Whenever I hear one of those oldie pop songs that sing gleefully about getting married (not just being/staying together, but specifically tying the knot), I think that that just wouldn’t fly so much with kids today. E.g. Going to the Chapel, Bus Stop by the Hollies, Get Me To The Church On Time, Leaving On A Jet Plane, If I Were A Carpenter, Wedding Bell Blues, I Married An Angel - just off the top of my head.
There’s also a lot of violent and crude things adults (almost exclusively male, I’d guess) used to teach kids (also probably mostly male) that wouldn’t be cottoned to today. For example, I remember my Webelo Scout master teaching us bunch of third graders the following ditty by the campfire:
(to the tune of Glory Hallelujah)
Glory glory Hallelujah
Teacher hit me with a ruler
So I came through the door
With a snub nose 44
Now teacher don’t teach no more
You realize that the songs of Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, when put in a specific order, tell a coherent story?
“Young Girl” – Singer is attracted to a young girl.
“Lady Willpower” – She’s just turned 18. It’s now or never.
“This Girl is a Woman Now” – The morning after
“Woman, Woman” – have you got cheating on your mind?
“Over You” – She’s left him
I was born in 1971, so I only encountered the song with any kind of rationality in the 80s, and it always makes me think “Grace Jones”. Not the prostitute bit, but the rest.
I have to confess I don’t understand what is anachronistic about most of the examples in this thread, and am not sure what sort of thing the OP is looking for.
I don’t know how old you are, but The Who’s 1982 “Athena” also compares a hot chick to a nuclear weapon. It contains the repeated line “She’s just a girl (she’s a bomb)”. Since Athena was the Greek goddess of war many Who fans speculated that the song was some sort of metaphor about politicians being obsessed with nuclear weapons, but it eventually came out that it was in fact written as just a regular love song. The almost identical demo version was called “Theresa”, inspired by Pete Townshend’s unrequited infatuation with actress Theresa Russell. For the final version he swapped her real name for a similar one that fit the meter and rhyme scheme.
It wasn’t a huge hit, but Bruno Mars’s “Marry You” got a fair amount of airplay a few years back.
Athena was the goddess of a lot of things, including war. You can Google it if you don’t believe me, but since the Who song wasn’t intended to be about the goddess in the first place it’s not really relevant to this thread. I mentioned “Athena” as a post-1950s example of a song in which a desirable woman is compared to a bomb.
Another item in the “Humorous Songs by Flanders and Swann on the Subject of Date Rape That Are Not As Funny As They Used To Be” category is the “Tonga song” from “Songs For Our Time”:
:dubious:
With very few exceptions, though, F&S songs have aged remarkably well and are still fun as hell to sing. All together now! “Some talk of a Lagonda…”
He didn’t really mean anachronistic at the time they were written, which seems to be confusing some people. What he really meant was things that “didn’t age well.” They were OK when they were written, but wouldn’t be OK if they were written now.
I don’t think this is too difficult to understand.
Well, I don’t understand why a love song using nuclear weapons as a metaphor wouldn’t be OK today. A quick Google turned up a recent-ish pop song called “Atomic Love Song” by a band called the ReadyGoes, and there are probably other examples. If anything I’d think this sort of thing probably seemed edgier in the 1950s, when the song linked in the OP was written.
I have no idea what’s supposed to be less OK about Ben Folds Five’s “Brick” today vs. when it was written in the '90s. “Having My Baby” was before my time, but I don’t think it was considered totally OK even in the '70s – according to Wikipedia it was criticized for sexism, with both NOW and Ms. magazine giving Paul Anka sarcastic “awards” for male chauvinism.
My “Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades” neglected to include anything about a nuclear war or atomic weapons in the song; I know that the title/chorus is supposed to be a reference to nuclear weapons, but it’s an incredibly oblique reference that you pretty much have to be told about to get, so it doesn’t remotely count. Plus it’s an anti-nuke song not a pro-nuke song, though again it’s so oblique that you have to go to outside references to understand it. “Waitin’ for the Hammer to Fall” and “I won’t let the Sun Go down on Me” Are also both clearly anti-war songs, not songs using the awesomeness of nuclear weapons to talk about how hot a girl is.
If you can get a song that talks about nuclear weapons as a cool thing that the singer compares a hot girl/guy to or some other really positive thing, it would be similar. But a song protesting the idea of nuclear war or nuclear weapons under a jaunty facade just isn’t the same as a song jauntily using features of nuclear weapons to show how pretty a girl is.
I suppose I should clarify, I was born in the 1970s so those qualify as ‘not in my lifetime’. Really I’m thinking of ‘80s on’ as the time period, since I was too young to really pick stuff up in the 70s.
Again, it hides the reference to nuclear weapons behind metaphor, it doesn’t directly mention ‘atom bombs’ or ‘radiation clouds’. And “I’ll melt with you” is much easier to interpret as metaphor than literal in a song. Also doesn’t do any kind of positive comparison with nuclear weapons, though I didn’t make that bit clear in the OP even though it’s the major piece that seems weird to me.
I didn’t say that it would be disallowed today, I said that I can’t imagine it being a hit. What’s the highest ReadyGoes charted, and did it even get to US/UK charts? It’s definitely not something I’m likely to ever hear on the radio even assuming I listened to the radio for several hours a day. And I’m pretty sure that song is trying to be edgy with the comparison, not happy and shooting for a big hit.
Not to me, because I’d describe that song as being about the annoyances of a piece of current life. Technology has moved on so the gripe itself isn’t ‘current life’ anymore, but it doesn’t make the style of the song seem weird to me, the way that a song about happy nukes or it’s cool if your man beats you does. A song like “Spiderwebs” from the 90s hits on 'here’s some stuff about technology we use that annoys me" in the same way. I’m not saying don’t put it in the thread, but IMO it’s a different class of ‘wrong time’.
Having grown up in the 1950s and the 1960s, although people were afraid of an atomic Armageddon, the attitude about atomic weapon use was far more casual. People imagined that some use in the future was almost inevitable. Perhaps because the threat was more real, people were more willing to joke about it.
Seventy years after their last use in warfare, atomic weapons are much less in the public conciousness, and hence perhaps more taboo.
