Is Lake Shore Drive about drugs? Puff the Magic Dragon?
You can make any conclusions you want, but the only person who can say is the songwriter.
This Julie Brown, who is Caucasian, wasn’t on MTV all that much, but Downtown Julie Brown, who is black, was on MTV for quite a while.
I used to like the Ayds testimonials in my grandmother’s “Workbasket” magazines, because I thought they were articles.
Amazon does not sell it, although some other vendors do, and it’s very expensive and hard to find, at least in the English-language version.
Here’s a bit more information about it.
Never heard of “Lake Shore Drive” until I saw this, so here it is for our listening enjoyment.
She had a show on MTV, “Just Say Julie”.
No, the lyrics say what a song is about. There may be more than one interpretation but all the songwriter can say is what they were thinking and feeling when they wrote it. Whatever that was it won’t change the meaning(s) of the words.
KInd of generic, but one thing that “wouldn’t fly” is the past’s low-key response to incidents and disasters.
Example: In my freshman year, a lover’s spat on the quad ended with one being shot to death in front of the crowd. Oddly enough, the distraught shooter handed the gun to my girlfriend (who was standing nearby) who kept it and called the police. They arrived, shooter was taken away, a few were interviewed, crime scene processed, and the rest of us went on to class. No lockdowns, afternoon lab wasn’t cancelled and the next morning there was no apparent evidence anything had happened. I assume it was on the evening news but I didn’t bother to watch
No counselors were summoned, AFAIK none of us were traumatized, my girlfriend had an interesting tale to tell, and we all went on with our weekend plans.
Imagine the response to an identical situation today. It’s possible there would be days of coverage, news vans crowding the university, numerous declarative statements by officials and maybe even twitter stuff from celebrities. I imagine counselors would be on hand to help “deal with the trauma”, and politicians would clutter the local airwaves braying over any connection to their pet legislation. The school might shut down for a day and likely conduct a large memorial service with even more news coverage.
From that Wikipedia article, it looks like it didn’t fly then, either, at least not in the U.S. Maybe it’s a better example of something that wouldn’t fly in the US, like the sex-ed video discussed in this thread:
Miss Julie Brown had her own show, Just Say Julie, that was a mix of music videos and comedy that aired for three years on MTV. But Downtown Julie Brown was probably a bit more popular with her show Club MTV airing for 5 years.
I do think we should differentiate things that wouldn’t fly now due to changing social values versus styles. Miss Julie Brown’s “The Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun” is a parody of 1950s songs featuring teenagers losing the love of their life or some other such tragedy. When the song was released in 1984, most of Brown’s audience would have been at least familiar with those songs having heard them on the oldies stations.
But in another way, I think Brown’s song wouldn’t work today because of the subject matter. The idea of a student bringing a gun to prom and whacking students just isn’t funny to most people. But this kind of humor can still be found. “The Ballad of Sara Berry” is about a mentally unstable young woman who starts murdering people to ensure she becomes the next prom queen. It was released in 2012 (I think), but never achieved the popularity of Brown’s “Homecoming Queen.” Maybe Dr. Demento?
True, if the literal meanings of the words say that. But Lucy in the Sky or Puff do NOT say they are about drugs.
They don’t have to explicitly. It is reasonable to interpret Lucy as describing the experience of a trip on acid and it is reasonable to consider Puff to be about smoking marijuana making people happy. People can disagree about what the words refer to. Now if you played one of those songs during a movie about drugs what interpretation do you think they would commonly invoke?
I honestly thought you were going to say “souvenir”.
I just remembered one: Back in the late 70s or maybe early 80s, Saturday Night Live had a character who was a fake Indian guru/yogi named Havena-good-time, Vishnu Were-here.
Dressed in white robes and sitting cross-legged, he would pontificate on “meaning of life” questions, like “why, when we poop, do we always turn around to look at it before we flush?”
I knew that the blonde Julie Brown had an MTV show, but it wasn’t as memorable as the ones hosted by Downtown Julie Brown.
One of these days, Alice, you’re going to the Moon.
This clown:
Ditto, 1960s. In fact, I think I heard the offensive version here on the Dope.
Drinking and driving - considered no big deal, as far as I could tell, though of course it became socially disliked, if not yet completely unacceptable, by the time I learned to drive.
In fact, portraying someone as completely drunk for comedic purposes is much less accepted. Going back to Otis on the Andy Griffith show: didn’t they basically keep a cell available for him to sleep it off, on a regular basis?
Pumped up Kicks was a 2010 song with a sympathetic view to a school shooter.
They had 2 cells and they were almost always available. No trouble for Andy or Barney either, Otis would let himself in the courthouse and go into to his cell and go to sleep. One time Otis got a car and Andy and everyone were scared to death. Somehow they got him to give up the car. He was always presented as a good hearted man with a comical drinking problem. He managed to redeem himself when it was important. Eventually in a later TV movie we find out Otis is finally clean and sober.
So really it was pretty funny and might be a little hard to do in a new show but Andy Griffith is on the air all the time, including on children’s channels. If it were redone now we’d just have a few episodes to show Otis’s life spiraling down the drain as a result of his drinking. His family and friends or some kind stranger would finally convince him to go to an AA meeting. “Hi my name is Otis and I’m an alcoholic” he’d say, and they say “Hi Otis” and the camera would close in on his face, the face of a broken man finally coming face to face with his problems. We here indistinct sounds of talking as the camera begins to pan around him highlighting his profile to capture his nervousness, and music begins to play because we know this part of Otis’s life is over forever and soon will he will be a brand new man, healthy and productive, helping others with their lives now. Because that’s how life works on television.