A friend put a song by Spirit of the West called “Bone of Contention” on a mix tape for me. I didn’t realize until it was explained to me that the song was about Paul Reubens ruining his career with the adult theater incident.
You’d think I could have worked it out on my own from this part of the song,
*And the bone of contention
has all our attention
The bone of contention
was all our invention
**Gonna burn the playhouse down **
**Death by his own hand **
when the black cat
crossed his path and stayed
as close as the tattoo
that never fades
**For the Saturday morning man **
the laughs have all been canned
The joke’s no longer with him
It’s about him, at him, on him *
but no.
I always assumed that the Counting Crows’ Mr. Jones was a penis, but I heard an interview with Adam Durtz where he expressed bewilderment that people were interpreting the song that way. I suspect he was being disingenuous.
While it may be true she has been spiritual most of her life, she has also openly exploited sexuality throughout her career. Notably, she released a book of naughty pictures of herself, performed fellatio on a pop bottle on camera, and sang numerous songs with open sexual connotations. I certainly think she realized that the lyrics:
“When you call my name,
It’s like a little prayer,
I’m down on my knees,
I want to take you there.”
could easily be interpreted as “When I’m giving you head and you moan my name it sounds like you are praying”. That it occurs in a song with a spiritual theme could only enhance the potential controversy and increase buzz around Madonna.
I used to have arguments with friends in school about the real meaning of The Who’s Squeeze Box. Yes, accordions do go “in and and in and out” but there are other things that do that too… “Mama’s got a squeeze box and Daddy doesn’t sleep at night” was pretty damn obvious to me. Daltry wasn’t singing about polka music. Poke her music maybe…
Bryan Adams claims that Summer of '69 isn’t about the year 1969, but about the 69 sex position, and that most people don’t get it. To be honest, I can’t really find anything in the lyrics to support that.
Master Control, that might be an attempt to deflect the criticism that he received that he was being pretentious by writing a nostalgiac song about teenaged love and setting it in the summer that he was nine years old.
Personally, I think it’s a silly criticism. “The Summer of '69” is just plain more euphonious than “The Summer of '77,” and besides, putting it right before the change of the decade emphasises that it’s a song about being on the threshold of change, particularly with the popular romantic notion that the '60s were an idyllic, idealized time. Gives the song more universal appeal. The summer of 1969 has mythical appeal for plenty of people who weren’t even born then. The summer of 1977 was just a watershed year for geeks.
That being said, Bryan Adams is a bit of a dick and I could totally see him trying to bluff his way out of the accusation, silly or not.
I discovered what it meant when I uttered the phrase. In a staff meeting. In front of the Methodist Bishop’s wife, who started tittering madly, while the men on the staff could hardly stop themselves from busting out laughing.
As an engineering major, most of the people I hung around with in college were guys, and I think I picked up the phrase from them, but never really considered the etymology of the phrase.
In grad school, I worked for an engineering extension program, and our staff was having a meeting about what topics we would be including in an upcoming seminar session we were offering. The Bishop’s wife was our marketing person, and said something like “Well, since we already have prepared slide shows on topics A, B, C, and D, why don’t we offer sessions on each of those topics?”
As the chief person in charge of writing and producing these seminars, I didn’t want to use up all my already prepared seminars at once. I earnestly argued “Well, but if we offer all those topics this fall, we’ll have shot our wad, and won’t have anything new ready to offer them in our program next spring.”
At which point the Bishop’s wife begins tittering madly. The program director looks really wide-eyed at the sweet young thing on his staff that he thought he knew. My thesis adviser looks like he’s trying not to bust a gut. My other co-workers alternately look startled or amused. And I instantly come to a recognition of where the phrase “shot his wad” came from…
[sub]And just to prove that some things never change, I’ve been looking wide-eyed at a LOT of these songs you guys have been talking about. Brand New Key was dirty? And I’d heard that “She-Bop” was dirty, but never figured it out before. And Larry Mudd is a bad, bad man for pulling my leg so thoroughly[/sub]
I’ll throw in one. The Kendalls, a country duo, perhaps best known for the song Heaven’s Just A Sin Away. The lyrics are not a big mystery, a woman singing to a guy that’s she’s tempted to sleep with, despite her being married to someone else.
What skeeves me out is that The Kendalls are a father-daughter duo, and their singing to each other about a lust that is so wrong but feels so right… :eek:
Oh way down deep inside I know that it’s all wrong Your eyes keep tempting me And I never was that strong
The fact that it is a father-daughter duo gives the lyrics a rather different spin, IMNSHO.