I was thinking today about the song “You’re A Grand Old Flag.” The song announces that in America, “there’s never a boast or brag.” But the whole freaking song is essentially a boast about how awesome our flag is. Especially boastful are some of the lesser known lyrics like “Here’s a land with a million soldiers / That’s if we should need 'em / We’ll fight for freedom!”
There’s a more obscure one from a song we learned in grade school. I remember all the lyrics but I absolutely cannot find it anywhere online except for people reminiscing about snippets of it. So I can’t post a link. But it’s about the most hyperbolic bicycle accident ever. I’ll spoiler the lyrics so they don’t fill up the OP:[spoiler]I was going 'round the corner making 90 miles an hour
When the chain on my bicycle broke.
I was skinned all over by the rocks and the gravel
And was punctured to death by the spokes.
Well you’ve heard of accidents with hotrods, motorcars, and airplanes
But this accident of mine will take the cake.
For my foot slipped off the pedal and my coat caught in the chain
And therefore I could not even hit the brakes.
I’m not braggin’ I’m not lyin’ I’m just layin’ here a-dyin’
Cause these handlebars are sticking down my throat.
I’ve got the back wheel for a necktie and the front wheel for a belt
And I’m wearing the fenders for a coat.[/spoiler]Hang on there, Miss 4th-Grade-Music-Teacher. Our coat caught in the chain? I thought the chain broke? You can’t have it both ways. I’m not singing this garbage. (Well okay, I’ll sing it one more time because I’m 10 and I think it’s hilarious.)
But I think my favorite one is from the Disney movie The Little Mermaid. In a reprise of “Part of Your World” Ariel sings “I don’t know when / I don’t know how / But I know something’s starting right now!” I like it because it’s so immediately contradictory.
Oasis are good for this kind of thing because Noel Gallagher wrote all his best songs while out of his mind on drugs. A selection from the classic “Champagne Supernova:”
“Slowly walking down the hall/Faster than a cannonball”
Hrm?
Also, I know this one was intentional, but it still makes me laugh. From Ween’s “Push Th’ Little Daisies:”
“If you think/That I’m a loser/Well you suck/Cause you know I ain’t nothin’ but a loser”
Also one that struck me recently was from a classic 90’s alternative hit of my childhood, “Hey Leonardo” by Blessid Union of Souls (hey, no one said anything about high culture), where in the beginning the guys says something like,
“She don’t care about my money, but that’s okay cause I don’t got a lot to spend”
but then goes on to say,
“She don’t care about my big screen or my collection of DVDs” (keep in mind this was the 90’s when DVDs were cutting-edge and big screens were massive analog affairs)
and also,
“She don’t care that I can fly her to places she ain’t never been.”
The song is also supposedly a letter to Leonardo DiCaprio, whom he claims in the song to hang out with, along with Steve Buscemi. Apparently “she don’t care” that he appears to be a pathological liar, also.
Oh, I wish I was an Oscar Mayer weiner,
that is what I’d truly like to be,
'cause if I were an Oscar Mayer weiner,
everyone would be in love with me.
“Oh, I’m glad I’m not an Oscar Mayer weiner,
that is what I’d truly hate to be,
'cause if I were an Oscar Mayer weiner,
there would soon be nothing left of me.”
If you think that I’m a loser
Well you suck, ‘cause you know I ain’t nothin’ but a user
Of your love I can’t get enough
Girl it’s true, the whole wide world is smiling with you
There’s a songwriter I like named Andrew Ratchin. Over the course of a few decades, with two groups (Uncle Bonsai and Mel Cooleys) and his solo career, he has written more than a dozen songs about a guy named Doug. Doug at Home, Doug Gets Married, Doug’s Greatest Christmas Ever, and many more.
It’s mentioned more than once that Doug is Jewish, but in Doug’s First Job he eats bacon.
“Did he ever return?
No he never returned
And his fate is still unlearned
And he’ll ride forever, 'neath the streets of Boston
He’s the man who never returned”
If his fate is unlearned, how do you know he’ll ride forever?
“I would do anything for love
But I won’t do that”
Well, then, I guess it’s not really “anything”, then, is it?
Ratchin’s songs shifted between spectacularly silly (as a lyricist, I put him in the same category as Tom Lehrer) and deeply sentimental. To pick apart the details in the saga of Doug strikes me as contributing to the spirit of the enterprise.
*She smiled at me on the subway.
She was with another man.
But I won’t lose no sleep on that,
'Cause I’ve got a plan…
…
I saw your face in a crowded place,
And I don’t know what to do…*
You don’t know what to do? What happened to that brilliant plan you were bragging about just a couple of lines ago? Did it fall through already?
The first time I heard that I started laughing because the lyrics exactly described my friend’s big brother when we were in high school. He was 18 or 19 and we saw him almost running down the sidewalk, sweating and out of breath. We found out the next day that he had dropped acid and had thought he was moving super-slow, but with better shoes, no doubt he’d have approached cannonball speed.
There’s a lyric in a Blake Shelton song that drives me crazy - “Hold yourself together like a pair of bookends”. Bookends aren’t together! They’re apart, because they have books between them! I hate that song.
IIRC, the explanation she’s hinted at is that it’s a song about three different guys – the one who wore an apricot scarf isn’t the one who used the pick-up line about how “we’d make such a pretty pair”, and neither of 'em is the guy who bet on the right horse before flying out to see a total eclipse.
So if you’re one of those three guys and think the song is about you, well, most of the time she’s singing about someone else…
