Lola is a transvestite. There is no ambiguity. At all. You can check the Wikipedia entry on the song if you like.
“Oh What a Night” is not about a prostitute. He doesn’t know her name, it ended too soon–so what? Lots of hookups are anonymous, and they always end too soon. There’s no discussion of money, or that she is a professional, or he met her on the street, or any of the other zillions of ways a songwriter can suggest prostitution. You might as well say the narrator is an astronaut. Could be, but it’s not reflected in the lyrics.
I never noticed that, but I can’t say I ever paid much attention to the song. Just the other day I heard the phrase “Rosie Palm and her five sisters” for the first time – it sounded like a phrase that might have been around a while.
It could certainly be read that way, but I don’t see anything specific in the lyrics supporting that. I really do think it’s just an innocent pop song about daydreaming about your lover.
I’d never listened too hard to Elton John’s Philadelphia Freedom until it recently struck me as odd that a pair of Englishmen would write and sing a ditty about American patriotism.
My current theory is that it’s about enjoying the anonymity (sexual or otherwise) that comes from living in a large city.
“I like living easy without family ties,” and “Shine a light through the eyes of the ones left behind”… so they can’t see what I’m doing?
Bernie Taupin is apparently not gay, but Elton is famously bi-sexual, which could provide a further subtext there.
My husband doesn’t listen to lyrics, or at least doesn’t process them. I had to work quite hard to explain why Bryan Adam’s Run to You was not an appropriate song to play at out wedding. Yup, he wanted a song about a guy running away from his wife to his mistress.
palindromemordnilapit is daughters, not sisters.
Terry Pratchett, king of puns, has a character called Mrs Palm who is a madam in one of his books, and another, more innocent character then misunderstands that her “girls” are her daughters. In a later book we discover Mrs Palm’s first name is Rosie. I love Discworld for all the little throwaway jokes like that.
Pretty much every song by Mark Knopfler in his solo career. I can groove to one in the car 10 or 20 times before I realize that he’s supposed to be a tattoo artist, a coal miner, or even Ray friggin’ Kroc!
The man’s nothing if not diverse with his subject matter!
I must be an 8 year old at heart, because this song made perfect sense to me the first time I heard it and all 478 times I’ve heard it since. In fact it makes more sense to me than most everything I’ve heard in years.
The Monkees’ “Last Train to Clarksville” (written for them by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart) started making a lot more sense to me when I read a comment by Hart that the song was about a soldier going off to Vietnam. He doesn’t know if he’s ever coming home because he knows he could be killed. No wonder he sounds so lonely, and no wonder he wants to see his girlfriend one last time before he leaves.
I used to think Extreme’s “More than Words” was a song about doing little things to show you love someone, but now I’m pretty sure it’s a plea for sex.
Yeah, that song is a total booty call. My ex says he used to play “More Than Words” on the guitar at parties when he was a teenager, and it never failed to get him at least one phone number, and sometimes company for the rest of the evening from girls who were too smitten to actually listen to the lyrics.
My .02 re: “Oh, What A Night”: I thought “it ended much too soon” because the narrator, um, “finished” sooner than he expected.
I heard that John wrote the lyrics as an anthem to the “Philadelphia Freedom” which was a tennis team coached by Billie Jean King. So he wrote an anthem for her and her team.
Not being from the UK, or probably being taught as much world history as I should; for a long time I didn’t know that U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” was about an actual event.
