Has this ever happened to you? You listen to a song for years with your own understanding of its lyrics, and then the songwriter comes along and spells things out and it turns out you were waaaaaayyyyy off. Now, suddenly, you can’t listen to the song in the same way any more and the song loses some value to you.
IMHO, one of the beauties of well-written poetry is that it is open to multiple interpretations. (The current thread on Spandau Ballet’s “True” got me thinking about this.) I sometimes wish artists would just refuse to discuss the meaning of their lyrics. Better that songwriters shouldn’t spell everything out for you.
I can think of two instances of this phenomenon in my own song-listening history:
Fall on Me - R.E.M. The song’s lyrics talk about the sky falling, and I assumed this meant the singer’s own little world was in danger of falling apart (presumably as a result of a calamitous romance), and he is trying desperately to hold things together. Then Michael Stipe goes and tells everybody that the song is about acid rain, and suddenly the song is a lot more literal and (to me) a lot less interesting.
Driving With the Brakes On - Del Amitri. I had imagined this song to be from the perspective of a man who has convinced a woman to leave her husband. And now he is having regrets and feeling guilty about breaking up a marriage. But it turns out I was wrong. The songwriter gives an interview and says the song is about a couple dealing with the emotional aftermath of an abortion. It’s still an interesting song from that angle, but hardly the same.
So has this ever happened to you? Has a song lost value to you when you found out what it was really about?
Yes - I will cite the same song I cite in “creepy lyrics” thread: Possum Kingdomby the Toadies. I love the groove of the song and the vocal delivery, but knowing what it is really about (the video linked to provides obvious clues…)
The band is circumspect, but it appears to be about a killer luring a girl to her death - with the song representing the killer’s POV and rationale for doing it - come with me and you’ll never grow old…
I always thought Possum Kingdom was a vampire fan-wank song. Love the song though … “Rubberneck” was a great album.
As for me, I had always assumed that Hey Man, Nice Shot by Filter was about Kurt Cobain shooting himself. As it turns out it’s really about Bud Dwyer shooting himself … on live TeeVee no less. It kind of took a little of the cool out of it for me. My solution: Fuck the songwriter. It’s about Cobain as far as I’m concerned.
I never paid enough attention to the lyrics to try to parse them out - it was just a fun-groove song with a non-standard time (what is it 5/4? 7/8?) that had cool guitar parts. Then someone pointed out the lyrics. :eek:
I didn’t particularly like the song, and I wasn’t bummed out to find out what (or who, rather) it was about, but when I started hearing that “You Oughta Know” was supposedly about Dave Coulier I was pretty surprised. Like, damn, how could anyone have been worked up enough about the dude from Full House to write a song like that? And that theatre line? TMI!
Isn’t that just a rumor, though? It’s known that Alanis Morisette used to date Dave Coulier, but I don’t believe either of them ever claimed the song was about their relationship. I’m sure Ms. Morisette has dated more than one man in her life. It became a popular rumor because it is so ridiculous (and somewhat creepy) to imagine this angry breakup song is about “Uncle Joey”.
I just found a relevant article on Snopes, which lists this legend as “undetermined”. It says Coulier has admitted a few of the lines did seem to apply to their relationship, but also that Morisette has stated she’ll never say who the song is about.
Sorry, this is a nitpick, but I’m something of a Full House scholar. (Yeah…I know.) It’s not Uncle Joey. Uncle Jesse, yes. But it was always just Joey.
The first few times I heard The Darkness’ Growing On Me I thought it was a song about the all-consuming elation of falling in love with someone. Then I had it pointed out to me that it’s about venereal disease. Really obvious from the lyrics in retrospect.
You could NOT tell a lil’ chunky 16 year old black girl speeding down the street in her beat up hooptie that she wasn’t rocking OUT when this song came on! The station to catch the good grunge was called the Nerve, and I would always listen to that for a while before popping in my hiphop tapes.
But I gotta beat you up a bit, WordMan. By the end of that song, they are repeatedly shouting “DO YOU WANNA DIE?!” over and over. You have to really be zoned out to miss it.
On the other hand, I went my whole childhood without realizing the real meaning to songs as obvious as Rick James’ Superfreak. So I’m sure we both could have used a visit from Obvious Man.
God help me, I do know that Joey wasn’t a blood relative to the rest of the cast, but I could swear I remember the youngest girl referring to him as “uncle”. If you say no then I’m probably wrong, though.
I used to think “Like a Virgin” was about a sensitive girl who meets a nice guy and falls in love.
The a friend told me that it’s actually about a girl who’s a real fuck-machine, I mean: morning, noon, and night, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick.
Then she meets this John Holmes Motherfucker. This guy is like Charles Bronson in The Great Escape, he’s digging tunnels. All of the sudden she’s feeling things she ain’t felt since forever: Pain. When this cat fucks her it hurts. It shouldn’t hurt, because of all the fucking she’s been doing, but it hurts. It hurts just like it did the first time. The pain is reminding a fuck-machine what it once felt like to be a virgin. Hence, “Like a Virgin”.