Seven Songs That Didn’t Use Spellcheck

Somewhere, an English teacher is still reaching for the red pen. Pop has always been suspicious of the dictionary, and the misspelt title is its most efficient act of rebellion: a single word mangled on a record sleeve can signal youth, menace, wit or simple impatience before a note has played.

Sometimes it is a pun hiding in plain sight. Sometimes it is a phonetic shout from the terraces, or a text message from a man who knows where you live. Occasionally it is a purple signature.

The seven songs gathered here span more than four decades and almost every genre, from glam to gangsta rap, yet each treats spelling as one more instrument to play slightly out of tune.

1. Look Wot You Dun by Slade (1972)

Teachers complained. In January 1972 the band’s phonetic spelling became a matter of national pedagogy, which says plenty about Slade’s gift for annoying exactly the right people. Look Wot You Dun followed the chart-topping Coz I Luv You and stopped at №4, a near-miss that sounds, in hindsight, like a band clearing its throat before 1973.

It is stranger and sadder than its stomp suggests. Jim Lea and Don Powell built most of it before Noddy Holder added his share, and the lyric is less terrace chant than coming-of-age catechism: question after question about disorientation, beginnings and being torn apart, set against a promise that the years ahead hold fresh thrills and fresh damage alike. Powell, from behind the kit, supplies the chorus’s heavy breathing. Dave Hill, his own guitar stranded by Christmas weather, plays Peter Frampton’s.

Chas Chandler keeps the production lean, and the song never found a studio album home, surfacing instead on the 1973 compilation Sladest. That suits it. A song about searching rather than arriving was always going to live between albums, not on one.

2. D’Yer Mak’er by Led Zeppelin (1973)

Say “Jamaica” in a broad enough English accent and it becomes a bawdy question, which is the joke behind the title. American listeners, ignoring the apostrophes, settled on something closer to dire maker, and a couple of reviewers at the time appeared to agree.

The song began at Stargroves in 1972 with John Bonham playing a doo-wop beat and nudging it fractionally off its axis until reggae fell out. Three microphones set well back from the kit gave that drum sound its cavernous weight. Lyrically it is pure 1950s pleading: a letter, the bad news it carries, anger, sorrow, refusal to let go. The tribute to Rosie and the Originals on the first pressing gives the game away.

John Paul Jones called it an unconsidered studio joke. Robert Plant wanted it out as a British single; the band said no, leaving promo copies as collector’s items while America took it to №20. Critics heard parody. Axl Rose heard his way into heavy rock. Both were listening to the same thing: four men, all credited, discovering that heaviness and silliness can share a groove.

3. Nite Klub by The Specials (1979)

Every provincial town had one: a carpeted room with a dress code, a bouncer and the faint promise that tonight might be different. Coventry in 1979 was no exception, and on The Specials’ debut, produced by Elvis Costello for Jerry Dammers’ 2 Tone label, Nite Klub props its narrator at the bar of one, counting his reasons for being there and finding none.

The song works as a self-portrait in negative. He sleeps through daylight, calls himself a parasite, explains unemployment with a shrug that is half boast and half indictment, and flaunts a membership he plainly despises. The vulgar verse, delivered with a sneer, insults the venue and its patrons in equal measure, yet he keeps paying. That contradiction is the point. Ska’s original sunshine has been swapped for fluorescent tubes and sticky floors.

Musically it lurches rather than skanks, guitar pushed forward in the way the album rewrote the Jamaican template, with Chrissie Hynde among the backing voices. The joke lands, then slowly curdles. In Thatcher’s Britain, the club was the only room left with the lights on.

4. Wot by Captain Sensible (1982)

At five in the morning, somewhere in America, a pile driver went to work outside a hotel housing the Damned. Captain Sensible did what any self-respecting punk would do: he taped it, carried the evidence to reception and lodged a complaint. He was wished a nice day. He did not get one.

Home again, producer Tony Mansfield turned the recording into a loop in 10 minutes, and the song, briefly titled Cap’s Rap, was built on top of it. Sensible’s description of the process amounted to piling junk onto a racket, which undersells it slightly. The verses recount the sleepless morning, wander off into bawdy filler and stop for a pantomime jab at a pirate called Adam [Ant]; few listeners in 1982 needed the reference explaining. Dolly Mixture’s backing vocals turn the call-and-response chorus into a playground chant that refuses to end.

Britain gave it a respectable chart run. Continental Europe took it to heart. Rap had barely crossed the Atlantic, and one of its earliest British send-ups arrived courtesy of a building site and a man who wanted a lie-in.

5. Gett Off by Prince (1991)

Prince celebrated turning 33 by giving nightclubs a present: a 12-inch pressing of a song nobody could buy, stretched to almost 10 minutes. The response was loud enough that Gett Off became a single, then forced its way onto Diamonds and Pearls so late that its title was scrawled in red over the track it replaced.

It had been assembled from spare parts. A chorus from Lovesexy’s Glam Slam, lines borrowed from Graffiti Bridge, fragments of a B-side: Prince recycled the way other people breathe. What emerged, with the minted New Power Generation behind him, Eric Leeds’s flute darting through the bass and a guitar solo for good measure, was the most brazen thing he had released in years. The lyric opens with mock politeness, offers a numbered menu of positions, migrates to a parking meter and detours through a James Brown homage.

Rolling Stone’s David Fricke summed it up as “Dirty Mind goes house”. America stalled it at №21; Britain sent it to №4. The man had been away from the gutter for a while. He knew the way back.

6. Check Yo Self by Ice Cube (1993)

In 1982, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five used a slow, sticky bassline to describe a city closing in on its residents. Eleven years later Ice Cube borrowed the same groove to describe what he would do to anyone who got in his way. Context is everything; so, apparently, is a hook.

Check Yo Self arrived in July 1993 as the third and final single from The Predator, with Das EFX supplying the stammering, sewer-dwelling cadence that turns the title into a schoolyard taunt. The original mix leaned on a Sweet Inspirations sample and a snatch of the Beastie Boys; the remix, built on The Message, is the one radio remembers. It topped Billboard’s rap and R&B charts and cracked the Hot 100’s top 20.

The verses are harder to love. Car theft, firearms, prison-rape threats and a closing tirade against women sit uneasily beneath that bouncing chorus, and no amount of wordplay disguises the contempt. Yet the warning outlived its author’s menace: Chuck D re-cut it, Snoop Dogg covered it, Hollywood licensed it. Threats age badly. Catchphrases are bulletproof.

7. We No Who U R by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds (2012)

A title spelt like a text message, from a man who once wrote murder ballads in the cadence of the King James Bible. Nick Cave introduced Push the Sky Away with its most deceptive gesture: a lead single, released in December 2012, that sounds too quiet to contain anything at all.

Listen closer. The lyric moves through a landscape that does not care about us: trees indifferent to birdsong, morning dew, hands raised in supplication, then scorched. Forgiveness is repeatedly declared unnecessary, which is either grace or a verdict. Only at the end does the refrain arrive, and its intimacy tips into surveillance. Knowing someone’s name and address is the stuff of love letters and threats alike, and Cave refuses to say which this is.

Recorded in a Provençal mansion with Nick Launay, and without Mick Harvey for the first time, the band let Warren Ellis’s loops, flute and hushed harmonies do the work Grinderman once did with volume.

The album became their first Australian №1. Not bad for a whisper that sounds like it is reading your mail.

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