Title Meanings
The cover to Welcome To New York, a 1970s Rolling Stones bootleg, is a cartoon by William Stout, showing the Stones against a grafitted wall which includes the phrase "50,000,000 flies can't be wrong - eat shit!"
The title is itself a reference to the hit song of 1927, "Fifty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong", by Willie Raskin, Billy Rose, and Fred Fisher, most notably performed by Sophie Tucker. It is also supposed to be an estimate of the number of singles that Presley sold worldwide by late 1959.
Its evolution of the phrase into a snowclone – as expressed in the Simpsons pastiche "Fifty million smokers can't be wrong," for example – ironically ridicules argumentum ad populum, the misconception that popularity or consensus equals validity.
Read more about this topic: 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong
Famous quotes containing the words title and/or meanings:
“And Reason kens he herits in
A haunted house. Tenants unknown
Assert their squalid lease of sin
With earlier title than his own.”
—Robert Bridges (1844–1930)
“You can’t write about people out of textbooks, and you can’t use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.”
—Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)