On a lighter note, I think REM’s “Stand” qualifies. What a catchy beat! What dumb lyrics.
Even they admit it’s a stupid song.
If you are confused, check with the sun
Carry a compass to help you along
Your feet are going to be on the ground
Your head is there to move you around
OTOH, 5-year-old me loved dancing to that song and following the directions whenever it came on the radio when it was new.
Huh, I just replied to the wrong post. Sorry.
Hehe, when I saw them on that tour, he introduced the song with “This is the stupidest song ever written by man.”
NP at all, really just wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing something.
That was played at my dad’s funeral. I had no idea about the meaning of the lyrics. I wonder if he did!
That was the first song I thought of. But it’s not straightforward… should I not like it? Are the lyrics problematic, or just about a horrible subject?
I mean, it’s literally about a Southern plantation owner fucking his slaves.
Gold Coast slave ship bound for cotton fields
Sold in a market down in New Orleans
Scarred old slaver knows he’s doing alright
Hear him whip the women just around midnight…
Drums beating, cold English blood runs hot
Lady of the house wondering where it’s gonna stop
House boy knows that he’s doing alright
You shoulda heard him just around midnight
Good entry, but, for me, I understood the lyrics right away, so I never got to likin’ it in the first place. What a whiny jerk. I assume it’s autobiographical, not just something that sprung out of the aether into his head. Didn’t anyboy tell him, didn’t anybody see?
Yes I know what it’s about. But art can be about appalling subjects without endorsing them. In this case I’m not sure quite how I feel about the song. I definitely don’t enjoy the lyrics, but I enjoy the tune. Does knowing the lyrics make me enjoy the tune less? Maybe.
This might come down to my (mis)understanding of the word problematic. Having thought about it, yes absolutely that song is problematic.
I had no problem with the song itself, or the version we were playing (by Pentatonix). I did have a problem with it being passed off as a “Christmas” song, to be played between Steve & Edie warbling “Sleigh Ride” and that kid who sang “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas.” It was just beyond ridiculous.
I’m torn on one song: Boom Boom Ba by Metisse. You’ve heard it if you’ve watched Dead Like Me.
Originally, I liked it. Loved the keyboards. Thought it was a song about a lady who had the hots for some guy. But that seems not to be. More like it’s about a lady who’s desperately seeking a human connection. That alone doesn’t change how I feel about the song.
But it baffles me. I don’t get a lot of the things mentioned. Some might be personal to the songwriter. Others might be specific to the Ivory Coast cultures. So sure, One, two, three, four, five okay… but who the hell is Annie?
In the end, I liked casually listening to it better when I thought it was a plain old love song, but the newer interpretation I’m coming around to is the more interesting.
ISTM all of the '70s and maybe into early '80s pop was one long celebration of spoiled stalkery men and the obedient, clueless, or both, women they lusted after.
That was simply the tenor of the times. Great times to be a sleazebag. Not every song was that way, but an awful lot of them were / are. It went with the territory.
As the last few years’ events out in the real world have demonstrated, that attitude never went away. It just went underground … for awhile.
Not mentioned so far in the thread that I noticed …
I’ve always liked the Motown sound. But there are one heck of a lot of those songs that amount to a black female singer telling us how she loves a man who’s a serial cheater, but she’s soo in love that she’ll follow him anywhere anyway. Talk about a) enabling your own mistreatment, and b) training a generation to become single (and probably unwed) mothers.
Yeah, maybe a smidgen problematic. But great listening.
The Stranglers “Golden Brown” is an amazing interesting composition, weird time signature, great vocal delivery. Reading the lyrics it is about…heroin. Sigh, yet another forgettable drug song.
Well … what’s that old saying? Oh yeah:
Write what you know.
There are also a lot of 70s rock songs about sex with groupies. They aren’t all obvious at first, many seem like normal but simple love songs, but when you pay close attention, yeah, groupie sex. So many I’ve considered starting a thread just to catalog them all, see which ones I missed.
Write what you know. Indeed.
See also “My Favorite Things.”
And, of course, there are all the problematic songs about adult men lusting after underage women, like Winger’s “Seventeen,” “You’re Sixteen” by Ringo Starr, “Christine Sixteen” by KISS, and a whole swath of others.
I sang along with Allison Kraus’s lovely, soft, “Baby Now That I Found You” hundreds of times before one day the meaning hit me like a ton of bricks. Good Og help us all.
I’d heard that Jim Croce’s songs were actually based on real people he’d met and real incidents: eg. Leroy Brown, Rapid Roy (that stock car boy), Don’t Mess Around With Jim, Roller Derby Queen, etc.