Picture This

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“If it weren’t for your job at the garage, you could own the whole world.”

—Debbie Harry misheard, Picture This, 1978.

A magnificently underrated Blondie track from their breakout album, Parallel Lines. The main reason it is so underrated, in the JC’s view, is because everyone in the world mishears the key lyric, including its author, who indeed miswrote it.

The passage in question is this:

Picture this, a day in December
Picture this, freezing cold weather
You got clouds on your lids
And you’d be on the skids
If it weren’t for your job at the garage
You could own the whole world.

The imagery of the dreamer — “clouds on your lids”, right? — who aches for a better life, knowing all the while he can’t have it, hemmed in by a life-sentence as a working stiff up to his elbows in grease, which, at the same time keeps him alive and stops him overcoming his surly mortal bonds and becoming the superman is a neat encapsulation of modern life indeed.

Unfortunately, Ms. Harry overlooked this wistful ambiguity and instead sings the following:

Picture this, a day in December
Picture this, freezing cold weather
You got clouds on your lids
And you’d be on the skids
If it weren’t for your job at the garage
If you could only, woah-woah.

Which isn’t quite the same. Never mind.