For those too young to remember, music used to be distributed on vinyl records (commonly known as a "phonograph" record). These records were played using a needle that would pick up the inscribed spiral grooves in the disk and, with the use of an amplifier, emit from a set of speakers.

Inevitably these records would get a scratch in them causing the record to skip a groove. The result was that a few milliseconds of the song would be missed. As audio tradition would have it, the listener would end up memorizing the song and lyric precisely as it was played back...skip and all. This is referred to as phonographic memory.