Things you learned from lyrics, pretentious or otherwise

Cafe Society
1

Reading The Pretentious rock lyrics thread( all of whose examples I agree with) got me to thinking about all the things I learned from hearing them.

Sting may be full of himself but he did motivate me to look up “Scylla and Charibdes”.

Alanis Morissette’s ‘All I Really Want’ has the line “I’m like Estella, I like to reel it in and then spit it out” which led me to look up who the heck Estella is, which in turn led me to learn about ‘Great Expectations’ ( why I never had to read it in school, I don’t know).

Morrissey / Smiths have been a source of British vocabulary and events. I learned about the Moors Murders, the Kray Brothers and the terms “old blighty” and “spanner” among many others.

These aren’t all necessarily examples of pretention, but they’re things I didn’t know until these wordsmiths introduced them.

How have lyrics lead you to educate yourself?

2

I don’t think this is what you had in mind but:

“But all I’ve ever learned from love was how to shoot somebody who outdrew ya.” ~ Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah

(not proud of it)

3

There are no wrong examples, and that’s actually a good one. I didn’t get all the religious references and had to look them up. Also, I find that line quite meaningful. Also also, I hate when singers cover it and pronounce all the "ya"s with “you”. Way to ruin the flow and diminish the rhyme :roll_eyes:

4

When I first heard Nick Cave’s There She Goes, My Beautiful World I had to look up 3 things that he mentioned in one verse. Turned out he was wrong about Johnny Thunders though.

John Wilmot penned his poetry
Riddled with the pox
Nabokov wrote on index cards,
At a lectern, in his socks
St. John of the Cross did his best stuff
Imprisoned in a box
And JohnnyThunders was half alive
When he wrote Chinese Rocks

5

Elvis Costello’s “Less than Zero” was where I first heard of British fascist Oswald Mosley.

And I first learned who Nelson Mandela was from the Special AKA’s “Free Nelson Mandela.”

6

I learned who Richard Manuel was because of Counting Crows’ “If I Could Give All My Love (Richard Manuel Is Dead)”.

Not immediately, though, because I knew about The Band but not who its members were and I couldn’t figure out why it vaguely sounded like a Band song.

7

I learned that:

In World War II the average age of the combat soldier was 26
In Vietnam he was 19
In-in-in Vietnam he was 19

(Don’t know if that’s necessarily accurate, though.)

8

There are a couple ways I learn things from lyrics. One way is if the lyrics contain an interesting subject or word I am unfamiliar with, which prompts me to Google it and learn more. One example (of many) is the acronym “DDT” in the song Lobotomy by The Ramones. What the heck is DDT? So I Googled it, and learned it was an insecticide that was banned in the 1970s and 1980s.

Less common is when the lyrics themselves teach me something. One example would be The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot. It’s a light history lesson, even though some of the details are incorrect.

9

Al Stewart. Every album was a weeks worth of research.

10

Same for me. I first heard that song on Dr. Demento’s show, of all places.

I may have first learned about Patty Hearst from Camper van Beethoven’s “Tania.”

11

It also appears in Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”:

Hey farmer, farmer, put away the DDT now
Give me spots on my apples, but leave me the birds and the bees
Please

But I’m old enough that I remember to have heard as a child that DDT was a very bad thing that polluted the environment.

12

Hey Man, Nice Shot was about the suicide of disgraced and soon to be convicted Budd Dwyer. Makes the song sweeter to know it was a guilty coward.

13

Banned in 1972 in the US.

For those of a younger generation not exposed (sorry!) to it, DDT also prevented the spread of malaria, which is a good thing. It’s so effective that it is still used in places in the world where malaria is rampant, as there is no better replacement.

It also weakened eggshells and led to the decline of the bald eagle, which is a bad thing.

In the US all in all it is better that it was banned.

14

Something I learned from The Wobbly Doxology, by John Neuhaus:
Praise boss when morning work-bells chime.
Praise him for bits of overtime.
Praise him whose wars we love to fight.
Praise him, fat leech and parasite.

15

I can’t believe I didn’t include the granddaddy of informational songs: Billy Joel’s " We Didn’t Start the Fire". I was a few years out of high school when this came out but I would have loved to have a history class that used this. By the time lyrics were easily found on line I knew a majority of the things mentioned(at least the ones that I could make out) but not all. Johnnie Ray? Apparently well known enough to be mentioned in 2 moderns songs - WDSTF and “Come on Eileen”. Malenkov, Dien Bien Phu - huh? What happened in Budapest? Starkweather homicide?

16

The Brits have different spellings for a lot of things, but I’ve always only seen Charybdis. Is that another tire/tyre?

17

And osprey, which was how I learned about it as a kid (Time or Newsweek? cover arguing for the banning of DDT).

18

Really? No one else? Okay, it only counts as “Rock” for certain values of rock, but we also have pop, folk, and other styles. So I’ll go with the big boy!

SCHOOL HOUSE ROCK!

Lots of stuff learned there, but it’s thank to the lyrics about the Preamble that I still can recite the whole thing (minus the one clause I have to add mentally).

19

As a high school sophomore in 1986, I was not at all interested in history. But I learned this/memorized these lyrics about Alexander The Great:

    At the age of nineteen
    He became the Macedon King
    And he swore to free all of Asia Minor
    By the Aegian Sea, in 334 B.C.
    He utterly beat the armies of Persia

To this day, I know that Alexander The Great’s time = ~334 B.C…courtesy of Iron Maiden. :slight_smile: :metal:

20

I didn’t learn from the songs, but now more easily remember the date (not the time) that MLK was killed (April 4, in Memphis), and what time the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima (8:15, that’s the time that it’s always been).

U2 and OMD