We all know The Kinks song Lola, right? Well, the rest of the song makes it obvious that Lola is packing some serious swinging heat, but at the end of the song there’s the line:
“But I know what I am and I’m glad I’m a man
And so is Lola”
From strictly grammatical perspective does that line mean that Lola is also glad that the speaker is a man, or that Lola is also man?
It means that the reference is ambiguous and so may mean either, exactly as Ray Davies intended.
The sense of it, outside the context of a song that just spent 3 minutes packing every ambiguous reference to Lola’s gender that it was possible to pack in, is that Lola is glad that Mr. Davies is a man.
In Bangkok, Lola is anyone you want him/her to be.
OP needs a harry rag, and he’ll be fine.
It’s a syntactic ambiguity, like “tall men and women” or “police help dog bite victim.”
I always liked “small business owners.”
IMHO It’s “The Crying Game” carefully constructed to survive the American radio censors of the time.
“Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl
With yellow feathers in her hair and a dress cut down to there
She would meringue and do the cha-cha…”
Whoops, wrong song, different gender - maybe?
Get that song out of your head!
My favorite is the one-eyed one-horned flying purple people eater - where is it finding these freakish, horned, flying purple cyclopes to eat?
“Whatever Lola wants . . .”
"Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl
And she drank champagne that tasted just like Coca-Cola
At the Copa (CO!), Copacabana (Copacabana)
The hottest spot north of Old Soho (here)…”
Better?
Actually, she would merengue.
The Kinks? Huh, learn something new every day.
Why would the Beatles cover a song from the Kinks?
The story I heard, in a CBC show about “stories behind the songs”… The Kinks boys had gone partying in London. By about 6AM they were leaving a bar and one of the guys noticed that one of the “chicks” they had been partying at the bar with, had a visible five-oclock (or 6AM) shadow that was obvious in the early morning sun while they were waiting for a cab.
So they wrote a song about a poor naive kid (“just left town a week ago”) who ends up with a deceptively confusing sort of assertive bar friend. (“couldn’t understand, how she walked like a woman but talked like a man…”)
Also mentioned was that Billy Idol’s “Mony, mony” was based on the massive neon MONY billboard Billy could see from his apartment window in New York. And “White Wedding” was about Billy chiding his kid sister how she could get knocked up by her boyffriend. (Sister and hubby are still together, and Idol’s been divorced how many times?)
Add this to the “'Excuse me while I kiss this guy…” list for me. I always thought he was singing:
“…but I know what I am and what I am is a man and so was Lola!”
Guess I confused it with what Popeye sings! I never pay close attention to lyrics (I never even realized the whole gender-bending point of the song until my brother pointed it out to me!)
Albumenist!
s/Billy Idol/Tommy James/
Doh!
That’s on the single. It was meringue on the albumen version.