Cowboy Be Bop At His Computer / Music

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

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• When Ace of Base performed in a Brazilian TV show, the host described them as "Rock of Sweden", when the music genre the group performs is actually Europop. The error can be justified as the group's name sounds similar to Motörhead's album/song "Ace of Spades".
• The Ottawa Citizen described U2 as "a Brit band". They're Irish, albeit with two England-born members being Adam Clayton (Irish father, English mother, born in Oxfordshire) and The Edge (Welsh parents, born in Essex).
  • In a very infamous outtake, American Top 40 radio presenter Casey Kasem, flustered by a bad take, flipped out and ranted about U2; "These guys are from England, and who gives a shit?" Ironic, given that the bio he was reading from referred to them as an "Irish band from Dublin" in the first sentence.
  • 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).
  • Possible confusion, since Northern Ireland is still part of the UK along with Britain, and Ireland is geographically part of the British Isles, the archipelago that consists of Great Britain, Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands and many other minor islands.
• Massimo Volume is an Italian post-rock band whose name means "maximum volume". However, Massimo is also a common name for people in Italy. When the Italian newspaper Il Giornale commented one of the band's tours in 2014, the description of a photo showed "Massimo Volume with his band" ("Massimo Volume con la sua band"). Actually, it was the singer Emidio Clementi in front of his bandmates.
• "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, Prince George of Denmark (and Norway).)
• 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 lot of articles have called Miku a "holographic idol" or something along those lines. The concert avatars are definitely not holograms—the glass screen they're projected onto isn't hard to spot in the videos—and Vocaloids were popular for years before any concerts featuring them took place, so it's an overly flat depiction.
  • A Yahoo News article reported about a Hatsune Miku concert in Paris... Except the picture shown was not Hatsune Miku, but IA, who's not only a completely different character, but also belongs to a rival company.
  • A Brazilian TV show introduced Hatsune Miku's character as a "little fairy", while showing a clip of Megurine Luka, and then used ryo's song World Is Mine to make a condescending joke about her popularity... When the lyrics are just about a girl who wants to be the center of her boyfriend's attention. The same show made more mistakes years later, referring to her as "Hatsoon Miku", a virtual singer made from "manga drawings and softwares that generate voices".
• 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."
    • The common media definitions of Emo itself, along with which bands do and don't fit into the genre, have caused enough online grief (especially for fans of older emo) to be considered a victim of this trope.
• 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 Dogg, then still known as 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.
  • Snoop even had a single called "What's My Name?", possibly to clear this up. However, in a predictable twist, people get the name of the song incorrect due to the titular question being asked at the end of the verses, and the chorus being the words "Snoop Doggy Dogg" repeated. Thus, many think the song title is "Snoop Doggy Dogg".
• 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, which is about a woman trying to make a man jealous. 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."
• The 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.
  • When other British groups like the Dave Clark Five, The Animals, Freddie and the Dreamers, etc. also had hits in the wake of Beatlemania, the US media tended to describe them all as having "the Liverpool sound" even though hardly any of them were from Liverpool. Besides the Beatles themselves, Gerry and the Pacemakers, The Searchers, and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas were the only bands of much note who were from there.
• 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: 6 Golden Coins claims that Wario has "got the Princess bound up as captive", despite the fact that neither Daisy nor Peach nor 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 funny music, especially during the days when music was 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, and never uses profanity or outright sings about adult situations, something other misattributed parody artists do frequently. Interestingly, the majority of the mislabeled 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.
  • There also seem to be a large number of people who believe that Yankovic's work consists of nothing but straight parodies of popular songs. While this does make up a large chunk of his work, he has never been a parodies-only artist, and in fact, even many of his parodies have parodied musical styles or approaches of some artists, rather than songs themselves. For Example "I'll Sue Ya" is a parody of Rage Against the Machine's style but not on one particular RATM song. Ditto "Germs" being a parody of Nine Inch Nails' style rather than (as people assume) being a direct parody of "Closer" or "Terrible Lie." "Don't Download This Song" is a parody of benefit songs like "We Are The World" and pokes fun at the recent hysteria of people being arrested for even so much as listening to a pirated song. Also, not all the songs he parodies are modern pop. The most prominent example is "Jurassic Park", which is about the popular film, but is set to the tune of "MacArthur Park".
    • Also, there are a number of people who believe "You Don't Love Me Anymore" is a parody of Extreme's "More Than Words". The video is a parody of the video for said song, but the songs themselves are nothing alike.
  • The All Music Guide writer assigned to review Poodle Hat apparently didn't take the time to listen to "A Complicated Song" past its first chorus - the review derides the song for its Toilet Humor in a way that implies that it sticks to that theme throughout... when the gimmick of the Song Parody is that it wildly changes subjects in every verse - the first time around, the title drop is replaced with "constipated" as quoted in the review, but the second verse is about a couple suddenly finding out they're Kissing Cousins ("we're related"), and the final verse is about a roller coaster accident that's played for gory humor ("decapitated").
• Super Ghostbusters: The track "Ghost Bus-Ters" claims Ghostbusters (1984) came out in 1986. The video captions call Joel out on this.
• 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.
• A great many weird German songs are attributed to Rammstein for no better reason than they are simply in German; sometimes songs are attributed to them that are not even German at all. For example, Dutch comedian Frank van der Plas, AKA "Ome Henk", did a parody of Aqua's "Barbie Girl" in Dutch that appears all over the internet as "Rammstein Barbie Girl Cover". Among the most egregious offenders is a song called "Juden Hasst" ("Jew Hate"), which is actually the song "Mladshaya Sestrenka" by Russian band Lube and, guess what, doesn't have anything to do with Jews or WW2. 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. Quite they opposite: they're anti-authoritarian leftists. Of course, this message never seems to get through to some people. It doesn't help 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. See also All Germans Are Nazis and Music to Invade Poland to.
  • For years a Dutch music magazine was unable to grasp the fact that the name of Rammstein's drummer is Christoph "Doom" Schneider, and for many publications referred to him as Horst Schneider instead.
• 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 are the bands 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.
• Thanks to Saturday Night Live's famous "More Cowbell" sketch, there are a lot of people who believe Gene Frenkle was a member of Blue Öyster Cult, and that they had an album produced by a legendary rock producer named Bruce Dickinson. Frenkle was completely made up (as should be obvious because Blue Öyster Cult never had a permanent "cowbellist") and there also isn't a legendary rock producer named Bruce Dickinson (and no, he was not supposed to be the Iron Maiden lead singer), but there was a Bruce Dickinson who was a mid-level manager at Columbia Records. However, he didn't produce "(Don't Fear) The Reaper." The song was produced by David Lucas, Sandy Pearlman, and Murray Krugman. Dickinson's name appears on Blue Öyster Cult reissue CDs and a greatest hits compilation as the "reissue producer." Lucas has claimed credit for being the one who suggested the addition of a cowbell to the track.
  • In a case of Misattributed Song, there's a strange misconception in some corners of the Internet that the Blue Öyster Cult recorded "Ballroom Blitz". The fact that British glam-rockers the Sweet recorded this and had the hit single does not stop it being attributed to the BOC. Nor does the fact it was written by another songwriting team ^note Chinn and Chapman stop it being credited to Eric Bloom and Donald Roeser. OK, it sounds like something the BOC might have recorded or at least covered live - but they've never been anywhere near it. Consider the opening lyrics, strange for a band whose members are called Eric, Buck, Allen, Albert and Joey. Mick, Andy and Steve are, in reality, the first names of the Sweet.
  Are you ready, Steve? Aha.
  Andy? Yeah! Mick? OK.
  Alright, fellas, let's Go!!
• 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, or if it was written as a Stealth Parody of "know-it-all" trivia books. 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 the band Camper Van Beethoven had recorded a cover of "Pink Floyd's classic 'Stairway to Heaven'." Camper Van Beethoven's self-titled album includes a cover of Pink Floyd's "Interstellar Overdrive" and a track called "Stairway To Heavan", but it seems that the author didn't even listen to or look up the copyright information on the latter song - it's an original instrumental that isn't even a cover of the Led Zeppelin song they incorrectly attribute to the Floyd.
    • In the same entry, the author messes up the release dates and order of release for the albums Camper Van Beethoven, Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart and Key Lime Pie. Key Lime came out in 1989, and the book gets that right, but it believes the self-titled came out in 1993 (it was released in 1986) and Sweetheart in 1995 (it was released in 1988). Baffingly, the book gets the band's 1990 disbanding date correct, which leads one to assume that the author thought the band released two phantom albums after their breakup.
  • 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, hosted by Stephen Colbert, star of the NBC dramedy The Office." Uh, guys... wrong Steve. The two were on The Daily Show at the same time at one point which, without fact checking, might have been the problem. Also note that the book calls The Office a "dramedy" - the show has no more or less dramatic moments than a regular sitcom.
  • In the Sonic Youth entry, it's mentioned that Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore divorced in the early 2000s (Gordon and Moore broke up in 2011, after the book was published.).
  • The sentence "The Nine Inch Nails won a Grammy for their cover of Johnny Cash's classic song 'Hurt'" has an amazing number of errors. Nine Inch Nails' name has never been spelled with a "the", "Hurt" lost the Best Rock Song Grammy to Alanis Morissette "You Oughta Know", the band is just one guy, not a "they"^note Or, at least it was at the time, until 2016, and most importantly, Cash's version was the cover. Of course, since the release of the very popular Cash cover, this has been a very common mistake in journalism, despite the fact that it being a cover was well-publicised. On top of that, Nine Inch Nails is an industrial rock act, and so should be irrelevant to an "Indie Rock" encyclopedia.
• 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.
• This was also done on purpose by a DJ on Australia's Triple J during the 1998 Hottest 100 of All Time. Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" from Physical Graffiti came in at number 63, but he introduced it as "Communication Breakdown", explaining after the song finished that he did it to see how many irate Zeppelin fans would call up to correct him. The answer was many.
• The Partners in Kryme performed a Theme Tune Rap for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990). 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.
  • Toto seem to have a habit of acting as Trolling Creators with the press; in 1992, they claimed (likely to protect his privacy) that drummer Jeff Porcaro died as part of a "bizarre gardening accident", a Shout-Out to This is Spın̈al Tap. In 2003, the band announced, as a joke, that keyboardist/vocalist David Paich would undergo a sex change and would now be referred to as "Davida Paich". Naturally, the media would pick up on both stories as the truth.
    • For some godforsaken reason, a similar rumor was spread about John Mellencamp in the late 1990s.
• 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 charged, later 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 and they've been told by law enforcement not to leave the state." In truth, David Brom had likely never even heard of "Christianity Is Stupid"^note Friends and family noted that David had often argued with his parents about religion and music, so Negativland simply said they'd been arguing about "Christianity is Stupid" on the fatal night., but within months the story was in newspapers across the country, and was even made into a special report by Hal Eisner on San Francisco's KPIX-TV. 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 repeated on nationwide television, radio, newspapers and magazines with absolutely no fact-checking or research^note they may even have been called by a reporter trying to get a statement for Rolling Stone; The entire debacle can be promptly heard in an odd, documented form on a Negativland album, Helter Stupid.
• Check out this amusing article by writer Ingrid Schorr. Who? She was the college girlfriend of R.E.M.'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" from Wish You Were Here (1975). "The band is just fantastic, that is really what I think, oh, by the way, which one's Pink?"
  • Richard Wright even said, "it sounds like a weak joke, but it used to be a fairly common question."
• This article about a concert of former Iron Maiden vocalist Paul Di'Anno uses a picture of his successor/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.
• Deliberately Played for Laughs in Hot Dad's alternate theme song for The Simpsons, which switch Bart and Homer's roles and refer to Lisa and Maggie as twins.
• "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.
• 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 in the United States, the critic identified two of the dancers as "African-American", probably just out of habit. The Pet Shop Boys, and their dancers, are British.
• Chris Brown has been known for his R&B music and singing. After he beat the hell out of Rihanna, news reporters kept referring to him as a "rapper".
  • Chris Brown later donned a Kirby medallion. This is the Daily Mail's article on it. Apparently, Kirby is a cat Pokémon. The confusion is slightly understandable to a layperson: Kirby, for all intents and purposes, looks like he could be a Pokémon and is owned by Nintendo. So a connection was made by the uninformed writers. But a cat? In the medallion, he's holding up his arms, which to a person just glancing at the picture, looks like cat ears. Sort of kinda not really. This has since been edited - to remove the references to Pokémon; they still refer to Kirby as a cat.
• Chris Brown isn't the only Black R&B singer who has been incorrectly referred to as a rapper. This even extends to musicians who perform styles like reggae or rock and is typically done by outlets who don't have regular entertainment or music writers to fact check. Among the singers wrongly called rappers in the past include Frank Ocean, Miguel, and, perhaps most inexplicably, Usher. Indie rock singer Santigold is also often erroneously referred to as a rapper. Even Lenny Kravitz, well known for being a psychedelic rock and soul singer and who has never performed hip hop, has been incorrectly called a rapper by some websites.
  • Even Prince has been labeled "hip-hop" or "rap" by some labels. Prince was definitely in the pop-rock genre, though in all fairness he did incorporate other urban styles.
• 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.
  • Former keyboarder Enary did temporarily replace Janne Wirman on a Children of Bodom tour in 1998 under her real name Erna Siikavirta while she was already a member of Lordi.
• 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 a solo act.
• Something similar happened to Body Count after the "Cop Killer" controversy: Body Count were a Thrash Metal / Hardcore Punk group (albeit one fronted by rapper Ice-T) but once the song's lyrics caused a furor, the media often referred to the group as "gangsta rap".
• 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 him as "a retarded cousin" while speaking of Hip-Hop like a big family.
• Many music video stations, such as MTV erroneously credited Minutemen spinoff alt-rock band fIREHOSE as Firehouse, a glam metal band. A somewhat understandable mistake since, excluding the former band's unique capitalization of their name, there's only a one letter difference in the two 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' (comprised of Low, Heroes and Lodger) 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 (one of Bowie's most frequent and acclaimed producers). 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'.
  • David Bowie's NSFW video for "The Next Day" in 2013 warped Catholic imagery to grotesque, ultimately tongue-in-cheek ends. This made headlines in England as Moral Guardians were agog, and a former Archbishop of Canterbury said "I doubt that Bowie would have the courage to use Islamic imagery — I very much doubt it." Actually, Bowie did that in "Loving the Alien", a safe-for-work video for a song specifically about Christianity and Islam and the conflicts therein, in 1985...with not a peep raised in the press.
• invoked The Allmusic biography for the country band Blackhawk originally had several errata, almost all of which were later fixed. The original bio said that their debut single "Goodbye Says It All" went to number one on the Billboard country charts. It actually went to number 11, and the band never had a number-one hit on Billboard. It can't even be explained away as referring to a non-Billboard chart, as "Goodbye" got to #9 on Radio & Records, Gavin Report, and Cash Box. The revised (and far more accurate) biography still claims that the song was a "chart-topping debut", but this can at least be handwaved as a more vague and metaphorical phrase. The original biography also said 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 there's no possible Refrain from Assuming issue that could have anyone thinking that "Down in Flames" had any other title, nor any possible way to confuse it with Clint Black's "Wherever You Go", released one month later. Finally, there was absolutely mention of the album's last single, "That's Just About Right", which became their Signature Song. The revised biography correctly identifies both "Down in Flames" and "That's Just About Right".
• Allmusic's 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 first album, which was also their most commercially successful. They do correctly identify "Fighting for You" as a dud single from the second album, but make no mention of the far more successful "Til I'm Holding You Again" (their second biggest chart hit) from the same. Given that Allmusic also has track listings for most artists' albums, you'd think they'd be able to correct this.
• Allmusic's biography of Da Yoopers claims that Jerry Coffey and Dave "Doc" Bradbury joined as bassist and percussionist, respectively, on their 1987 album Camp Fever. While it was their first album to feature Jerry Coffey, he was the percussionist. Joe DeLongchamp (who is not mentioned on Allmusic's article at all) played bass on that and 1989's Yoop It Up, with Bradbury replacing him for Yoopy Do Wah in 1991. The article also makes no mention of the membership changes after Jim Bellmore replaced Joe Potila as lead guitarist/main songwriter in 1995 (specifically, Dan Collins joined as rhythm guitarist and Bradbury quit, so Bellmore played both guitar and bass on We're Still Rockin' in 1996). The entry has also not been updated since then, as it makes no mention of the membership changes after that point (Reggie Lusardi and Bobby Symons became touring bassist and drummer respectively just before the release of 1999's Jackpine Savage, although studio albums usually kept founding member Jim DeCaire on drums and had Bellmore continue to play both guitar and bass; in addition, both Coffey and Collins quit one album later). It also claims that "When One Love Dies" from Yoopy Do Wah was the first "serious" song from the largely novelty-driven group. However, two songs on their debut ("My Shoes" and "Critics Tune") are unquestionably "serious", and cases could be made for a few more after that.
• Allmusic strikes again; for a long time their entry on legendary gospel group the Gaither Vocal Band stated that the band was founded in 1990 by Bill Gaither, Mark Lowry and Michael English. Literally none of that is true. The GVB was formed in 1982, nearly a decade before becoming the face of the Gaither Homecoming videos, and had numerous members come and go during that time, including several big names in gospel, inspirational and Christian Rock, such as Steve Green, Gary McSpadden, Larnelle Harris and Jim Murray. Michael English joined in 1985, while Lowry wouldn't join until 1988. While the GVB's popularity didn't explode until after both men were with the group, the actual founding four were Gaither, Green, McSpadden and Lee Young.
• 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.
  • Todd in the Shadows said that he was well aware that the song is actually sung from the POV of music itself… but that doesn't stop him from thinking that the song is incredibly egotistical.
  • 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, and is the Trope Maker for Stuck on Band-Aid Brand), 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 failed to research are constantly claiming otherwise.
• 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.
• For several years, the Myspace page for Australian alternative electronic group Midnight Juggernauts sarcastically listed their location as "Afghanistan" (though many on social network sites list "Afghanistan" as their country because it's the first entry in the box and they're too lazy to change it). MTVu promoted airings of their 2008 video for "Shadows" as apart of their "Freshman 5" new videos programs by playing up the fact that the band were supposedly from Afghanistan. You'd think that whoever was in charge of the show would have taken a look at, say, the band's website or Wikipedia page for more information on the band, but alas, they did not.
• A particularly egregious example happened to Mutya Keisha Siobhan at the Q Awards in October 2012. The group were originally the first lineup of Sugababes, something the interviewers were keen to play up when grilling the group. However, on the webcast, the caption not only referred to MKS as the Sugababes, but they spelt it as Sugarbabes.
  • Another example involving that particular lineup was when Keisha was interviewed for a TV show. The continuity announcer said that Keisha left in 2005, when it was actually Mutya who left in 2005. Keisha left in 2009.
• A 1967 article about groupies in the early rock magazine Cheetah included a section set at the house of Micky Dolenz of The Monkees describing him practicing ("flailing away") on his drums by playing along with a Beatles album. "Even though it is a fairly slow song, he can't...quite...keep the beat." Disgraceful! Except, the "fairly slow song" was "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds", which has verse and chorus in different tempos and some sophisticated cymbal work. Not to mention that Ringo Starr had the benefit of multiple takes and overdubbing to perfect his part in the studio.
• Manchester band The Smiths used an image of actor Joe Dallesandro in a cropped still from the 1968 film Flesh, directed by Paul Morrissey, for the cover of their debut album, The Smiths in 1984. A few months later, on an appearance for kids TV show Data Run by the band's songwriting duo (Steven Patrick) Morrissey and Johnny Marr, singer Morrissey was wrongly credited as 'Paul Morressey', which is even an incorrect spelling of the director's surname.
• Cracked refers to Richard D. James as "the founder and sole member of alternative rock band Aphex Twin". While they are correct that Aphex Twin is one person, he is not considered a "band" and his music is neither alternative rock nor any sort of rock; he makes electronic ambient music.
• Black Metal musician Varg Vikernes referred to the Thrash Metal group Venom as "the American Motörhead". Any true metalhead knows well that Venom and Motörhead are both from England. Talk about ignorance towards your own genre's origins...
• At the release of the documentary about their final concert, a movie website referred to LCD Soundsystem as an English band, even though they had written a song ("North American Scum") specifically about the fact that they're American and not English.
• When Slayer's Jeff Hanneman passed away, several newspapers wrote an obituary that featured the image of Gary Holt, the band's backup guitarist during Hanneman's recovery.
  • Also, Slayer is NOT death metal!
• Several sources have said that Blake Shelton's "Sure Be Cool If You Did" was co-written by Nicolle Galyon (a contestant on The Voice, of which Shelton is a judge). It was actually co-written by her husband, Rodney Clawson, who is a prominent Nashville songwriter. At the time, Galyon did not have her name on any notable singles, but she would later write several major hits in her own right.
• Bob Kingsley, formerly of American Country Countdown, has made his share of mistakes on his own show, Bob Kingsley's Country Top 40. Besides the aforementioned Clawson/Galyon gaffe when "Sure Be Cool If You Did" was climbing the charts:
  • He sometimes has a tendency to conflate Billboard and Mediabase data (the countdown show uses Mediabase), thus leading to conflicting information on where an older song peaked; notably, this frequently threw off George Strait's tally of #1 hits. Averted the week Strait's "Give It All We Got Tonight" went to #1 on Mediabase, where Kingsley went out of his way to clarify that it was his 60th #1 hit on all country singles charts, past and present (including Billboard, Mediabase, and the defunct Radio & Records and Gavin Report).
  • Somehow, he credited Joe Nichols' "Believers" as being written by Phil Vassar and Craig Wiseman instead of Ashley Gorley, Wade Kirby, and Bill Luther. One wonders how he would even make this mistake, as Vassar has had almost no outside cuts since beginning his own singing career in 1999.
  • On a show in December 2012, he mentioned George Strait's 2002 single "She'll Leave You with a Smile". However, it turns out that George had previously cut an unrelated song of the same title in 1997, which was never a single, and that was the song that Bob played instead. To his credit, Kingsley acknowledged the error on a later show and played the right song.
  • In September 2013, he pointed out that Lee Brice's "Parking Lot Party" had just entered Top 10, and that Brice had made exactly three prior trips to the Top 10, all of which resulted in a #1. Bob forgot about "Love Like Crazy", which came before any of those three trips, and only resulted in a peak of #3.
  • On one show, he referred to Jason Michael Carroll as "John Michael Carroll" three times. Perhaps he was thinking of John Michael Montgomery?
• While Jay Kay is the band's front man, it doesn't explain why British newspapers often call him "Jamiroquai".
  • It's likely to be because British tabloids think all pop musicians whose names don't indicate they are bands are solo artists. Given that Jamiroquai have been going at it for 21 years now, there is not exactly an excuse.
• Way back in 1976, a great many newspapers across the globe (but especially in the UK for some reason) came across Rush's breakthrough album, 2112, wherein the entirety of side one was taken up by a 7-movement piece with a runtime of 20 minutes, 33 seconds, about an oppressive dictatorship run by the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx called the Solar Federation well after humankind has left the world destroying the spirits of a young guitar prodigy, with a clear moral about individualism vs. uniformity and totalitarianism. The original pressings featured liner notes with an acknowledgement of Ayn Rand, whose work inspired the story heavily. The tabloids began running with this, calling Rush (and especially drummer/lyricist Neil Peart) everything from right-wing to fascists to Nazis. If they'd just asked the band, they would find that not only is singer/bassist Geddy Lee (birth-name Gary Lee Weinrib) Jewish... his parents were both Holocaust survivors. (Not to mention the fact that Rand was also Jewish.) Later vinyl pressings and CD releases removed this credit from the liner notes to avoid stirring up further controversy.
• When Silva Gonzalez of Hot Banditoz was a contestant on the German version of I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! he got the melody of their own latest song wrong. The melody wasn't even new, they had taken it from one of Sash!'s hits.
• When Franky Gee, then-frontman of Captain Jack, died, it was widely reported that "Captain Jack" had died. Captain Jack is actually a group built around an eponymous character (who isn't even prominent in all of their songs), and Franky had already been the second person to portray him. Not completely surprising as he had been doing so for almost a decade whereas his predecessor had retired after the first hit, but the misinformation had apparently already been in the press release by the record company, who should really have known better.
• In 2014, Paste magazine reviewed Television's set at the Big Ears festival and claimed that guitarist Jimmy Rip joined the band in 2007 after the death of Richard Lloyd. Lloyd has been pretty active in social media and the press for a dead guy; he actually left the band over personality clashes with Tom Verlaine.
• Courtney Love is still sometimes referred to as Kurt Cobain's girlfriend despite the fact that the two were together longer as a married couple than unmarried.
• Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" isn't the only song that's ever been misattributed to Johnny Cash; in a review of Marilyn Manson's Best Of collection, an Australian newspaper referred to "Personal Jesus" as a cover of a Cash song. It is in fact a cover of a Depeche Mode song that Cash covered alongside "Hurt" and other songs on American IV two years earlier, giving rise to the same misconception.
• During the Revolver Golden Gods Awards, a Heavy Metal awards show, Zakk Wylde played his song "In This River" while a montage dedicated to deceased musicians was projected onstage... Except strangely, the late Warrant vocalist Jani Lane was listed as being a member of Motörhead. The flub was apparently a case of bad graphic editing, not bad research - Würzel, who actually was a Motörhead member, was also included in the montage, so presumably someone was working off a default template for the image captions, and forgot to replace "Motörhead" with "Warrant".
• When Ronnie Hazlehurst died in October 2007, part (if not most) of the "research" done by media into his life was to check his Wikipedia article — which had been vandalised a few days earlier by someone inserting a claim that he had co-written "Reach" by S Club 7; and this hoax formed a prominent part of most published obituaries. See the article talk page for discussion.
• At least one recording of the Third Brandenburg Concerto claims to be of the "First and Second" movements. As just about any Baroque fan knows, even if their knowledge consists mainly of reading the sleeve-notes to Wendy Carlos' Switched-On Bach, when Bach wrote the Third Brandenburg he only wrote First and Third movements (and a placeholder cadenza to stand in for the Second, the idea being that the musicians were supposed to improvise, or otherwise interpolate, something). Needless to say, the so-called "Second" movement in that recording is actually the Third, which is very clearly in the style of a third movement, not a second.
• One chain-letter on the theme of "God is not mocked" had as its first example John Lennon's notorious interview in which he is misquoted as claiming that The Beatles were "bigger" or "better" than Jesus; his "subsequent" assassination was supposedly "the wrath of God". There are several things wrong with this that anyone with the slightest knowledge of the incident can spot:
  • What Lennon actually said was that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. Decades later the Vatican even agreed with this.
  • Lennon's statement was sarcastic; what he was having a go at was not God, Jesus or even Christianity as such, but the kind of idiot who takes things far too seriously. Plus he was speaking about the decline of organized religion in a specific context understandable to Brits but virtually unheard-of in America.
  • Lennon's assassination occurred nearly 15 years after that episode; if it were God's vengeance, one would expect it to be much more prompt than that.
  • Lennon publicly apologised for the remark shortly after making it; so its inclusion on this list said far more about the list author's prejudices than it did about Lennon. (Evidently the author believed in "God is not mocked" but not in "repent and be forgiven"; yet another case of a person using the Bible to bash people being very selective about which parts of the Bible they choose to bash people with.)
  • Similarly, many writers give John's death date as late in November (possibly confusing it with JFK's death date of November 22nd). It was December 8th.
• In 2002, there was released as a supposed "tribute to George Harrison", Big Beat Box which was a compilation DVD of various news clips of The Beatles, plus a CD of Beatles cover versions by tribute group The Overtures. Track 1 of the CD was "In Spite of All the Danger", claimed to be a "re-creation of a lost John Lennon composition". There were several things wrong with this:
  • The supposed "lost" track had been released on The Beatles Anthology 1 seven years earlier.
  • It sounded nothing like the supposed "re-creation".
  • The actual Beatles track was McCartney/Harrison, not Lennon.
• A 2014 interview with some of the members of Genesis had the interviewer claim that Phil Collins was one of the group's founding members. In actuality, the band released one or two albums^note depending on whether or not you count From Genesis to Revelation as an official album before he joined.
• Piero Scaruffi has notoriously criticised The Beatles, on the grounds that they only wrote meaningless three-minute pop ditties; their more imaginative peers disliked them and resented their success; they took other people's innovations and dumbed them down for the general public while having no real influence of their own; that people only think that the band is great because it sold a lot of records; and that Beatlemania never happened on anything like the scale it was depicted, and was largely invented by rock critics years after the fact. Whether or not you actually like The Beatles, as far as the truth-content of these criticisms is concerned, the historical record disagrees.
• Virtually every Reggae song in existence has been misattributed to Bob Marley, usually by idiots who don't know any other musician in that genre.
  • Similarly every classical music piece has been attributed to either Mozart, Bach or Beethoven and will be described as a "song" on the Internet.
• An Associated Press alert about Robert Durst said that "an arrest warrant was issued for the former Limp Bizkit frontman." A few minutes later they issued a correction noting that Robert Durst "is a real estate heir; Fred Durst is the former frontman of Limp Bizkit." Except, Limp Bizkit is still around and Fred Durst is still their frontman. There was similar confusion when Robert Durst died in 2022.
• One sixties compilation CD had a track which was claimed to be "Morning Starshine" by "Oliver Good". It was actually "Good Morning Starshine" by Oliver.
• German quiz show 17 Meter (Transatlantic Equivalent of The Whole 19 Yards), during a round where the solution was "Barbie", claimed that she made Aqua a One-Hit Wonder. Aqua actually had four top 20 hits in Germany, plus a ballad that was very popular with adult contemporary stations.
• When Survivor vocalist Jimi Jamison died in 2014, a number of media reports described him as the vocalist on the band's #1 hit "Eye of the Tiger" from 1982. Dave Bickler was the vocalist on that song; Jamison wouldn't join Survivor for another two years.
• In a VH1 show profiling Britney Spears fans, one fan obsesses that they would love to own her "Mouse Ears" from her stint on The Mickey Mouse Club. Britney appeared on the 90s version, in which the cast members (Mouseketeers) wore denim/Letterman style jackets with their names on the front.
• In Blood+, the final opening OP is rendered, in romaji, as "Raion", translated as "Lion" in the official English subtitles. Except, in Japanese, the kana for "lion" is ライオン, while the OP's title is actually 雷音, meaning "thunder-sound".
• Rappers being called singers happens all the time. Hörzu, a controversial German TV guide, gave us an egregious example when they wrote that Sabrina Setlur openly admitted she couldn't sing, then called her a singer anyway the following sentence.
• After an incident in 2019 where Yoshiki of X Japan had his scarf blow onto Queen Elizabeth II during the Royal Windsor cup, some outlets referred to him as "Scarf lady". Oops.
• There is a German Hip-Hop-Lexikon (reference book), released in 1999, that was supposedly written by insiders yet includes errors obvious even to casual audiences. (At least the authors openly admit in the introduction that there might be errors and request that they be reported, so later editions might have corrected these.)
  • The entry on Fettes Brot mentions that "Lieblingslied" was played by mainstream stations MTV and Viva TV – technically correct, but some earlier songs of theirs had been much bigger hits.
  • Then there is an entry for a group they call "Die Absolute Beginners", who supposedly changed their name to just "Beginners" around 1998. They had actually started out as "Absolute Beginners", then changed their name to "Absolute Beginner" (an extremely literal German translation) early in their career, and then to just "Beginner" around 1998, but the latter wasn't accepted by their record company until 2003. They also achieved mainstream success at the time the book was being written, which it doesn't mention.
  • There is also the occasional blatant typo (near instances where the name in question was spelled correctly), such as "Shugar Hill" or "Wycleff Jean".
• Er, Dustin, No Doubt's song is called "Hey Baby", not "Say Baby." "Say Baby" is by H Blockx.
• A CD collection entitled 70 Years of Broadway includes the song Theme from New York, New York instead of the song with the same name from On the Town.
• Andy Gibb is often said to have been a member of the Bee Gees. Actually, he was the younger brother of the three main members of the Bee Gees and worked as a solo artist.
• SR-71's song "1985" (which was later Covered Up by Bowling for Soup) has a verse that goes "She's seen all the classics at least a hundred times: Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Fast Times at Ridgemont High." Pretty in Pink and Fast Times at Ridgemont High were released in 1986 and 1982, respectively, and the song is about a woman who's obsessed with what life was like in the year 1985. Bowling for Soup's version partially fixes this by replacing "at least a hundred times" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" with "she knows every line" and "Even St. Elmo's Fire", which was released in 1985.
  • Also, among the musicians the song name-checks are Bruce Springsteen (Born in the U.S.A. was released the year before, though it was still pretty huge in '85), Blondie (who had broken up in 1982 and wouldn't reunite until 1997) and that it was "way before Nirvana" (if by "way before" you mean "4 years before their first album, 2 before they actually got started").
  • Another line in the Bowling for Soup cover asks "Who's the other guy singing in Van Halen?" referring to Sammy Hagar...who joined the band in 1985.
• In the book 1,342 QI Facts To Leave You Flabbergasted, one of the facts states that: "The last note of The Beatles' 'A Day in the Life' is so high only dogs can hear it". The problem with this fact is not only is the note in question not even a specific instrumental note (rather being a 15kHz sine tone at a similar frequency to a dog whistle), but it isn't played at any point during the song at all - the tone, alongside a looping sound byte of studio chatter, was burned into the run-off groove of the original Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band LP, being suggested by John Lennon as a joke. In addition, the article that this fact was sourced from doesn't state anywhere that it was the final note specifically. The actual last note of "A Day in the Life", the famous E major chord played on three pianos and a harmonium, also does not reach anywhere near 15kHz.
  • Moreover, the "only dogs can hear it" statement is uncertain in itself, as regular human hearing actually extends up to around 20kHz, with 15kHz being the lower end of high-frequency hearing loss that tends to occur with ageing, so any human with normal hearing under the age of 40 would have no trouble hearing the whistle, though it may depend on the listening setup.
• Jean-Michel Jarre's big classic albums Oxygène (1976) and Équinoxe (1978) keep being associated with the most famous synthesizer brand ever, Moog. In fact, however, Jarre neither owned nor used a Moog until the mid-1980s when they weren't even made anymore. Otherwise, he preferred Moog's biggest competitor, ARP, and the English brand EMS. This isn't even insider information: Most Jarre albums, including these two, have a list of the instruments used in their production in the booklet or even on the back of the cover.
  • Oxygène was not Jarre's first album, no matter how often that's said or written somewhere. It was his first hit album, but his first album altogether was Deserted Palace from 1972. Neither was "Oxygène 4" his first single; that was the rare "La Cage"/"Erosmachine" from 1971.
  • Also, the "part numbers" of his pieces of music often remain unmentioned altogether, probably because remembering one-digit numbers as song titles is that difficult. It doesn't take too much guesswork to decrypt his "big hits Oxygène, Équinoxe and Magnetic Fields" (referring to single pieces of music rather than to albums) as "Oxygène 4", "Équinoxe 5" and "Magnetic Fields 2", the biggest single hits from the respective albums. That said, "Équinoxe 4" was a minor success as a single, too.
  • Any claims that Jarre was massively, especially financially, supported by his father, the Hollywood film score composer Maurice Jarre, are false. Actually, Maurice left France for Hollywood when Jean-Michel was four years old, young Jean-Michel mostly grew up with his grandparents, and he and his father didn't have any contact whatsoever until the 21st century.
  • Not to mention misspellings of his second name like "Michael" or "Michelle". Can't people read what's written on record covers anymore?
• The booklets in the British Now! That's What I Call Music series occasionally feature errors in the writeups about artists featured:
  • According to the booklet that came with Now 57, Franz Ferdinand were named after the archduke whose assassination, "as all historians know"^note the genuine words, led to the start of the World War II in 1914 — Ferdinand's death actually led to the start of World War I. (And, even then, it’s not entirely correct: the band was named after a horse named after the archduke.)
  • Volume 102 included Ariana Grande’s “7 rings”, which sampled “My Favorite Things”, just like - as they claimed - “Wind It Up” by Gwen Stefani, which had appeared on a previous volume. The Gwen Stefani song sampled “The Lonely Goatherd”.
  • Mistakes like this are sadly known around the Now! series. A book produced about the series by them made several errors:
    • A page listing Christmas number ones (which is Serious Business in the United Kingdom) that appeared in the series omits 2012’s entry, despite appearing on volume 84, but includes later ones;
    • It states that Fall Out Boy’s “Thnks Fr Th Mmrs” is the only song to appear in the series without a vowel in its title, despite the appearance of songs called “LDN”, “1234”, “1973” and two different unrelated songs called “22” on other albums (all of which had been released by the time of the book’s publication); and, strangest of all;
    • The same 57th volume alluded to a few lines above, according to the book, included a song called “Buleria” by Spanish singer David Bisbal. He is unknown in the United Kingdom and the song that appeared in its place was the better known Justin Timberlake’s “I’m Lovin’ It”.
• When the "bro-country" trend of The New '10s, codified by Florida Georgia Line's "Cruise", began to infiltrate Country Music, this trope came up a few times. Even though "bro-country" is an informal and loosely defined derogatory name for a specific type of country music, it is characterized by shallow sexualized lyrics about women and partying, and heavy influences of rock and hip-hop. For some reason, many critics called "Redneck Crazy" by Tyler Farr a "bro-country" song — even though that one is a downbeat, moody ballad about stalking an ex-lover, with absolutely no themes of partying or sexuality, and no rock or hip-hop influences whatsoever. Most likely, people just saw the words "truck", "beer", and "redneck" in the lyrics, and just assumed that the song had to be a jacked-up party anthem. Even "Girl in a Country Song" by Maddie & Tae, a song which lampooned the bro-country influx, referenced "Redneck Crazy" in its lyrics.
• Safri Duo's biggest hit was, As You Know, titled "Played-A-Live (The Bongo Song)". However, the CDDB entry for at least one compilation it is on believes it to be a live recording of a piece called "Played-A".
• This piece from AV Club, in bashing "Fly" by Sugar Ray, described it as "reggaeton". Many commenters pointed out that reggaeton was still in its infancy as a genre in 1997, is mainly sung in Spanish, and "Fly" doesn't even sound remotely close to reggaeton. Yes, certain mixes of the song featured Jamaican DJ Super Cat toasting during the chorus, but Reggae and reggaeton are not the same thing. Even assuming that the writers confused reggaeton for dancehall or ragga doesn't help, because "Fly" doesn't really sound like those Reggae subgenres either.
• A karaoke "Tribute to Tim McGraw" album includes karaoke renditions of some of Tim's biggest hits... and for some reason, "Lot of Leavin' Left to Do", which is actually by Dierks Bentley. The latter song is nowhere close to McGraw's Signature Style (if anything, it sounds like an homage to Waylon Jennings), leaving one to wonder just how one could so blatantly mis-attribute the song.
• Joel Whitburn and his company Record Research publishes several books that archive the chart positions of Billboard magazine for every major chart, such as Hot 100, Country Songs, Adult Contemporary, R&B/Hip-Hop, etc., and has also branched out into providing similar books for other publications and their charts (Whitburn died in 2022 but the company is still very active). Each book lists artists with all of their chart positions on the given chart, along with a mini-biography where applicable. The books are considered authoritative by music enthusiasts, and while the chart info is accurate, the bios have been known to contain errors and some of the other research isn't infallible. Mistakes in the 2012 Country Songs book included the following, all of which were corrected in the 2017 edition:
  • Country Music singer Doug Stone is mentioned as also being a cartoon voice actor. The voice actor was actually another person with the same name. The only acting that the singer has done at all is in the 1995 live-action movie Gordy.
  • Although artists who recorded under more than one name are normally given a combined entry, there are two instances where this didn't happen: James Wesley and James Prosser (his real name) are listed as if they were separate artists, as are Maggie Rose and Margaret Durante (her real name). Neither listing gives any indication that the artists are the same. Later editions of the various books that include songwriters' credits also have problems recognizing different names for the same artist. Michael Bublé's version of "Crazy Love" is listed as having been written by George Morrison. Yes, it was written by one George Ivan Morrison, but you know him as Van Morrison.
  • No mention is made of the fact that J. Michael Harter also recorded with his sister and brother in The Harters, despite their listings being right next to each other.
  • Whitburn's books have also had a habit of falling for Trolling Creator jokes. For years they dutifully reported the Bobby Kimball/Toto/Robert Toteaux joke mentioned above as a fact. They still say that The Sisters of Mercy have a drummer named Doktor Avalanche. That's actually just the band's nickname for their drum machine.
  • The 2016 edition of Top Pop Singles has a few major errors.
    • It lists Shorty Rogers (who had a Top 40 hit as Boots Brown with "Cerveza" in 1958) as a "black Jazz trumpeter." Rogers was white.
    • It says this about The Five Blobs, the group credited with the theme song of The Blob (1958)—"Group is actually the overdubbed vocals of Bernie Nee (born on 12/4/1922; died in February 1974, age 51)." He was actually named Bernie Knee (though he often used the Nee spelling in his career, so that's not really a mistake), and he lived way past 1974; his actual birth date was 2/14/1924 and he died on 11/20/1994. Some handwritten notes by The Illegible might be to blame.
    • It notes that The Routers and The Walker Brothers both had a member named Scott Engel, but doesn't seem aware that they're the same person, or, more importantly, that he went on to a long career as a Cult Classic favorite under the name Scott Walker.
• A German magazine's mangling of a The Damned song title ended up inspiring a different song by The Pogues: The article referred to the Damned B-Side "Turkey Song" as "Turkish Song Of The Damned"^note the title was meant to refer to the bird, not the country. The Pogues happened to pick up the magazine while on tour in Germany and thought "Turkish Song Of The Damned" would actually be a pretty good song title, so they came up with a Middle-Eastern-sounding song about pirates dying off the coast of Turkey to fit it.
• While interviewing Marc Almond on Radio Two's "Sounds of the Eighties", DJ Sara Cox said the motorbike crash which nearly cost Marc his life happened in 1994. It actually happened in 2004. However, Marc did spend part of 1994 being treated at a drug rehabilitation clinic after he almost became a casualty of Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll.
• Even Johann Sebastian Bach is not immune. A widely-cited online article about Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht (the "Coffee Cantata") includes the summary, "Written in 1735, the opera tells the story of a young woman named Aria..." As any actual opera fan knows, "Aria" is not a character's name but the word meaning a solo number! (The young woman, named Lieschen, sings an Aria). At least they got the opera part right as, despite its name, the piece is not a cantata. Probably a fluke.
• The iTunes Store’s description of Weezer’s The Teal Album states that the band covered The Monkees’ “I’m a Believer” for Shrek. Of course, this was Smash Mouth, not Weezer. However, they didn't mistake Weezer for Smash Mouth so much as cite the wrong film - The Smash Mouth version is more heavily associated with the Shrek films, but Weezer also covered the song for Shrek Forever After.
• According to the BBC Programmes listing for the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest coverage on Radio 2, Iceland's entry wasn't performed by Hatari but rather Henry Mancini — an impressive feat, considering Mancini died in 1994. Mancini did score a movie titled Hatari!, so it's probably an auto-ID algorithm mix-up.
• A few news articles reporting on the Daft Punk figures in the S.H.Figuarts line described them as being in their outfits from Random Access Memories, when they are actually in the attire from Human After All.
• Amazon erroneously describe Synergy as "The Synergy", despite the fact that Synergy is the stage name of veteran synthesist Larry Fast and hence is not a "the". Amazon also (to Fast's annoyance) lump his albums together with some unauthorised users of his registered trademark "Synergy".
• Civil Rights Movement leader, Baptist minister and sometime Presidential candidate Rev. Jesse Jackson decried Rotten Rock & Roll for promoting child abuse, because he and his daughter went to a concert where the band made some jokes about pot and Drugs Are Bad. The band, according to Rev. Jackson, was "The Funkadelics."
• A 2011 Yahoo News article that was meant to be about Zooey Deschanel divorcing Death Cab for Cutie vocalist Ben Gibbard got bizarrely mangled somewhere down the line, reading as though Zooey divorced someone with the improbably cool name of Death Cab and started dating Ben, whose band is just called Cutie. This was most likely an editor misinterpreting the Ambiguous Syntax of the headline, "Zooey Deschanel divorces Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard". The article was corrected, but not before numerous other publications mocked the slip-up and quoted it as originally published.
  Original uncorrected article: "Deschanel and Cab were married for a little more than three years."
• In 2006, a number of Nina Simone songs were remixed. One of these was "Ain’t Got No, I Got Life". For reasons unknown, this track is referred to as "Ain’t Got No - I Got No Life" on iTunes. This is despite the single it came from, as well as the album, using the correct name.
• In 2010, The Beatles’ Music was made available on iTunes. How did Fox News report this? "What's up Apple's sleeve? Apparently, Manchester's favorite mopheads." The writer of the article is clearly unaware of the rivalry between Liverpool (where the Beatles are from) and Manchester.
• The 2i's ("two eyes") Coffee Bar in London's Soho was an important venue in the late 1950s skiffle and rock'n'roll scene. There was understandably much mockery when BBC Four broadcast a documentary about the scene in which the narrator managed to misname it as "The Twenty Ones Club".
• The 11th edition of Guinness British Hit Singles was notorious for the number of errors it contained. Among these was that the actor Clint Eastwood (who had an entry because his recording of "I Talk to the Trees" had been listed on the chart for a few weeks in 1970) was conflated with his namesake in the reggae duo Clint Eastwood and General Saint — despite the two Clints having been correctly separated in every previous edition.
• Yellow Magic Orchestra were on the receiving end of this from their own record label, which managed to issue the single "Firecracker" with the title and credits for a completely different track, "Computer Game (Theme from The Circus)". The single became a hit — and to this day, most people still don't realise "Computer Game" is not the correct title, unless they're sufficiently intrigued to investigate the album where both "Firecracker" and the real "Computer Game (Theme From The Circus)" are listed correctly.
• That Metal Show once listed Cinderella's Night Songs on a list of the "top five worst album covers on great albums", with Eddie Trunk claiming that the cover was misleading as it put forward a Hair Metal image while the songs on the album were classic Hard Rock and Heavy Metal. The album is pure Hair Metal, especially with tracks such as "Somebody Save Me" and the ballad "Nobody's Fool". Its likely the show's staff just assumed Night Songs was like their later, more Blues Rock-esque albums.
• At the 93rd Academy Awards, a recurring theme was 80's songs that got nominated for Best Original Song playing during both the preshow and the actual ceremony itself. These included "9 To 5", "Eye Of The Tiger", "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" and "Don't You (Forget About Me)", except that the last song was never nominated for an Academy Award, making it an odd pick.
• Books published by the British Official Charts Company include ones for each decade from the 1950s to the 2010s which compile all of an act’s entries in the single and album charts and include a short biography about the artist. The one for Michael Jackson states that he has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame - which he technically does, one for himself and one with the rest of The Jackson 5. But that’s not the one the author is referring to - he’s referring to the radio presenter of the same name; it even mentions that the “other” Michael Jackson’s star is for radio (that one is awarded to radio presenters, not musicians).
• Collin Raye's birth name is often stated to be Floyd Collin Wray. However, a quick search on the Broadcast Music Incorporated database would reveal it to be Floyd Elliot Wray.
• The Guardian has a pretty infamous article headline loudly proclaiming Nirvana's debut album Bleach as "brightening up grunge" by combining the "epic rock" of Aerosmith with the "gentle melodies" of The Beatles. While that may be a fair description of the album's most popular single 'About A Girl' or band's subsequent and anthemic sophomore opus Nevermind, it's a dissonantly jarring and laughable depiction of an album that casually bumps heels with hardcore punk, noise rock and sludge metal enough to get frequently grouped together with peers such as Melvins and Tad as being one of the heaviest releases in the "grunge" genre.
• When Fountains of Wayne bassist Adam Schlesinger became one of the first celebrities to die of COVID-19, some news outlets referred to him as the band's lead singer or frontman. The band's lead singer was actually Chris Collingwood, who wrote every Fountains of Wayne song with Schlesinger in a Lennon-McCartney style songwriting partnership. It would have been more accurate to call Schlesinger the band's co-leader, but outright incorrect to call him the band's singer - his vocal contributions to the band's music were typically only backing vocals.
• Apple Music occasionally does this with their kids' section, classifying things not meant for the proper demographic as being meant for whatever audience they're trying to target. For example, an album of songs from The Ghost and Molly McGee was placed in the preschool music section when the show is aimed at a much older audience, while a Cocomelon album, as well as a Disney Junior album about getting ready for preschool, was placed in the elementary school section.
• British supermarket chain Tesco used to have a music streaming service called Blinkbox until they sold it in 2015, and once advertised a playlist where "The Foxes choose their favourite songs" (or words to that effect). Had they consulted Google first, they'd have discovered that the definite article does not appear in her name - not their name - as it's just Louisa Rose Allen and not a group.
• This article about a Bob's Burgers restaurant calls the 80's band Simple Minds "Famous Minds".
• As one of the most morally-panicked-about musicians of all time, Eminem got a great deal of this.
  • One example was a moral panic piece in a British newspaper in 2001 which railed against Toys 'R' Us selling an action figure of Slim Shady, which it described as having all of the singer's tattoos - including "CUT HERE" on his neck. Eminem does not and has never had any neck tattoo at all, visible in the article's accompanying picture. (He does have a small tattoo saying 'SLIT ME' on his wrist, which he claims he got so he could look at and defy it instead of actually doing it.)
  • Eminem has a complex kayfabe in which he has three characters — Marshall (the real him), Eminem (The Storyteller who writes and performs the songs) and Slim Shady (the Villain Protagonist of the songs) — and he often flips between them, often within the same song. Understanding these personas is crucial to making sense of the Cerebus Rollercoaster of his body of work, which often contains Morality Ballads and Hard Truth Aesops sandwiched between Anti-Role Model shock comedy. Of course, newspaper writers in the late 90s and early 2000s had absolutely no interest in communicating this distinction, and just liked to use "Slim Shady" as a nickname for the rapper in general, creating an idea that all his lyrics were literal and he was the Horrorcore psycho of his unrealistic and basically comedic songs. This contributed to the moral panic about him, songs about which ended up forming the body of much of his work.
  • In "The Ringer", Eminem complains about Charlamagne Tha God, who criticised the lyrics to "The Storm" with the inexplicable comment that the Thing (Eminem compared Trump's infamous fake tan to him) isn't orange:
    Shout out to my colorblind people, each and every one of y'all! If you call a fire engine green, aquamarine, or you think water is pink: "Dawg, that's a date!" — "Looks like an olive to me!" "Look, there's an apple!" — "No it's not, it's a peach!"
  • Eminem has, of course, written some howlers:
    • In "Underground", Shady beats up a succession of Slasher Movie villains to prove how dangerous he is, including Edward Scissorhands, who is just an awkward teen (with scissors for hands) and not a slasher.

• The All Music Guide review of Anal Cunt's album Picnic Of Love sums it up as "a collection of ballads that never ceases to have a tragic and violent ending by the end of each song": While the album is meant to parody both acoustic soft rock ballads and the band's normally offensive image, the songs generally don't end with anything "tragic" or "violent": the closest things to that description are a spoken section to "I Want To Grow Old With You" that alludes to the Together in Death trope, and the ending to closing track "In My Heart There's A Star Named After You", where Seth Putnam suddenly goes back to his usual screaming vocals after having spent most of the album using a gentle falsetto.
• In 2016, news outlets pointed out a glaring flaw in the music video for the Nelly song "Dilemma" where Kelly Rowland is shown "texting" Nelly on her Nokia 9210 using what said outlets mistook for Microsoft Excel; an ex-Symbian developer who once worked on the operating system pointed out that Rowland actually used the built-in Sheet app to "text" Nelly, and it wouldn't be until 2012 when Microsoft Office finally received a port to Symbian.
• Many music websites claim that Yung Gravy is famous for lyrics that "put food in sexual scenarios". While Gravy has used food related euphemisms in his songs, they aren't the main subject of his works, nor are they something he's particularly known for. If anything, he's more famous for his affinity for MILFs.
• An Exclaim! review for Good Kid 2 misquotes some of the lyrics to "Everything Everything". In particular, "it was a city of jade" becomes "it was a city of faith", and "I'm still here, I lost everything, everything" becomes "I'm still here, amongst everything, everything".
• The Scholastic book Rock Star Drummer claims that Pink Floyd's "Money" has a 5/4 time signature, when it actually has a 7/4 time signature.
• This video claims that "Roundabout" was by The Who.
• In a 2005 SouthCoastToday.com article about songs being reviewed for playability in a Swansea, Massachusetts prom due to their lyrical content, DJ Mike Cordeiro mentions that a lot of the popular rap songs the students requested to be played include "offensive sexual content that sets a bad example for students", with one of the songs he mentions to prove his point being "Back That Thang Up" by Ludacris, which in reality is by Juvenile featuring Mannie Fresh and Lil Wayne. Bizarrely, the article also mentions that he was a general manager for a music production company (namely MC Music Productions in Westport, Massachusetts).
• A 2021 Cleveland Scene article about Christmas albums claims that Carpenters's Christmas Portrait (1978) included two versions of "Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town" when in actuality, it only has one, brief rendition of the song. They might've confused it for 1996's Christmas Collection^note a double-CD release that paired Christmas Portrait with its 1984 sequel, An Old-Fashioned Christmas, which does include two versions of "Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town" on it.
• On their début tour, British pop group Take That (Band) performed a Motown medley: "Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me)", "My Girl", "Reach Out (I'll Be There)", "Get Ready", "Treat Her Like a Lady", and "I Got You (I Feel Good)". All of these tracks are by Motown artists, except the last one, which was not released on Motown, but King. An official YouTube upload by the band even lists this as a Motown medley!

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