All right, how about this: the first Dirty Harry film strongly implied that dangerous criminals are running rampant, and that tough cops need to be given free rein to stop them, by almost any means necessary.
The first sequel, Magnum Force, had just the opposite message: that cops are not above the law, and rogue cops have to be kept in check or they’ll be more dangerous than the crooks.
Both films had the same star and the same director- Clint Eastwood and Don Siegel.
I am perfectly aware that songs and other works may be written or sung “in character” and don’t necessarily reflect the artists’ true feelings. It still counts if the characters have totally different viewpoints.
OK, you’re the boss. I thought you were asking for an artist actually putting for contradictory attitudes, not pretending to. There are plenty enough examples of the former, as you and most of the other posters in the thread have shown.
Are we including artists whose views changed drastically over time?
Many fire-breathing, radical young artists have gotten far more conservative with age. A poet like William Wordsworth comes to mind. In his youth, he wrote poetry extolling the French Revolution, while in his old age, he was a Tory and a patriotic English Poet Laureate.
Pick away because I’m joining you. Every lyric sheet I’ve ever seen for “Can’t By Me Love”, whether analogue paper 40 years ago or digital digits today, presents the line as
I don’t care too much for money
For money can’t buy me love
I’ve never heard a Beatles recording, studio or live, where they sing the word “for.”
I feel better now.
ABBA’s Dancing Queen is “only 17,” turns on a guy, leaves him burning and then goes on to another. The young woman in “Does Your Mother Know?” gets turned down by the guy.
Frank Sinatra’s “That’s Life” vs. “My Way.”
That’s the same philosophy!
He’s been “a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king” – or, as he later puts it, he’s traveled each and every highway. He’s been shot down, but assures us he’ll be back on top – and since that’s true, he can later note that he took the blows and did it his way. He’s repeatedly found himself flat on his face, but he always picks himself back up – which means he (a) bit off more than he could chew, but then (b) spit it out and stood tall instead of kneeling.
His regrets are too few to mention? I guess he doesn’t let stuff get him down. He mentions a fact he can’t deny? I guess he says the things he truly feels…
Okay then, the Beatles Hello Goodbye
In the first song, he says he’ll continue living no matter what (at least until the last line); in the second, he’s resigned to death.
The first song ends with him saying he’s thought of quitting, but that his heart won’t buy it – adding that he’d curl up and die if he didn’t think it was worth it; the second song opens with him saying the end is here.
I take that to mean that (a) he’s still not committing suicide – as contemplated, but rejected, in the first song – but that (b) it’s no longer up to him: he’s about to drop dead regardless of his feelings on the matter. But the record shows that, right up until the final curtain, he took the blows and kept doing it his way; his philosophy is unchanged: the spirit is still willing, but for the first time his flesh is too weak.
Pollock once stated that his art was intuitive, from the subconscious. He also said that he was in complete control of what he was painting.
What a drag it is getting old…
…vs. ti-i-i-ime, is on my side.
Elton John sang goodbye to the yellow brick road, with the penthouses and the dogs of society, to go back to his plow. But when he was told that a honky cat should get back to the woods, he replied that he’d quit those days and his redneck ways, and the change would do him good.