Open Letter to Tinchy Stryder «

My radio listening habits wander between BBC 6Music (for Adam and Joe), Radio 4 (for feeling smug and cerebral), Radio 1 (a recent experiment to see if I can learn to listen Chris Moyles without wanting to punch something), XFM (to keep up with what the indie kids are listening to) and occasionally Capital (annoyingly commercial and repetitive but periodically worth enduring for Johnny Vaughn).

One of the songs which has been played to death over the last few weeks on Radio 1 and Capital is Take Me Back by Tinchy Stryder, which contains the following lyrics:

Take Me Back
...
I'm sorry I misleaded you pretty lady
I'm sorry I mistreated you pretty lady
...

Now it's a catchy enough little ditty, but the first couple of times I heard it, it left me slightly unsettled and I couldn't work out why. Until I realised that although “misleaded” sounds like a real word, of course in reality it isn't.

Now I can't imagine Tinchy is a regular reader of this blog, but just in case he is, I'll address him directly.

I'm sorry Tinchy, you can't just go around inventing words like “misleaded” — completely ignoring the perfectly servicable “misled” in the process — simply because it happens to rhyme better with “mistreated”. It's lazy and I expect more of you.

And while we're being candid, let's just admit that the only reason “misleaded” sounds like it rhymes with “mistreated” is because you're not really pronouncing “mistreated” properly — that's a ‘t’ not a ‘d”.

One of the creative challenges of being a lyricist is to pick existing words that work together both in terms of metre and rhyme but also semantically. If you can't do that without resorting to made up words it doesn't mean it's not possible, it just means you haven't spent long enough at the computer.

Of course Tinchy, you're the one with the hit single, not me, so maybe making up words is the way to go. Here are some more suggestions for new words you could incorporate into future remixes of Take Me back or possibly your live shows:

Take Me Back (Man Writes Blog Lyrical Remix)

I'm sorry I upsetted you pretty lady
I'm sorry I forgetted you pretty lady

I'm sorry that I losed you pretty lady
I know I should of choosed you pretty lady

I'm sorry what you seed me do pretty lady
I'm sorry what I sayed to you pretty lady