One of the charms of the twentieth century I miss most is arguing over song lyrics. Not the meaning of song lyrics—those arguments are eternal—but the actual lyrics themselves, the verbatim poetry of pop music. Back in the day, everyone had these arguments, I think. But since the World Wide Web was in its infancy and so few of us were online, we didn’t talk—not at scale, anyway—about the shared experience of misquoting the lyrics to our favorite songs. And unless we had access to a specialized music library, we didn’t have anywhere to go for authoritative answers to settle our pop music debates.
As near as I can tell, the best thing we had was a 1996 episode of the sitcom Friends. The episode is called The One With The Princess Leia Fantasy, and it’s probably best remembered for another pop culture epiphany—namely that many heterosexual men of a certain age share a sexual fantasy inspired by the gold bikini Princess Leia wore in Return of the Jedi. But that Friends episode also include…
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