Yeah, I understand it’s a crime scene. Hazmat teams and the medical examiner are en route.
Though they weren’t stupid, I actually did learn the words “acumen” and “eviscerate” from R.E.M. songs as a teen.
Roger taught me that
England swings like a pendulum do
Bobbies on bicycles, two by two
Westminster Abbey the tower of Big Ben
The rosy red cheeks of the little children
after that I never wanted to visit England.
Detroit has an area, it has boundaries. It is roughly rectangular, with the Detroit river as the southernmost boundary. It has general areas that can be called the “north side”, the “east side” etc. If you live off 7 Mile Road, you can say “I’m from the north side”, if your street forms the boundary with Grosse Point, you can say you live on the east side.
So why wouldn’t you be able to say you live on the south side? The southern boundary is not indeterminate. Detroit does not go into hyperspace at the river. It’s not a Klein bottle city. There are houses both west and southwest of downtown. Just because “downtown” is at the river, it isn’t all there is in Detroit proper.
So, if I lived in Corktown, at Brooklyn and Labrosse streets, a quarter mile north of the river and half a mile southwest of downtown, I could legitimately say I lived in southern Detroit. Or on the south side of Detroit. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say I live in south Detroit.
Now, if people who live there don’t say that, that’s a fair point. They know better than me what they call their home area.
By the naming conventions I grew up with (there is a “south side” of Milwaukee, as well as the notorious “south side” of Chicago), if asked I would say that I lived on the south side of Detroit, rather than “south Detroit”. But that doesn’t fit the meter of the song, and to this non-native son of Detroit, “south Detroit” doesn’t really seem wrong.
And one can still wonder why a bunch of Californians decided to write a song about something they know nothing about, who can say. That never stopped Stephen King!
Lets use different words.
He was born and raised in the southern-most section of Detroit.
Bangkok is getting the crème de la crème of the Chess world since, as we learn, play at a high level is at no ordinary venue. It could be Iceland or the Philippines
Or Hastings or, or this place.
I learned how a bill becomes a law,
I also learned that Shaft would risk his NECK for his brother man.
Was that the night the lights went out?
The night they hung an innocent man?
I learned that Kid Creole is not Annie’s daddy. Or else she wouldn’t be so ugly.
Right on!
Well, I can honestly say I knew nothing of the sinking of the freighter ***Edmund Fitzgerald ***until Gordon Lightfoot’s song started getting radio airplay about a year or two later.
I learned that I should not leave the cake out in the rain.
(and, that writing lyrics while on a cocktail of psychedelics will make you use a freshly ironed pair of striped pants as a metaphor for love, thus making you immortally stupid)
Mares eat oats, and does eat oats, but little lambs eat ivy.
Apparently, some folks are willin’ if you give them weed, whites, and wine, and show them a sign. Though perhaps a gps will do for the sign these days.
Probably better to wait for break of day, when there’s no more flashing lights against the sky.
Their album named Eponymous makes my brain into a pretzel.
Also, if you want to be happy for the rest of your life, get an ugly girl to marry you.
The people of China Grove keep on facin’ to the east, religiously following some of the dumbest lyrics ever set to some of the most kick-ass rock ever recorded.
House: Well, like the philosopher Jagger once said, “You can’t always get what you want.”
[later]
Cuddy: Oh, I looked into that philosopher you quoted, Jagger, and you’re right, “You can’t always get what you want,” but as it turns out “if you try sometimes you get what you need.”
I was never allowed to listen to the song when I was a kid. My grandfather was second make on the laker freight boats, was far away from the area of the storm, but he was not in port during that storm, and (IIRC) on Lake Superior.I was actually staying at my Grandmother’s that night, and slept in her bed (she barely slept until she got a “Ship to shore” from Grandpa the next day.) The song hit too close to hime, and my dad doesn’t like songs about death in general, or that one in particular.
Gordon Lightfoot also taught me that “there was a time in this old land that the railway did not run.” And I can claim I learned that because I knew the words to it before I was old enough to understand there weren’t always such things as railroads. There used to be tape of me singing to an aunt*… my parents thought I was going to sing “you are my sunshine” but I sang part of Canadian Railroad Trilogy, part of "American Pie"and part of “Mrs. Robinson”. Yes, a tone deaf two year old lisping her way through Mrs Robinson… mostly I liked the “do do do” parts and the woah woah woah parts. I thought it was about church!
*Does anyone else remember sending cassette taped letters? My dad did that with several of his aunts in the early 1970’s.