Like a Record, Baby

Since I moved to Israel, I have lost touch with a lot of Amer­i­can pop­u­lar cul­ture. But I recently heard a cover of “You Spend Me Right Round” by some band named FloRida (see above), and I noticed that the refrain had changed.

The orig­i­nal lyrics are:

You spend me right round, baby, right round / Like a record, baby / Right round, round round

But the cover changed the words to:

You spend my head right round, right round / When you go down / When you go downtown

Here is the original:

Maybe I am get­ting old, but I hate when artists change the lyrics or mean­ing of the orig­i­nal songs. My assump­tion is that the record com­pany changed — or asked FloRida to change — the words because they think the tar­get mar­ket, teenagers, no longer know what records are. Which is preposterous.

Sales of records have actu­ally been increas­ing in recent times (see here and here) because music loses much of its qual­ity when it is trans­ferred to dig­i­tal for­mat. A song sounds more, well, “full” on a record than on an iPod, at least to peo­ple with trained ears (unlike myself).

Related: Larry Derfner writes that music today is, well, crap com­pared to the 1960s and 1970s. I agree.