I can’t think of any of my own revelations off the top of my head (though I know I’ve had many), but I do recall a friend whose school almost made Every Breath You Take the theme song for a dance of some sort, not realizing it’s about a creepy stalker ex before someone pointed out a few choice lyrics. Apparently, it’s pretty common for people to miss this fact.
Oh, it’s about a lot more than that, but that’s in there, too.
Even in the same thread. 
Oops. How’d I miss that?
True. In The Navy is their gay hook-up song. 
It was many years before I realized that the woman in “Lying Eyes” is lying to her lover as well as her husband.
Not me–I inspired the revelation in someone else–but the memory of the moment still makes me laugh some 25 years later. My younger sister was arguing with our father about his criticisms of her choice of rock music, you see. When she tried to enlist me to support her argument, she got more than she bargained for …
Dad: I just don’t like you listening to songs about drugs.
Sis: But it’s not about drugs! [turns to me] Huey Lewis’s I Want a New Drug isn’t about drugs, is it?
Me: No, of course not.
Sis: See?!
Me: It’s about sex.
Sis: It’s … what? Ohmigod, it is! :eek:
Dad: :rolleyes:
The song was supposed to be “In the Garden of Eden”, baby!
As an innocent preteen I adopted what at the time seemed like a wholly nonsensical line from a Kingston Trio song, “En El Agua”, as a personal non sequitur to accentuate any moment that seemed to require an added bolus of hilarity. The song is sung in call-and-repeat English-Spanish, with the lead singer singing a line in English, then the backups repeating the line in Spanish. It’s all about the magic of young love, with jumpy verses about walking along the coast side, playing in the sand dunes, going to parties, etc. Each verse ends with the surpise line “I throw you in the water,” to which the backups repeat, in thoroughly bewildered Spanish “¿En el Agua?”
But that was not the line in question. That one comes at the end of the song, after all the verses and choruses are over and the song is starting to fade out, while everyone is trilling and whistling and laughing, someone utters, in an exaggerated faux Mexican accent, the “nonsense” line, followed immediately by a squeal of falsetto laughter. I adopted the whole bit, the accent, the line, the laughter. Other kids loved it, and the reactions it got from any adults in earshot ranged from puzzled aprehension to slightly scandalized concern. (Which, of course, made it all the more appealing). So, when the hijinx reached a proper crescendo, I would summon my Speedy Gonzales voice and intone “We’re sorry, Senor, but ze border is closed to all sailors without raaaaaaincoats!! Wee hee hee hee hee hee hee!!!”.
That was decades ago. It wasn’t until recently, as in last Fall, as I was strolling along and that song and that line were once again gently wafting through my otherwise absent mind, that it suddenly hit me, what that line meant. Did it? Really? That? No. Really? hmmmm……
I was still little when Olivia Newton John’s “Physical” came out, so I thought it was just about doing physical (i.e., athletic) activities.
Mary Jane, by Major Lazer.
Took me about a year before I made the connection to marijuana.
Not as long a time as some of the other responses in this thread, but shit, the lyrics practically beat you over the head with it. :smack:
In my defense, I pay more attention to beat, tune, etc., than lyrics anyway.
Back when I was a wee shaver, it was a long time before I found out what was going on with the lyrics to the Pixies song Here Comes Your Man. Namely that, apart from being all weird and disjointed and stream-of-consciousness-y, it’s also chock full of references to the atomic bombing of Nagasaki:
*
Outside there’s a boxcar waiting*: The B-29 that dropped the bomb on Nagasaki was called “Bockscar” (a pun on “boxcar” and “Bock’s car”, after the name of the pilot, Frederick C. Bock).
A big, big stone fall and break my crown: The bomb dropped on the empire of Japan.
And, course, the chorus itself:
Here comes your man. The Nagasaki bomb was called Fat Man.
Etc. Blew my tender, young mind, that did.
Apparently Skin Up’s 1991 techno classic “Blockbuster” - with its refrain of “give us an e” - was not intended as a paean to the popular daytime quiz show hosted by Bob Holness and had a whole other meaning.
I listened to Dylan’s Ballad of a Thin Man for years before I learned what was happening that I didn’t know what it was.
Holy shit, Batman! I don’t really like quoting myself like this, but I just realized that some chick called Meaghan Smith covered the song on the soundtrack for *500 Days of Summer. *Heve a look at this video and tell me just how much more fucking creepy it seems when you realize that she’s actually singing about impending nuclear doom.
I had an “a ha” moment several years after The Village People became popular. Just never got the gay references.
:eek: I just realized that NOW!
I was about 8 years old singing this in the car and my mom said “Stop singing that, it’s rude.” I was like “
But it’s about exercising!”
I thought “Dancing with Myself” by Billy Idol was about a guy who liked to, well, go to the bar and dance whether he had someone to dance with or not. One day I was all “Waaaiiiit a minute…”
“You Oughta Know” is about Dave Coulier. As an avid Nickelodeon watcher in the '80s, finding that out was…disturbing, to say the least.
There was a peppy little song some years ago, Cherry Hill Park, by Billy Joe Royal. About a girl who used to ‘give a thrill to all the guys way after dark’. In Cherry Hill Park. When I got a bit older, it dawned on me all those guys merrily taking a ride on the town pump revealed she was such a sad sexual abuse victim acting out. And all those guys just lining up to take their turn, happy as can be, no one thinking anything strange about this girl putting out for the sheer joy of it?. All of them were sad when she met a guy with money and left town. Just…ick, such dysfunction.
Well, I just looked up the full lyrics and they don’t seem to have anything to do with the bombing of Nagasaki.
I don’t buy most of these “hey, this song is actually about x” stories.
Vague lyrics + people’s imaginations lead to all sorts of interpretations.