinity of performing that entire album live during their shows, which they've been doing for several years.
 * Claiming that J Mascis left Dinosaur Jr. in 1988 (Lou Barlow was the member of the band to leave, and he was fired...by Mascis, who by 1994 was in fact the only original member remaining in the band until the original lineup reunited in 2005).
 * There was a mention that Dischord Records was founded in 1970 (ten years before it actually was) that can be attributed as a typo, but listing Neutral Milk Hotel's In The Aeroplane Over The Sea as being released in 2003 rather than 1998 has no excuse.
 * Chris Funk of The Decemberists appeared on The Colbert Report...OK, so far so good..."hosted by Stephen Colbert, star of the NBC dramedy The Office"...Uh, guys...wrong "Steve". They were on The Daily Show at the same time at one point which, without fact checking, might have been the problem.
 * Also...dramedy? The Office has no more dramatic moments than any other sitcom.
 * In the Sonic Youth entry, it's mentioned that Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore divorced in the early 2000s (Gordon and Moore split in 2011, but when the book was published, they had been married for over 20 years. The indie rock couple that divorced in the early 2000s was Robert Schneider and Hilarie Sidney of The Apples in Stereo)
 * The sentence "The Nine Inch Nails won a Grammy for their cover of Johnny Cash's classic song 'Hurt'". It was their song to begin with, Cash's version was the cover. Of course, since the release of Cash's cover in 2002, this has been an astonishingly common mistake by media types. Nine Inch Nails never received a Grammy for the song either.
 * Also, NIN plays industrial rock, not indie rock. Moreover, it's not a they.
 * A rare example of this being done on purpose, a report about Oasis on British radio station Radio 1 made several factual errors, including referring to the band as "The Oasis" (the band is just called Oasis, no The) persistently throughout. Unlike the other examples on this page, though, this was actually being done deliberately, almost like a public broadcast form of trolling.
 * The Partners in Kryme performed a Theme Tune Rap for the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. Apparently they were not familiar with the franchise, because their song labeled Raphael as the leader of the Turtles, when everyone who's so much as heard the theme song knows that position is actually Leonardo's.
 * On his Theme Time Radio Hour show, Bob Dylan said he was in talks to be one of the celebrity voices for GPS car navigation systems, but it was actually just a deliberately corny segue to introduce Ray Charles' "Lonely Avenue". After the show was broadcast in the UK, The Telegraph reported it as a serious news story, and the BBC, The New Musical Express, The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post all picked it up too. Of course, since this came just a few days after Dylan confirmed that he was releasing a Christmas album, this is an understandable mistake.
 * After they got tired of being asked why they picked the name Toto for their band, the members started claiming that it was in honor of the real name of lead singer Bobby Kimball: Robert Toteaux. Fine, except Kimball's real last name was actually Kimball. That didn't stop many reputable reference books from printing this "fact" for over a decade before it was finally cleared up.
 * Sound collage group Negativland pulled off a media stunt, effectively lampshading this trope. The Bay Area band self-released a falsified news article based around the David Brom murders, in which the 16 year old boy was convicted of murdering his family with an axe. Negativland released a report that stated, in essence, "Negativland has been forced to cancel a planned tour because their song 'Christianity Is Stupid' is suspected of being a catalyst in inspiring the David Brom murders." In truth, David Brom had likely never even heard of "Christianity Is Stupid", but within months the story was in newspapers across the country, and was even made into a special report on a Californian news station. They were forced to cancel their tour for external reasons: They simply could not allocate the money necessary to provide for a full tour. This "report" was spread with absolutely no fact-checking or research; The entire debacle can be promptly heard in an odd, documented form on a subsequent Negativland album, Helter Stupid.
 * Check out this amusing article by writer Ingrid Schorr. Who? She was the college girlfriend of REM's Mike Mills, and the inspiration for "(Don't Go Back To) Rockville". As she reports, her relatively minor role in the early years of REM and the Athens, Georgia alternative music scene got more and more distorted over the years because writers and journalists were copying and magnifying each other's mistakes, without bothering to simply ask her what the truth was.
 * Australian newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald did an article that quoted the lead singer of Australian rock band Short Stack, Shaun. Unfortunately, not only did they get his age wrong, the picture accompanying the quote was actually of another band member, Andy. Oops.
 * When the band Journey got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one newspaper covering the story accompanied it with a photo of a completely different band, Electric Light Orchestra.
 * Lampshaded by Pink Floyd in the song, "Have a Cigar"'. "The band is just fantastic, that is really what I think, oh, by the way, which one's Pink?"
 * According to David Gilmour, this was actually something that producer-types frequently asked.
 * This article about a concert of former Iron Maiden vocalist Paul Di'Anno uses a picture of his sucessor/current singer, Bruce Dickinson.
 * 2 Live Crew's album As Nasty as They Wanna Be raised a big controversy because of their infamous song "Me So Horny" which apparently had a 'graphic description of the destruction of a woman's vagina' in it. The line in question was "I know he'll be disgusted if he sees your pussy busted", i.e., deflowering a girl, not mutilating her privates. However, conservative groups, including Focus on the Family, failed to recognize it as a slang term, even though it's clear in the lyrics that the girl is consenting to all this and is just doing naughty things like many teenagers will do. In the end, this actually helped raise the group's popularity.
 * "We're Not Gonna Take It" by Twisted Sister was also a victim of the Moral Guardians where supposedly a boy was calling his father a 'disgusting slob' who was 'worthless and weak' and then blasting him out of the window. In the video, the FATHER was berating his son (a Shout-Out to the actor's previous role in National Lampoon's Animal House), and his SON blasts the father out by playing a loud note on his guitar. Nothing really violent there unless you think all those old Bugs Bunny or Popeye cartoons were violent. Then the boy spins around and turns into frontman Dee Snider. The rest of the family (besides the parents) turn into the other band members, and what follows is just a bunch of cartoon-ish hijinks where the father tries to get into the house and subdue Twisted Sister, only to either crash or fall out the window. No blood or anything - pretty tame compared to a lot of violent movies. The song itself isn't about violence at all either, but freedom and enjoying life without others dictating every aspect of it without reason. Focus on the Family, The PMRC and these other conservative groups really needed to do more research before protesting something that they deem wrong or evil. While they're at it, they should probably look up the definition of irony.
 * Tipper Gore led that charge, and she ain't a conservative.
 * The BBC radio show Woman's Hour once booked Ladysmith Black Mambazo to appear, under the misapprehension that they are an all-female group. In fact they originated in the town of Ladysmith, South Africa, and are all male.
 * The Guardian newspaper once did a feature on rock duets and commented that Clannad & Bono's duet Robin (The Hooded Man) was unsuccesful because fans of both 'did not give a friar tuck'. Robin (The Hooded Man) was a solo hit for Clannad, the duet with Bono was 'In A Lifetime' which was actually Clannad's most succesful hit. Still at least the Guardian got to make a pun which is the main thing.
 * In a review of a Pet Shop Boys concert, the reviewer attempted to sound politically correct, identifying two of the dancers as "African-American". The Pet Shop Boys, and their dancers, are British.
 * Breaking news: Chris Brown has decided to take a page from Chris-chan and try to regain his fame and attract girls with a special medallion close to his heart. No, it's not an OC, but a Kirby medallion. This is the Daily Mail's article on it. Apparently, Kirby is a cat Pokemon. The confusion is slightly understandable to a layperson: Kirby, for all intents and purposes, looks like he could be a Pokemon and is owned by Nintendo. So a connection was made by the dimwitted writers. But a cat? In the medallion, he's holding up his arms, which to a stupid person glancing at the picture, looks like cat ears. Sort of kinda not really.
 * A Finnish newspaper once reported to have unmasked the members of Lordi, and accompanied the article with a picture of none other than... Children of Bodom. (To be fair, they're both popular Finnish metal quintets.) Nobody still knows who they really are.
 * In Pitchfork Media's review of Zola Jesus's Stridulum EP, they constantly refer to Zola Jesus as a band (and saying "they" instead of "she") when it is in fact the solo project of Nika Roza Danilova.
 * Although you can't really blame anyone, Gnarls Barkley is a duo, not an actual person.
 * Chris Brown has been known for his R&B music and singing. After he had that incident with Rihanna, news reporters kept referring to him as a "rapper".
 * Timbaland invented dubstep. Well, according to him.
 * Lupe Fiasco planned to retire with LupE.N.D,. However, his contract required that he make 3 more albums before doing so. Fiasco has stated that he plans on releasing three albums, and then LupE.N.D. However...
 * Despite this, to this day, there are people who think that he's retiring after LASERS.
 * Or Food and Liquor II: The Great American Rap.
 * The true Fiasco timeline, if he plans to follow his words, is this: Food and Liquor, The Cool, LASERS, FnLII: The Great American Rap, TBA album, and then, and only then, LupE.N.D.
 * Another thing of Fiasco's fans is that they believe he disses Lil Wayne in nearly every song he writes that's against the mainstream. He's been seen onstage at Drake concerts.
 * The only rapper who Lu has actually dissed is Soulja Boy, by doing a subtle Take That of Crank That! and while at a concert referring to Soulja Boy as "a retarded cousin" while speaking of Hip-Hop like a big family.
 * Many music video stations, such as MTV erroneously credited Minutemen-spinoff punk rock band fIREHOSE as Firehouse, a glam metal band. A somewhat understandable mistake since there's only a one letter difference in their band names, but still...
 * At one time it wasn't uncommon for Moral Guardians to get Marilyn Manson's gender wrong.
 * One issue of Guitar World had a biography on Chuck Schuldiner from Death. One of the pictures in that biography was labeled "Control Denied at the Dynamo Festival, May 1988" even though Control Denied didn't form until 1996, and that two of the Control Denied members, Tim Aymar and Steve DiGorgio weren't present in the picture.
 * Metallic hardcore band Converge themselves pointed out an example of this in Terrorizer magazine. The band (who are almost all straight edge) answered the questions with joke answers and were surprised that they were accepted at face value.
 * David Bowie's groundbreaking 'Berlin Trilogy' is often referred to as being produced by Brian Eno. While all parties involved have noted Brian Eno's huge influence on the records, the fact is that the actual production was down to Tony Visconti. Tony Visconti himself has complained about how critics can't seem to be bothered to read sleeve notes which quite clearly state 'Produced by Tony Visconti & David Bowie'
 * Allmusic's biography for the country band Blackhawk says that their debut single "Goodbye Says It All" went to number one; it actually went to number 11, and the band never had a number-one hit on Billboard. The biography also says that the fourth single was "Wherever You Go" at number 10. While the fourth single did go to number 10, it was titled "Down in Flames", and it's not like there's any Refrain From Assuming issue that could have anyone possibly think that the song was called "Wherever You Go" — apparently the writer somehow got it crossed with Clint Black's "Wherever You Go", released around the same time. Strangely, the biography also fails to mention the (far more famous) number 7 hit "That's Just About Right", the last single from said album.
 * Similarly, their biography for Pirates of the Mississippi says that their debut album tanked, and that their second album was more successful with the hits "Feed Jake" and "Speak of the Devil". These songs were actually the third and fourth singles, respectively, from their most successful first album. They do correctly identify "Fighting for You" as a dud single from the (unsuccessful) second album, but make no mention of the far more successful "Til I'm Holding You Again" (their second biggest chart hit). You'd think they would be able to avoid mistakes like this, particularly since Allmusic also includes track listings and chart positions for most albums in their reviews...
 * They also have a habit of not doing simple checking through BMI and ASCAP databases for songwriters with similar names. This Tim James and this Tim James are combined into one listing on Allmusic, but two seconds in the BMI database would show them to be two different people.
 * Contrary to popular belief, Barry Manilow does not write the songs that make the whole world sing. That would be the spirit of Music, not Manilow himself. In fact, the very last line of the song is "I am Music, and I write the songs.". As Manilow is constantly at great pains to point out, he didn't even write that song; Bruce Johnston did.
 * And while Manilow did indeed work as a jingle writer for commercials back in the early seventies (he wrote the "Like A Good Neighbor" jingle for State Farm Insurance, among others), he is adamant about the fact that he absolutely did not write the famous "You Deserve A Break Today" McDonald's commercial; he only sang the vocal on it. Journalists who Did Not Do the Research are constantly claiming otherwise.
 * This article about Taylor Swift from a Christian website turns this Up to Eleven. For starters:
 * It claims that, in making the video for "Fearless", Swift "[lied] down on the floor, [rolled] around while wearing a negligee for some pervert's camera to film, and then put it on MTV for the world to see" when, in fact, the most suggestive part of the video is a shirtless man that appears for no more than three seconds.
 * It cites a Scripture verse claiming that miniskirts are sinful, despite the fact that Swift has never been seen wearing one.
 * It says that Miley Cyrus is primarily a Country Musician (again, wrong).
 * It says that "She's only successful because she's young, attractive and willing to strip virtually naked for the camera, period!" Cracked.com of all people got this right.
 * Indeed, that website has become rather infamous on various message boards for how insane and inaccurate it is. Many of its other articles contain other glaring inaccuracies, over-analyzing minor things, extreme fundamentalism (of the "women's pants are evil!" variety) and Bible-thumping condemnations of almost everything under the sun. There have been some mutterings that the site is actually a Stealth Parody because it's so unbelievable. Because there are so many examples of this trope on that site, we'll leave it at this blanket description instead of listing every little thing.
 * CNN once had a brief report on the video of "Bad Apple!!" - a song with a fairly convoluted history. To those who know the real story (or even a basic outline), it seems CNN gathered all of its facts from simply watching the video shown. As the comments show, it rather enraged Touhou fans.
 * Some sources have claimed that Navin Harris sang backing vocals on Olivia Newton-John's songs "Let Me Be There" and "If You Love Me (Let Me Know)". This "fact" stemmed from a piece of vandalism on Wikipedia that went unnoticed for two years. Mike Sammes was the actual backing vocalist.