In 1965, four baby-faced young men who called themselves the Who crammed into a studio and recorded the song “The Kids Are Alright.” It was a pivotal moment for rock ’n’ roll, for the Who themselves, and yes, even for the English language.
The latter is true because, while the word “alright” is as common in the rock world as trouser bulges, it just so happens that it’s every bit as fictional. “Alright” wasn’t a word when the Rolling Stones recorded “I’m Alright” any more than it was nearly four decades later while the Killers were recording “Everything Will Be Alright.” In fact, in the time that the world of popular music cranked out enough “alrights” to generate 3,045 hits in a song title search on TowerRecords.com, the most that the authorities had budged on the matter was Webster’s New World College Dictionary’s begrudging inclusion of “alright” as a “disputed spelling” of “all right.”
So how did this misspelling become the choice of almost every rocker from Joe Cocker to the Beastie Boys? Well, by pinpointing when this happened we may be able to infer why it happened. You see, Buddy Holly had no spelling problems with his hit “Well All Right.” Elvis songs tended to spell it correctly as well. So whatever took place happened sometime in the ’60s, which can only mean one thing: drugs.
I picture a Keith Richards type, youthful but already well on the way to permanent brain damage, scribbling an idea for a new song on a gin-soaked cocktail napkin, not even able to spell “baby” and incoherently smushing his “all” into his “right.”
The rest is history. In no time flat, the question of how to spell “all right” became secret code to separate the hip artists from the dorks. Today, a songwriter who opts for “alright” is in the company of Bob Marley, Elton John, the Doobie Brothers, Journey, Grand Funk Railroad, and the Beastie Boys. The musical artist who spells it “all right” will find himself in the company of Prescot Pleasanton, the International Submarine Band, and Marlo Thomas and Friends.
In the music world, the only misspelling more popular than “alright” is “gonna.” Led Zeppelin, Sublime, Lenny Kravitz, Tom Waits, Jet, AC/DC, U2, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Twisted Sister, and once again the Who are all “gonna” do something.
Personally, I’m a fan of “gonna.” Unlike “alright,” which suggests the exact same pronunciation as “all right,” “gonna” does a better job of representing how people sometimes pronounce “going to.”
Say and spell both of these however you want, just know that a grammar snob looking to score some points at your expense will win any fight in which you try to defend “alright” or “gonna.” In fact, James Kilpatrick actually wrote a whole column reaming Vanity Fair for using “alright” on its cover. The joke was on Kilpatrick, though, because the word appeared in the headline “The Pigs Are Alright”—a play on the Who song that went right over Kilpatrick’s head.
Moving on to a mellower musical genre, if anyone ever tells you, “I only have eyes for you,” don’t be too flattered. What this person may be saying is that everyone else in the world finds you repulsive, or that while you’re named on his organ donor card, you can’t have his liver or lungs. Let me explain.
Consider the following choices:
Only I have eyes for you.
I only have eyes for you.
I have only eyes for you.
I have eyes only for you.
The first one, “Only I have eyes for you,” means I am the only human being on the planet who wants to look at you. I only. I alone. I’m as good as you’ll ever do, baby.
The second one, “I only have eyes for you,” can imply the same as the first example. Technically, though, in this case the word “only” applies to the word “have.” I only have eyes for you. I don’t sell eyes for you. I don’t pluck out eyes for you. I don’t cross my eyes for you. I just have them here standing by in case your corneas ever become scorched by gazing upon Keith Richards in the stark light of day.
The third one, “I have only eyes for you,” instructs you to stop coveting the speaker’s liver and ogling his healthy young heart. His eyes are the sole bequest you can count on. An old man in Brooklyn has dibs on his pancreas. His private parts are currently the property of your sister.
The last one is the correctly worded version of what the more common expression is supposed to mean. “I have eyes only for you” means everybody else grosses me out or, at the very least, disappoints. But you rock my world.
Think these are just silly technicalities that nobody cares about? Think again.
“Misplacing one’s ‘only’ is a crime against syntax,” writes Kilpatrick. “Proper placement of ‘only’ is a virtue to be constantly applauded.” By the way, Kilpatrick is a man of words, for whom “constantly” means “constantly.” Therefore, he means that you should keep right on applauding even after your hands begin to bleed.
Or perhaps he’s just out of his mind with only-ness. That would explain why he has kicked off every New Year for the last two decades with a column on “only.”
Either way, you can see why it’s wise to avoid giving these guys fodder.
Ironically, snobs, meanies, and language authorities in general become eerily silent on the very music-related language issues I find most troubling. For example, when I was writing music reviews for an L.A. magazine called Music Connection, I could swear an editor told me that music groups should be treated as singulars: U2 is a good band, not U2 are a good band. I accepted this on faith until I ran into some situations in which that rule seems flat-out ridiculous. Would I really write, “The Backstreet Boys is good”? Nope. (They’re great.)
So where can you find a clear guideline for dealing with this? AP doesn’t seem to have one. I tried looking up “band names,” “music,” “musical groups,” “group nouns,” “verbs,” “verb agreement,” “subject-verb agreement,” and “Jagger, Mick, advanced linguistics of.” I tried all these in Chicago as well, plus “association and organization names,” “compositions,” “nouns: plural form with singular sense,” and a bunch of other dead ends I chased on the long road to bubkes. Strunk and White, who I believe predate electric guitars, were equally useless. So I e-mailed friends in the editing business with the specific question: “Where can I find a written rule on this?”
Most of my friends did what copy editors and clever politicians do, which is answer the question they wish they were asked instead of the question they were actually asked. They all gave me their opinions, but none could cite a source.
Now, a meanie in my shoes would probably apply the first rule of meaniedom: Cover your ineptitude. You can’t go around pretending to know everything if you’ve revealed that you don’t know everything, right? That’s why they just pick a side and declare it law. Luckily, I have no such incentive to dodge the subject. Instead, I’ll put my own neck on the line and offer some guidelines here and now. As you may have already guessed, that guideline is basically, “Trust your ear and your instincts.” But I’ll do you one better and be a little more specific.
When the band name is plural, make the verb agree accordingly whenever it makes sense. The Beatles are a good band.
When the band name is singular, do the opposite. Mr. Mister is a truly great band.
Modify that according to whether you’re talking about the group as a single entity or as multiple individuals. Mr. Mister are rockin’ musicians. Again, do that only when it’s clearly the best option. These cases are rare. A better way to state the above would be, “The members of Mr. Mister are rockin’ musicians,” which neatly wraps up the subject-verb agreement issue while at the same time raising serious questions about your taste in music.
If anyone challenges you on these rules, I suggest you quote the Who’s Roger Daltrey: “Who the!@#!! are you?”
Another serious rock ’n’ roll language conundrum in which grammar authorities are nearly useless has to do with the word “the” in band titles. You might say, “I’m going to buy the Avril Lavigne CD,” but you wouldn’t say, “I’m going to buy the the Who album.”
AP, Chicago, and Strunk and White clump this musical matter in with all the others. That is, they ignore it. One suspects these books were written by kids whose parents made them play oboe but wouldn’t allow them to buy a single Stones record.
I did find a shadow of a clue in one of these books. Under the heading of “Books and Periodicals,” the Chicago Manual says it’s okay to drop extra “the’s,” “an’s,” and “a’s”:
“That dreadful Old Curiosity Shop character, Quilp . . .
but
In The Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens . . .”
(Way to appeal to the masses, huh? I, for one, can’t shut up about Quilp. I’m all, “Quilp this” and “Quilp that,” 24/7.)
Anyway, the point is that when the sentence sets up the name, it’s sometimes awkward to leave in the “a,” the “an,” or the “the.” I suppose that would be even more true if you were talking about the ’80s group the The, perhaps saying something like, “I thought the the The song said it best.”
In all my research, the only reference I found to musical groups was in a section of the Chicago Manual titled “Institutions and Companies, What to capitalize.” It says:
“A ‘the’ preceding a name, even when part of the official title, is lowercased in running text.” For example, “I read it in the New York Times.”
There, clumped in with a bunch of highbrow examples such as “the Art Institute of Chicago,” “the Library of Congress,” and “the Cleveland Orchestra,” we see the book’s sole and piddly acknowledgment of popular music: “the Beach Boys; the Beatles; the Grateful Dead.” So I guess it’s a safe guideline to lowercase “the” for the Who (that’s what Rolling Stone magazine does), the Cure, the Captain and Tennille, and even the The.
With all this evidence that grammar snobs are tragically unhip in the area of popular music, you’d think that at least in this realm they’d keep their know-it-allness to themselves. Not so. In fact, Bryan Garner is even comfortable giving orders to one of the most respected and influential rock musicians of all time.
Pointing out some examples of redundant prepositions, Garner writes: “Paul McCartney, in his hit song ‘Live and Let Die,’ made a similar error: ‘But if this ever-changing world in which we live in, makes you give in and cry, just live and let die.’ McCartney might have improved the lyrics by writing ‘in which we’re livin’.”
One more time, all together now: “Who the!@#!! are you?”