*Young man, I was once in your shoes
I said, I was down and out with the blues
I felt no one cared if I were alive
I thought the whole world was so jive
That’s when someone came up to me
And said young man, take a walk up the street
There’s a place there called the Y.M.C.A.
They can start you back on your way*
Sounds to me like the young guy has been tossed out by his parents, or beat up by homophobes – something that left him down on his luck. The “you can hook up” implication is less important to me than the “you’re not alone in the world” message. In fact, I have a hard time dancing to that song since I spotted that message. I keep picturing a suddenly-homeless kid, perhaps with a black eye or split lip, being reassured by a guy who’s been there himself. Not uplifting, to be sure, but not sinister either.
Oh, carving her own name into the seats! Yeah, that’s pretty dumb.
The owner of the car is not only cheating on his woman, he’s getting a silly young girl who’s not used to alcohol drunk to ‘take advantage of her’. He’s also wearing cheap cologne. All around caddish behavior.
I nominate this song as the Anti-Caddish Behavior Song.
I’ve always been conflicted by Elvis’s “Kentucky Rain”. Classic stalker territory.
Seven lonely days
And a dozen towns ago
I reached out one night
And you were gone
Dont know why youd run,
What youre running to or from
All I know is I want to bring you home
So Im walking in the rain,
Thumbing for a ride
On this lonely kentucky backroad
Ive loved you much too long
And my loves too strong
To let you go, never knowing
What went wrong
What’s even more disturbing is the complete self pity thing, in which the singer casts himself as the victim here.
But its a great song. Pity one of the writers’ names is “Dick Heard”.
Aqualung? How so? It’s a sad tale of a drunken bum dying in squalid misery. Yes, at one point he’s perving at young girls in a park, but it’s not a love song.
How about “The One I Love” by REM? Like “Every Breath You Take” it’s one of those songs that many people think of as a love song because they only hear the hook. Describing someone as “another prop” who has occupied the time of the singer is perhaps a bit less charming.
For classic songs, Have Some Madeira My Dear - Limelighters have it on one of their albums I think. A nice song about an old man who gets a 17 year old drunk and screws her.
As Steven Colbert said (regarding McCain’s lack of support from the religious right), “If there’s one thing we know about Christians, they do not forgive.”
My own song contribution: “El Paso”, by Marty Robbins. The narrator sees his favorite “dancer” drinking with another man, and so he shoots him dead, steals a horse, and flees the state.
I have a feeling that Marty Robbins wouldn’t meet the “upstanding, clean cut citizen” criterion, though; the lyrics site where I looked it up says that the same album includes two songs with the word “hanging” in their titles.
Tony Randall all but lived it…his second marriage was to a 25-year-old…when he was 75! And she gave birth to two children before he died 9 years later!
I hope I don’t have to note this, but I’m talking about the age differential only. There’s no evidence that Randall had to get his second wife drunk in order to marry him…or anything else.
That’s certainly the impression the song leaves, but if memory serves, it’s never specified that Timothy was a human being. Some radio stations tried to defuse the song by suggesting that Timothy was a donkey that also worked in the mine.
Notably, the song was written by Rupert Holmes, of “Pina Colada” fame. Which also glorifies bad behavior, by the way.
The Bells of Hell go ding aling a ling for You but not for Me.
A WW1 Brit Army song rejoicing that someone else has got killed and not the singer,many people assume that it is ironic.