Lyrics
Lyrics
[Cueball sits in a chair holding something. A speaker on a counter behind him is transmitting music. Four lines of wavy undecipherable lyrics emanate from the speaker. The lyrics are surrounded by musical notes. Below is the best attempt to write this down in text, also using capitals when they are clearly there in the comic.] I CANT₣∇EN +ELҼ ⊤HER A|N⊃Г⊕N6 ƒHE W(AN NAp. HADβE Aūτ|ƒA!NNNG∩fҠILL... FOR♡ITiNn⊣GLOOOO!VEEE ?.-
[Caption below the frame:] Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be able to understand song lyrics without looking them up.
Get up in the morning Get up in the morning slaving for bread, sir sleeping for for bread, sir So that every mouth Sold out to every monk can be fed and beef-head Poor oh-oh me Israelites me ears are alight
My wife an' my kids Why find my kids? them a pack up an' a leave me They buck up and a-leave me Darlin' she said, Darling Cheese head I was yours to be seen I was yards too greasy Poor oh-oh me Israelites me ears are alight
I think that's what he says But I need to hear it on a Maxell (There is a picture of a cassette tape below that last line of text.)

For some modern songs, the vocalist chooses to perform the track in a way that emphasizes emotion, accent or style over clear pronunciation of the lyrics. Some forms of music, for example the Jazz style Scat, use purely nonsensical lyrics while some styles of dance music use a single line of lyrics repeated throughout the track.
There are also certain types of people that may describe themselves as "lyric deaf", which is sort of the lyrical equivalent to being tone deaf , although it doesn't have an underlying medical understanding. Some people that describe themselves as tone deaf are even quite musically capable.
The comic is illustrating (in text form) how listening to such a song feels before you have learned what the actual lyrics are. The lyrics are represented in an indecipherable way, with a few mildly recognizable words. This represents the auditory experience of being able to hear and understand some words (perhaps incorrectly), but not all of them.
Another example of this experience can be seen in this British TV commercial from the 1980s, showing someone who has misheard Desmond Dekker song Israelites so for instance the line Poor me Israelites becomes Oh-oh my ears are alight . See more details in the trivia section.
This experience is similar to that shown by the character Havelock Vetinari the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork , in Terry Pratchett 's Discworld book Soul Music (see part of book here ). Rather than listening to music, he preferred to read the printed sheet music:
In fact the kind of music he really liked was the kind that never got played. It ruined music, in his opinion, to torment it by involving it on dried skins, bits of dead cat and lumps of metal hammered into wires and tubes. It ought to stay written down, on the page, in rows of little dots and crotchets, all neatly caught between lines. Only there was it pure. It was when people started doing things with it that the rot set in. Much better to sit quietly in a room and read the sheets, with nothing between yourself and the mind of the composer but a scribble of ink. Having it played by sweaty fat men and people with hair in their ears and spit dribbling out of the end of their oboe... well, the idea made him shudder.
For a related experience see Mondegreen .
The title text elaborates on the fact that Randall has the same experience when trying to understand song lyrics as when he sees text in his dreams. The last part of the title text is written in strange scripts to illustrate how he feels when seeing text in his dreams. Translated it says: it's hard to read and I can't focus.
Note that it looks like the song lyrics were written by drawing in a tool, like MS Paint, and then cutting out pieces and shifting them slightly.
The closest guess on the lyrics is this:
I can't even tell her Anything she wanna Had outstanding skill Beautiful Forgetting love.
(Note that the first line also might be I can't even help her .)
It is very likely that Randall completely made up these lyrics himself and if any song coincidentally share some part of them it only happens because Randall has chosen some very cliché lyrics, that would thus be likely to occur in some pop songs.
Nevertheless, here below are some possible song references, in which the exact line from above occurs:
Joe Budden 's song More of Me From the lyrics : World keeps spinning, learned sinners keep sinning And I can't even tell her some fights ain't fight worthy Cause my pops got 20 years clean, but her pops got 20 years dirty
Bill Anderson's song Baby's Blue Again From the lyrics : Oh Lord, and I can't even help her All I can do is just wait Until the clouds are all blown away
Johnny Cinco's song She Wanna From the lyrics : Buy here anything she wanna Fly in anything she wanna Try on anything she wanna
Chino Brown's song Love Again From the lyrics : I was at a point in my life Of just forgetting love Until the day you touched me
[Cueball sits in a chair holding something. A speaker on a counter behind him is transmitting music. Four lines of wavy undecipherable lyrics emanate from the speaker. The lyrics are surrounded by musical notes. Below is the best attempt to write this down in text, also using capitals when they are clearly there in the comic.] I CANT₣∇EN +ELҼ ⊤HER A|N⊃Г⊕N6 ƒHE W(AN NAp. HADβE Aūτ|ƒA!NNNG∩fҠILL... FOR♡ITiNn⊣GLOOOO!VEEE ?.-
[Caption below the frame:] Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be able to understand song lyrics without looking them up.
Get up in the morning Get up in the morning slaving for bread, sir sleeping for for bread, sir So that every mouth Sold out to every monk can be fed and beef-head Poor oh-oh me Israelites me ears are alight
My wife an' my kids Why find my kids? them a pack up an' a leave me They buck up and a-leave me Darlin' she said, Darling Cheese head I was yours to be seen I was yards too greasy Poor oh-oh me Israelites me ears are alight
I think that's what he says But I need to hear it on a Maxell (There is a picture of a cassette tape below that last line of text.)
