[QUOTE=phungi]
Perhaps it is my interpretation, but I understand the song to be a call-out to unsuspecting lads merely looking for a place to stay (insert obligatory “not that there’s anything wrong with that” statement here)
[/QUOTE]
Not unsuspecting. Check the later verses:
*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.
[QUOTE=kaylasdad99]
Meanwhile, back in the twenty-first century, Carrie Underwood, Little Miss Jesus-Take-The-Wheel, herself, is demonstrating the cleansing benefits of turning your life over to the Lord, as she goes medieval on her boyfriend’s car.
I dug my key into the side of his pretty little souped-up 4WD, carved my name into his leather seats, took a Louisville Slugger to both headlights, slashed a hole in all four tires…
What would Jesus do, Carrie? What would Jesus do?
Probably cut his brake lines. Wait here, I think I have a hacksaw in my trunk.
[/QUOTE]
And …? I don’t get it, what’s wrong with that?
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.
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
Speaking of BTO, I think “Share the Land” sounds kind of obnoxious in retrospect.
Maybe I’ll be there to shake your hand.
Maybe I’ll be there to share the land
that they’ll be givin’ away
when we all get together now.
Who, exactly is going to be giving away this land and where did they get it from? Wouldn’t they have had to take it away from somebody else?
And what would Randy Bachman do with the land if he had it? Are he and his band really going to get up at 5 A.M. and go pick rocks and do everything else it takes to actually work the land?
Nothing against the band really (Bachman is actually a pretty good songwriter), but that song has some pretty shallow, fatuous hippie sentiment in it.
[/QUOTE]
The Guess Who did “Share the Land.”
I always took it as a 1960s hippie tune about everyone living happily together.
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”.
[QUOTE=WordMan]
There are countless threads that discuss songs portraying creeped-out behavior, but I always come back to Possum Kingdom by the Toadies, told from the perspective of a whackjob serial killer seducing his next victim “behind the boathouse, where she can stay young and beautiful forever” - I hate, hate, hate the fact that I love the groove and overall hookiness of this song…
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Is this confirmed? I always just thought he was going to, you know, deflower her. And then remember her fondly.
[QUOTE=Elendil’s Heir]
Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire,” though, sounds like a love song of a perv to a very young woman. Similarly, “Aqualung” by Jethro Tull.
[/QUOTE]
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.
[QUOTE=kaylasdad99]
Meanwhile, back in the twenty-first century, Carrie Underwood, Little Miss Jesus-Take-The-Wheel, herself, is demonstrating the cleansing benefits of turning your life over to the Lord, as she goes medieval on her boyfriend’s car.
I dug my key into the side of his pretty little souped-up 4WD, carved my name into his leather seats, took a Louisville Slugger to both headlights, slashed a hole in all four tires…
What would Jesus do, Carrie? What would Jesus do?
Probably cut his brake lines. Wait here, I think I have a hacksaw in my trunk.
[/QUOTE]
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.
[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
Tony Randall sang it, too, back on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.
[/QUOTE]
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.
The singer is trapped in a mine with Joe and Timothy. They are “hungry as hell and no food to eat,”
[/QUOTE]
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.