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How John and Paul for giving the world some great teaching tools! Internet giant Yahoo recently launched a new component of its popular music website that’s being hyped as the Cadillac of song lyric archives. In the past, lyric seekers have had to endure innumerable junky sites offering dubious transcriptions based on someone gluing their ear to a speaker. Now, there will finally be a legitimate one created in co-operation with the big five: BMG, EMI, Sony/ATV, Universal and Warner/Chappell. But obviously there are still Grand Canyon-sized gaps in its collection, whether you’re a fan of au courant pop tarts or major Gen X artists. Curious, I e-mailed Ross Blanchard, Gracenote’s vice-president of business development, to ask him about the omissions. He told me the database is still a work-in-progress and there were a few reasons why some prominent artists' songs aren't yet there. “In some cases we have agreements with the applicable publisher, but still need to secure permission from the artist's management, the artist themselves or the artist's estate,â€� he said. “In other cases we haven't yet concluded licence agreements with their publishers, often for the same reasons.â€� He said Gracenote was expecting significant new signings in the near future. Fair enough.

Now back to the website. At this point I realized I’d been unwittingly ageist. What about all those internet-savvy grandparents? Would your web-surfing grandmother finally be able to savour the inimitable lyrics of Tin Pan Alley alumnus Neil Diamond? No dice, grandma. A search under his name brought forth none of Diamond’s diamonds — no Sweet Caroline, no I’m a Believer — just (sigh!) another selection of cover tunes. One of them was Elton John’s Rocket Man, that wistful space-age ballad beloved of William Shatner and Stewie Griffin. I clicked on it, and discovered another flaw in the service.

Namely … When Rocket Man comes to the line, “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids/In fact it’s cold as hell,” Gracenote gives us, “it’s cold as ****.” What? They’ve bleeped out “hell”? I hadn’t considered the lyrics might be censored. How did they deal with hip hop? I quickly typed in “Wu-Tang Clan.” Sure enough, the clan’s seminal rap was so riddled with asterisks it looked like the PMRC had put out a hit on it. Ol’ Dirty Bastard must be turning in his grave. (Or should that be, Ol’ Dirty *******?) OK, I appreciate that a widely used lil wayne lyrics website might shy away from printing the F-word and the N-word, but come on, “hellâ€�? And it gets worse.

Did you know that one of Iggy Pop’s best-known songs is called **** for Life? Yes, “lust,â€� the driving force behind 90 per cent of all rock songs, dare not speak its name on Yahoo. I felt as if I’d stumbled upon some Twilight Zone website from the 1950s. What’s the deal, Ross? “A built-in filter ‘bleeps’ out explicit lyrics unless the user turns it off,â€� Blanchard explained. “Publishers flag explicit lyrics and Yahoo also does extensive searches to ensure that they are not seen by anyone who has this filter on.â€� That got me thinking about the most notorious of all song lyrics — the legendary Louie Louie. The Kingsmen’s 1963 version of Richard Berry’s '50s R&B song, sung by marble-mouthed vocalist Jack Ely, became a frat-house classic thanks to rumours that its indecipherable lyrics were unspeakably salacious — at least for 1963. The song was even the subject of an FBI investigation, which came up blank. Today, theoretically, all the G-men would need to do is go to Yahoo.

Wrong. The real Louie Louie lyrics, which are, in fact, squeaky clean, can’t be found on the site, even though there’ve been endless cover versions. This brought me to my final criterion … News stories on the new service focused on how listeners would no longer be bedeviled by lyrics mumbled, distorted or shrieked to the point of incomprehensibility. They usually cited bonehead mistakes. (Really, did anyone ever think Roy Orbison was singing “Only baloney”?) But the real test comes with cryptic lyrics that even repeated, sedulous listening has failed to untangle. For this, I went to the songwriting supremo, Bob Dylan, whose oft-complex words, delivered in his trademark nasal whine, have baffled many a fan. I always used to wonder what the **** he was saying in the last line of the last verse of Precious Angel, one of those Dylan ballads replete with biblical imagery. The way I hear it, it goes: “Let us not be enticed/On the way out of Egypt, through Ethiopia, to the judgment hall of Christ.” Hey, let’s see a little more effort Yahoo! The answer was blowin’ on the net. Clearly, the Yahoo database needs a major tune-up before serious lyric freaks are going to view it as the last word on words. My final search brought me back to Nirvana’s Teen Spirit, and this time, thankfully, they got it right: the Cobain lyric is “a mulatto, an albino/a mosquito, my libido.” Then I scrolled through the other Nirvana songs onsite to find another fave, Pennyroyal Tea from the chart-topping album In Utero.

Was it there? No. Oh well, whatever, nevermind. Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC.ca. CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites - links will open in new window..