The book “Endless Love” is not bad. The movie was atrocious.
As a tween, I requested Little River Band’s “Happy Anniversary” for a friend of mine, who was celebrating a week with her boyfriend. Not a song of celebration either.
I suspect more than a few people have sung along to the chorus of Madness’ House of Fun oblivious to the fact the song is about a young lad buying his first packet of condoms.
Lou Reed’s Perfect Day gets a lot of use in a non-ironic way despite the lyrics being quite obviously sarcastic and bitter. It’s really not a “nice” song at all.
Great song from a genius album, of course.
That is a reflection on you, I think. Those lyrics are in no way obviously sarcastic or bitter at all. Not even subtly.
You’re claiming that a song that ends with a repeated refrain of “You’re going to reap just what you sow” is a happy song about a great day? Do you think it’s a little too subtle with the negative vibes?
I did a community thing for my job today. Basically all these local corporations had a competition for who could collect the most donated items and display them in the creative theme of “America 250.” Then me and some other nonprofits served as the judges.
One of them was indeed playing Born in the USA and I thought of this thread.
But this version is great
It always puzzles me when I hear Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman” described as a great romantic song, or even hear it played at weddings. Let’s examine the lyrics, and look at some of the things that will happen when a man loves a woman:
Turn his back on his best friend
Spend his very last dime
Give up all his comforts and sleep out in the rain
If she’s playing him for a fool, he’s the last one to know
It’s a song about being so desperately obsessed with someone that you will allow yourself to be mistreated, manipulated, and abused. Hardly my idea of romantic.
It’s definitely a meloncholic song with a tension between what appears to be the narrator’s description of a “perfect day” and a kind of self-loathing. “You made me forget myself, I thought I was someone else, someone good.” The deadpan, almost detached delivery of the vocals reinforces that feeling to me. Those reap/sow lines also support a less straightforward interpretation of the lyrics. That said, when Lou Reed has talked about it, he generally has refused to offer an explanation of the lyrics. The best I could find is an ambiguous: “[It’s about] a perfect day, real simple. I meant just what I said.” There is also the popular theory it’s about heroin addiction (which, yeah, you can shoehorn drugs or sex interpretations into many songs).
I’ve always heard it as at least melancholic. There’s the tension of having a perfect day and his realization of basically what a shitty person he is. And the final repeated lines are ambiguous. One possible interpretation is a suspicion that this feeling won’t last, as he criticizes himself as a bad person, and that will catch up with him. That’s if you interpret to “you” as a general “you” and not al the “you” in the rest of the song. You can interpret it otherwise. I find good lyrics to be subject to multiple interpretations. I don’t generally like straightforward lyrics. I don’t think there is one “correct” way of reading it.
“When You’re in Love with a Beautiful Woman” by Dr Hook. Some people think this is a love song about how he loves a woman so much
But the protagonist is miserable! He’s suspicious, jealous, depressed, just very unhappy. He doesn’t trust his woman, he thinks all his friends are trying to lure her away, he’s constantly on his guard. It’s actually quite a sad song when you dissect the lyrics.
I was just thinking: however many years ago, Elton John composed a catchy little song called “Nikita”, singing about some German border guard the narrator has a crush on. There was even a music video featuring Elton John romancing a blonde woman. However, if you pay attention to the title, the song is almost certainly about a man.
And AFAIK, Nikita mainly is a male name.
I can’t think of any real-life Nikitas besides Khrushchev, but I can understand people thinking of it as a female name, because isn’t it common for Spanish ro Italian names ending in -a to be feminine?
Yeah, that’s common for names in roman languages. But Nikita is Russian, and there are other male Russian names I can think of that end with -a, like Wanja, Aljosha or Sasha.
And, how often do you hear Khrushchev by his full name, while there was a movie and show called “La Femme Nikita” that might be higher in the public awareness.
Just a thought.
True, but my first thought on the name Nikita is the movie “La Femme Nikita,” where Nikita is a woman, so my brain goes feminine on the name (as well as it just sounds feminine with the -ita at the end.)
The movie title confused me at the time, because I had known Nikita only as a male name before.
ETA: just a hunch, but maybe they explicitly called the movie “La Femme…” to indicate that it’s not about a Russian male.
I thought it was a twist on “A Boy Named Sue”.
On the flip side of name genders, Suzanne Vega’s song “Luka” is about a young boy although many listeners assumed that Luka, with the -a ending, was a woman’s name and imagined her as an abused wife.
Vega said that it didn’t bother her which way you interpret it since it works both ways.
So was Shirly, early in the 20th century. Which might explain the Airplane joke.