LAS VEGAS — Radio rock stalwarts The Killers apologized to fans yesterday morning after realizing that they missed an obvious, optimal rhyme in their legendary song “Mr. Brightside.”
“A lot of people assume we didn’t rhyme ‘stomach is sick’ with ‘touching his dick’ because of my religious beliefs but the truth is much darker,” admitted frontman Brandon Flowers, a lifelong Mormon. “I … I just didn’t think of it. And for that, I’m sorry. I refuse to ever pull up RhymeZone while writing lyrics. So I just figured that no words rhyme with ‘sick,’ kinda like ‘orange.’”
“We’ve been consulting with Elvis Costello, Robert Smith, and Paramore about what to do with problematic songs,” continued Flowers. “I’m leaning towards never playing it again and taking it out of radio rotation. It’s not like there’s anything beyond multi-platinum.”
The Killers’ guitarist Dave Keuning asked that the band’s fans give them some grace at this difficult moment.
“We’ve never said we are perfect, and we are learning from our mistakes,” lamented Keuning, who was reportedly studying George Carlin’s seven words to avoid future incidents. “Sure, we’re Mormon but we’re no prudes — you can almost see the outline of a nipple on the ‘Mr. Brightside’ album artwork. Anyways, our next hit is going to have a word like ‘tits’ or ‘cock’ in it, so be on the lookout for that.”
Fans speculated wildly as to the cause for the band’s sudden realization.
“It was me, I was in the front row of one of the last Killers shows before COVID, and I shouted ‘dick’ instead of ‘chest’,” confessed Aubrey Dunne, diehard fan of the band. “My friends and I always swap the words when we sing in the car and have a good laugh. But when I did it at the show, Brandon was only a few feet away from me. He stopped, looked dazed for a minute, and missed the next line while he stared off into space. It was like I was watching his brain get rewired in real-time. I hope he can recover from this.”
The band’s soul-searching reportedly deepens, as they are considering scrapping the chorus of the hit “Human” due to grammatical errors.