Not buying Cecil’s explanation that toejam football is the grotty stuff between ones toes that when rolled between ones fingers forms an ellipsoid football.
Why would an Englishman write about an ellipsoid football? He wouldn’t, because to an Englishman a football is round; i.e. a soccer ball.
Toejam football (imo) is what one gets playing soccer barefoot.
LINK TO COLUMN: What is "toejam," as in "toejam football"? - The Straight Dope
A) Idioms have been known to cross the Atlantic unsupported by literal sense.
B) The formulation, “In England, ‘football’ means ‘soccer’,” is a gross oversimplification. It also means “rugby” and, yes, “American football”.
I think the lyrics were just this side of randomness. I remember hearing that Lennon/McCartney did that to fuck with everyone trying to analyze their lyrics.
I’m reminded of the Andy Partridge (XTC) lyric “…and all the world is football-shaped” from “Senses Working Overtime.” When it came out, I (an American) took it as whimsy, as Earth, though technically an oblate spheroid, is what most casual observers would describe as spherical. Months later, it occurred to me that he must have been describing a soccer ball.
How I crowed about my insight, and presumed worldliness at the next party I went to! That is until a more thorough observer (farter smellow) than I noted that in the next bridge, Partridge describes the world as “biscuit shaped.”
I was humbled, but not even so much as when I realized (again, months later) that my friend had been referring to “biscuit” in the UK sense (that and the now-obvious realization that both lyrics are ensconced in an absolute bed of wordplay—“the Sun is pie,” “jewels for the thirsty,” etc.)
Should have stuck with my instincts on that one.
Amusingly, this site offers a dozen different interpretations of the song lyrics, trying to pin each verse to a specific beatle, but manages to pin each verse to each beatle in turn.
However, they seem to agree “toejam football” refers to being barefoot and playing soccer.
I used to eat my toe jam when I was a kid. It was salty, a bit gritty, but always tasty.
Anyone else care to fess up?
Good cite, fun. Thanks. I can’t remember if I ever cared that much. I must have, right?
True above about John saying that he was possibly just fucking around (artistically, if you insist), like “I Am the Walrus,” or similar. Somewhere I read him saying that he wanted to be like Dylan and “learned” he could be creative by almost randomly stringing shit together. Obviously an extraordinarily wrong thing to be drawn from Dylan’s work. In truth, my guess is it’s one more thing he drew upon from his thinking with Ono.
I’d be curious to see where Lennon said that. I’d be kind of surprised if he put it that way. For the record, though, I think Dylan did sometimes do just. He got away with it because he’s Bob Dylan just like Lennon got away with that kind of thing because he was John Lennon.
Lennon was certainly known to do so:
Lennon received a letter from a pupil at Quarry Bank High School, which he had attended. The writer mentioned that the English master was making his class analyse Beatles’ lyrics… Lennon… [then] wrote the most confusing lyrics he could [for “I Am the Walrus”]… The Beatles’ official biographer Hunter Davies was present while the song was being written and wrote an account in his 1968 biography of the Beatles. Lennon remarked to Shotton, “Let the fuckers work that one out.”
From here: I Am the Walrus - Wikipedia
In theory, I can see creativity blooming from random shit thrown together. That’s kinda the nature of stream of consciousness. The trick is to take the rough ideas and then shape them after the initial inspiration has bloomed. Not that it relates to anything Dylan or Lennon was doing.
There are more random ways to string things together than this. The thing is, “I Am the Walrus” isn’t random shit strung together. There are other people who have experimented with writing poems or lyrics by cutting up the words and pulling them out of a hat, for example. If you read the Wikipedia entry or Lennon’s Playboy interview, he explains almost every line of the song. It’s got a lot of dense symbolism and wordplay even if the intended effect was just to screw with people, and I think it’s very evocative. As far as I’m concerned it’s one of his greatest songs.
Seconding this.