Songs that make you say, "WTF?"

I don’t find it creepy, because they are obviously telling a story with two unreliable narrators. You’re not supposed to sympathize with the rich guy who wants to control his woman, or the cocktail waitress who screws her way to the top. I used to love that song, by the way, but it was definitely a relic of the Dynasty era.

I believe it was hinted at but not discussed in this thread… (or maybe the other reference was to something else

Alanis Morrisette - Ironic
An old man turned ninety-eight
He won the lottery and died the next day
It’s a black fly in your Chardonnay
It’s a death row pardon two minutes too late
Isn’t it ironic … don’t you think
Chorus

unfortunately, these things are not ironic :rolleyes:
Also, REM’s It’s the End of the World as We Know It is a complete WTF (although I can sing along to the whole thing, which is cool)

on that note a while back about boyfriends looking like girlfriends, we’ve conjectured either that it was a transvestite or a transexual, but we never really had any idea what that had to do with anything

Well bless my soul, what’s wrong with me?
I’m itchin’ like a man on a fuzzy tree.

Actually, as Merriam-Webster Online notes,

Under which definition, at least some of what she is singing about is “ironic.”

Could I Be Your Girl by Jann Arden

I am Jesus? REALLY?? WTF!

This is about the boiling of silkworm cocoons, thus killing the larva (children), to make silk for clothing (some gods stocking). A bit of buddhist hypocrisy, since ordering animals to be killed is an offense in buddhism.

thanks to Rosco for explaining this to me many years ago

Heart’s All I Wanna Do (Is Make Love To You)

Girl driving along on a rainy night, picks up a hitchhiker.
Girl brings hitchhiker to hotel, proceeds to have wild, passionate sex with this total stranger, whose name she never asks.
Girl leaves before he wakes up, admonishing him in a note to never, ever, ever, ever, ever try to find her.
Girl runs into hitchhiker years later, where he somehow immediately knows that the kid she’s with is his.
Girl confesses that she’s in love with someone else who (was infertile? didn’t want kids? couldn’t have sex?), so she decided to hunt down a stranger to have random, unprotected sex with so she could have a baby.

:smack: :smack: :smack: :smack:

Yea gods, I hate that song.

Because of copyright concerns, please be careful to avoid posting full lyrics in your posts. The best thing to do is to quote a few lines and then cut-and-paste a link to the lyrics on another site. I’ve gone through and trimmed a number of lyrics in this thread, so if your post no longer makes sense, sorry about that. Next time, be sure to include a link to the full lyrics.

I’ve heard this before, but it isn’t actually true. The 0,0 point of the Chicago street system grid is the intersection of State and Madison, so by definition, anything east of State Street is the East Side. On the North Side of Chicago, it’s true that this terminates into Lake Michigan pretty quickly (although it does include Magnificent Mile portion of Michigan Avenue), but on the South Side, the East Side is fairly substantial.

On topic: EVERYTHING by REM, pretty much. I don’t mind, I still like them, but I’m damned if I know what, if anything, almost all of their songs mean.

Not to mention, it should be “hanged”.

Hmm, unless they hung him on a live wire to kill him. You may be on to something here.

I read this and the related posts and was astounded that there would be any confusion around this song. I have been listening to this one since I was a kid and I always loved the song and it always made perfect sense to me.

The Angie lives in a different reality than the rest of us and so appears strange. The neighbor sees her as easy pickings and makes a move. Once he enters her world the rules change and he becomes trapped when he is associated with the music on the radio. His interface with reality is now dependant on the volume control of the radio. So she just turns him off when she doesn’t need him and then turns up the sound when she wants a “dancing partner”. I mean, come on, the guy even gets disoriented when he crosses from one reality to the other.

You guys just never read enough 60s Sci Fi.

Tangerine by the Flaming Lips.

Maybe all their songs are like this; I dunno. But it was in heavy rotation when released, and it drove me crazy: it makes no sense whatsoever.

Girl, with vaseline on toast. Guy, blows nose on magazines. Girl like Cher turns hair orange by using tangerines. WTF?

No, seriously… WTF? What is the point of telling us these things? Why do you have these pathetic friends? Is Vaseline-toast girl some kind of bulemic, trying to induce diarrhea? Do you really hang out with booger-magazines guy? And why does the orange-haired girl remind you of Cher? Gah!

The chick-a cherry cola thing is in the liner notes. I have the CD. I thought maybe it was some Australian beverage or something, personally.

I still don’t know what a magenta feeling is, either. But I guess it’s good, from the context of the song. Blue=sad, magenta=some kind of happy?

I am right there with ya, bobkitty. Not that I needed another reason to hate Heart!

Lightray: That isn’t really very representative of The Flaming Lips. Their best albums are Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and The Soft Bulletin, both of which make more sense.

enigm4tic: It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine) is probably best understood as a dream where the world is ending but you feel fine because it’s time you had some time alone. In other words, don’t break your glasses.

I assumed that this chorus lyric is the result of playing “telephone” - as one person spread gossip to the next person down the line, the rumor evolved into something convoluted and more, well, gossipy. Plus it has the ambi-sexual feel that seems more provocative than it really is.

Our girl singer in our bands sings it and it goes over well…

Something that bugs me about Ironic is that it’s a very ironic song and that people get worked up over it. The name of the song is Ironic, it’s about things that aren’t ironic. That’s irony.

Eek! Sorry.

I feel Hazard was a small town and his mother (single? widowed?) moved there when he was seven and because he grew up somewhere else his mannisms were different and when his friend dissapeared they assumed the outsider caused it.

I always wondered is the Scatman was talking about abortion in this line of “I’m the Scatman”:

I hear you ask all about the meaning of scat
Well I am the professor and all I can tell you
Is while you’re still sleeping
Saints are still weeping
Cause things you call dead haven’t yet the chance to be born

I’m the scatman.