This is a great book, even though it has a few annoying errors - referring to a brand-new “Cadillac Esplanade,” mentioning “a guy who had played on New Zealand’s all-black rugby team” (their rugby team is called the “All Blacks” but it is not an all-black team!) and repeating the myth that FUCK stands for “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge.” I don’t know how the editors missed that, but it is still a must-read if you are an RHCP fan.
[QUOTE=C K Dexter Haven]
Close to an insult? Not my intention. Anyway it’s cooled, dropped, etc.
Actually, “Good Riddance” sounds like the perfect sentiment to sum up the end of my high school experience.
I think some songs sound good at first but don’t hold up to multiple listening.
Like I listen to some of my mothers 45s from the 70s. The song “At Seventeen,” I thought was great the first few times I heard it, then it came across as nothing but an anthem to self-pity. I felt like saying, it’s probably not your looks that are keeping you from getting a date.
Or another song was “Lonely Boy,” by Andrew Gold. I mean the tune is catchy but the lyrics, the man’s life is ruined cause his parents had another kid? What is that about? That’s taking sibling rivalry to an extreme.
Or “Love The One You’re With,” which sounds good but basically means second best is good enough.
I hate it when singers try to change implied meanings. Like Huey Lewis’s “Stuck with You.” Stuck implies a negative. Yet he tries to make it seem good. I mean stuck implies have no choice, so he’s happy not to have a choice, it doesn’t work after one or two listens. Nor does his “I Want A New Drug.” Which is a drug song about a guy who wants a drug if he can’t find love. Lewis says the drug IS love but he clearly uses it as a comparison so it is in fact a seperate issue.
I think the problem with message songs in general is they are too hard to write without sounding preachy or condescending. I can think of a few like “Big Yellow Taxi”, “Luka”, or “Fast Car”, that manage to express the message without coming across like that.
That always bugs me too.
The worst one for me was a song by Amanda Marshall called “Beautiful Goodbye”. It’s a charming little piano piece and she sings it well, it’s just the tag that made me cringe too many times once I noticed the grammatical error:
*And I don’t really miss you, I just need to know
**Do you ever think of you and I **
And that beautiful goodbye *
Grr. The songwriters tried too hard to get a rhyme in there and it just pisses me off to no end.
What’s wrong with this?
My moment is not as serious as the rest of you guys.
I had thought that “No Air” was one of those typical bad breakup/love of my life is dead songs…
Until I found out that the woman in the song is just upset because her boyfriend is moving out of the apartment they shared because he wants to pursue his dream as a singer.
Now, to be fair, he may have moved like cross country or something and she doesn’t think she can handle a long-distance relationship, but I felt so cheated after I found out about it.
I also WTF-ed at the techno cover of “What Hurts the Most”. Some songs just don’t work in techno, and that song is one of them.
Same here. That song always sounds like it’s missing a verse. My opinion about it is still the same as it was when I first heard it as a wee lad years ago: you mean that’s it? And it’s not like I couldn’t understand sibling rivalry because I was an only child. My parents had two more kids after me and not once did ever feel betrayed and abandoned by them because someone younger came along.
It’s a Cadillac Escalade, not “Esplanade.”
Does any remember an old song called “Honey”? That is the most schumultzy (sp??) song I have ever heard. It’s as if someone said to a songwriter, “OK I am gonna pay you a thousand dollars to write a song that is schumutzy.”
“Schmaltzy”
Yeah, “honey” was a song by Bobby Goldsboro. I hated it when I was a kid and I hate it now. Then I heard that it was an autobiographical song; that Goldsboro’s wife really did die… and I still don’t like the song, but I can understand why he wrote & recorded such a piece of self-pitying trash.
Mine is because the lyrics were so stupid they ruined it not so much because the song was about something bad.
“Don’t Worry Baby” by the Beach Boys. For years I loved the (very melodic) “Every thing will work out all right” part assuming he meant their relationship. Here’s something deep from the verses:
Sigh…
In other news
Yes but the point was not to be beating on someone until they did something as bad as rape, no?
I thought Anyone Else But You by the Moldy Peaches (that song at the end of Juno) was a cute little song when I first heard it, with a sort of sweet misfit charm, until I got to this line:
Now I can’t listen to the song at all.
“They Don’t Know” by Kirsty MacColl, better known as the Tracey Ullman Show theme, is probably not meant to be about an abused woman singing a love song to her abuser, but that’s how it’s started to come off to me. It’s sections like these:
and
It’s just such a classic Stockholm Syndrome response to someone saying your relationship is unhealthy and you need to leave.
Huh. I thought Tracey sang the song; I didn’t recall it used as the show’s theme song; and I always thought it was cute because of the video with her and Paul McCartney. It’s been a long time since I heard it, but I guess I thought she was just singing about being his fan and the whole relationship was in her head.
Perhaps our values differ too much to reach an accord on this. From my POV, it’s better to give hooligans a sound flogging for lesser transgressions and women not to be raped at all.
OK, I’m probably wrong.
Well, I never claimed my interpretation was what the songwriter (I got my info from the website I linked to, and it could be wrong) or Tracey intended. In fact, it likely isn’t. It’s just what goes through my head now, so many years after the show went off the air.
Well, don’t take my word for it! I just want to keep liking the song. 
I disagree with several of your interpretations of these songs. There is no disputing taste of course, but it’s fun anyway.
I believe you’re referring to the lines that start the song, “I learned the truth at seventeen/That life was meant for beauty queens”. But the rest of the song negates that point. Later Ian sings, “They’ll stare at you in dull surprise/When payment due exceeds accounts received/At seventeen” This is clearly a reference to Ian’s success as a pop singer (she was successful very young) and I have always taken “they” to be the beauty queens for whom life was supposedly meant, unable to process Ian’s success because that’s THEIR vision of reality.
On this one I thought Gold’s point in detailing all the “tragedies” in the protagonist’s life was that it was the protagonist’s attitude that left him so lonely, that another person might have lived the same life and not been lonely at all. His loneliness was a product of his inability to connect with others. I think there’s a tinge of irony in the phrase “Oh, what a lonely boy.”
I thought “Love the One You’re With” had a message that went, “Getting attached to some distant, unattainable person in a romantic way is a bad idea. Love the ones around you and you’ll be much happier, as will the people around you.”
I’m kinda neutral on the Huey Lewis stuff.
Hell, yes.