Jamie O’Neal - There Is No Arizona
I don’t see how anything could top this.
Deep in the Heart of Texas
But that one is actually about how great the girls outside of California are, not about how great the ones in California are (“I wish they all could be California girls,” i.e., live where I do - quoted from memory). It’s kind of the opposite of a California-rah-rah song. I guess you could call it a the-other-49-States-rah-rah song.
I’ve always understood it the other way - that even though girls from other states are great, the singer still wishes they were all California girls.
I am sorry for the hijack, but this is quite a coincidence. I had been thinking about starting a thread just to ask this question. Which one is it? Does he want girls from across the US to be replaced with California-style girls because California girls are better, despite East Coast girls being hip and so forth? Or does he want all the great types of girls to be physically located in California, so he can be kept warm at night and dig the French bikinis without having to leave his home state?
Rhode Island is Famous for You by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, from the 1948 Broadway revue Inside U.S.A. Witty and charming.
Jayhawks “Nevada, California”
The rephrased lyrics are “girls from Suchplace are cool because of this feature… girls from Suchotherplace are cool because of this other feature… I wish they all could be California girls”. Like I said, to me that sounds like “hot damn, why can’t I have evey cool girl out there right here? Why, oh, why do all those hot, hot, hot chicks not live here?”, rather than “oh, gee, whenever I go on tour I meet all these girls who are ok but not hip enough”.
Out of context, you may be correct. However, taking the entire Beach Boys *oeuvre *into account, it seems to me that implying that California girls are in any way inferior to girls elsewhere - in fact, stating that they are not superior - would be in direct contradiction to their espoused philosophy. The assertion that everything relating to California is superior to everything not relating to California is a key motif of dozens, perhaps hundreds of their verses.
This interpretation has never even occurred to me, in all my years of hearing the song!
The lines “I’ve been all around this great big world and I’ve seen all kinds of girls / But I couldn’t wait to get back to the States, back to the cutest girls in the world” seem to me to favor the latter interpretation.
But on the other hand, I went back and listened to the version of the song on the “Live in London” album, and they sing “I wish you all could be California girls” to their London audience—which I suppose is a compliment under the first interpretation, an insult under the second.
Alessan, yeah but that’s why it struck me so much, because it doesn’t fit the general “if I don’t have sand in my buttcrack I’ll die” general tone.
Of course, it’s also possible that he didn’t realize he was insulting the audience, sort of like that boyfriend I had who would launch into these speeches about how human science is worthless and some day the aliens will swoop down and explain everything to us. And we’d all look at him and someone would say “you must have the worst seduction techniques ever, dude.” I was in a PhD program in Chemistry at the time… “dude was nice but not the brightest bulb inna tree” is something which sounds like it could apply to Wilson too.
I guess I’m trying to say it’s just too ambiguous to go one way or another, specially if you consider the song by itself.
I always took it as meaning that girls from other places were great, but that they could only be enhanced by being California girls. Because for one thing, it’s warm, so they’d wear less clothing. And for another, just by living in California, they’d get into the California life style and relax and get into cool things like volleyball and surfing. So he sees a hot chick somewhere else and thinks about how she would make a great California girl.
Tennessee:
Tennessee Waltz
Tennessee Stud (Eddy Arnold song about a horse!)
http://www.statesymbolsusa.org/Tennessee/TennesseeSongs.html
Agreed, a great song. However, the last time Springsteen played Omaha, there had been a mass shooting there just a few months earlier. In a fine show of judgment, the song went unplayed in its eponymous state.