About

Wrong Lyrics Christina is an advice animal image macro featuring singer Christina Aguilera with captions of misheard lyrics to popular songs. The celebrity became a subject of online parodies after she was heard singing incorrect lyrics to the United States national anthem during the 2011 Superbowl championship.

Origin

On February 6th, 2011, Super Bowl XLV took place at the Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas.^[1] When Christina Aguilera appeared on stage to sing the national anthem "The Star-Spangled Banner," she sang the slightly altered lyrics "what so proudly we watched at the twilight's last reaming" instead of "O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming." Shortly afterwards, Aguilera herself admitted the mistake^[3].

On February 22nd, 2011 Redditor maip23^[12] suggested an idea for a new advice animal character called "Wrong Lyrics Christina," encouraging other Redditors to create an image macro series based on a photograph of Christina Aguilera and verbatim texts of frequently misheard lyrics.

Spread

The Redditor's request was returned on the following day when Redditor intejens^[13] used a still image of the singer from the Super Bowl performance and paired it with a pink color-wheel background to create the image template.

  

Since its emergence through Reddit and Quickmeme^[5], "Wrong Lyrics Christina" quickly spread across other humor blogs and image caption generators such as Memegenerator^[4], Quickmeme^[5], Tumblr^[8] and Memebase^[9] among others. On February 27th, single topic blog "Wrong Lyrics Christina" was launched on Tumblr to document the series and individual image examples have become associated with its routine hashtag #Wrong Lyrics Christina.^[11]

Notable Examples

Mondegreens

Like many examples of phonetic translations, "Wrong Christina Lyrics" image macros use "mondegreens," a word coined by Sylvia Wright in a 1954 Atlantic article^[7] which describes frequently misheard lyrics. It can also refer to any misheard phrase that results in a different meaning.^[7] According to an academic research paper^[6] on the subject:

As a child, young Sylvia had listened to a folk song that included the lines "They had slain the Earl of Moray/And Lady Mondegreen." As is customary with misheard lyrics, she didn't realize her mistake for years. The song was not about the tragic fate of Lady Mondegreen, but rather, the continuing plight of the good earl: "They had slain the Earl of Moray/And laid him on the green."

Search Interest

Search queries for "wrong lyrics christina" spiked immediately after the Super Bowl performance in February 2011, and dropped rather quickly in following months.

External References