You Keep Requesting That Song. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

And now, we kick off another themed week, this time on a topic I've not yet covered (at least in great detail). This week, it's music. Or more specifically, stuff in music I want to nitpick about.

One thing I love about music is how songs can be interpreted to have vastly different stories but still be valid. We've had strange things like In The Air Tonight being about a man who could have saved another man from drowning but chose not to and Phil Collins witnesses this from afar (it's actually about how he felt during his divorce), and rumors and theories about different aspects of songs (to analyze the entirety of Don McLean's American Pie would take more time then I could spare) like Fire And Rain by James Taylor being about a plane crash, with one of the passengers being a close friend of his who died on the plane (the friend was Suzanne Schnerr, who actually committed suicide while Taylor was away recording his first album. The plane crash in the rumors has to do with the line “sweet dreams and Flying Machines in pieces on the ground”, which is actually about the dissolution of his project The Flying Machine). Many of the Beatles songs are subject to debate about their content and whether or not it had deeper meaning (John Lennon even created I Am The Walrus just to confuse everybody, only that had interpretations too).

Now, with what I intend to say below, I do want to preface it with this: I am not here to rain on anybody's parade. If you have different ideas of a song, that's fine. What we think we can't help and our minds work in different ways. I once thought Pink Floyd's Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2) was about conformity and that to be “another brick in the wall” was to be another mindless conformist who does as they are told and that the wall was society. I was wrong, but rather than not accept what was presented before me or feel stupid that I was wrong, I was fascinated by the events surrounding the song. As it turns out, the song was not just a protest song against boarding schools and the school system, but the whole album was to do with how people put up walls to exile themselves from society.

However, when it comes to love songs, I have to scratch my head at the requests I hear being played overnight. On my way to work, I'll sometimes listen to a certain radio station that has a program running through the weeknights called Love Song Dedications (yes, beneath this cynical exterior I am a hopeless romantic. Tell no one) in which, well, people call up and... they dedicate love songs, obviously. Now, I'm not going to complain about how I keep hearing the same songs over and over (I have always hated Whitney Houston's cover of I Will Always Love You. Listen to Dolly Parton's, that's real heart right there), but I do want to go over a few songs that should not be played as dedications.

Let's start with one of the classics: Every Breath You Take by The Police. A staple at weddings, if you most people what it's about, the most common answer is “it's a love song about someone who'll always be with someone, watching over them and protecting them”. Sorry to burst that bubble, but no, it's a stalker. He is saying he'll always be watching her, whatever she does, wherever she goes, he's going to be there. Take this lyric “Oh, can't you see/you belong to me” and put it in the context of a stalker. Not so romantic now is it? Hell, I'd say just about half of their discography is filled with dark lyrical works contrasted by light-sounding music (Can't Stand Losing You, Murder By Numbers, Don't Stand So Close To Me, Roxanne).

Or Adele's Someone Like You. Now, it might be more like a dedication for someone that misses their ex-lover and that's fine. But the song's about regret and partly bitterness. That doesn't sound like you miss them and want them back, that kind of sounds like you loved them once but they tore your heart out and now you're black inside. Here's something Adele herself said about it: "I can imagine being about 40 and looking for him again, only to turn up and find that he's settled with a beautiful wife and beautiful kids and he's completely happy... and I'm still on my own. The song's about that and I'm scared at the thought of that." Yeah, I don't see much in the way of romance there. I know it's a great song, one of the better songs this year, but in that context, it doesn't make sense.

But perhaps one of the greatest examples is the song Jar Of Hearts by Christina Perri. Now, I love this song and have loved it since I first heard it. But it is not a love song. Oh my stars and garters, no. So, why am I hearing it on a radio program for lovers to dedicate songs to their partners or people looking to rekindle lost love? The lyrics “You're gonna catch a cold/from the ice inside your soul” do not inspire feelings of romance in most people. Cynical people, maybe, or the kinds of people that take after Enid from Ghost World or Daria Morgendorffer. You ARE listening to the lyrics when you call up to make a request, right? And it's not like these are easy-to-miss lyrics, they make up part of the chorus!

But it's not just love songs that get misinterpreted. Take the song I Fought The Law by The Bobby Fuller Four. For some reason, people latch on to the title and mistake it for something uplifting, like we should be fighting when the law's becoming too oppressive. Uh... no. The guy in the song? He loses. “Breaking rocks in the hard sun” generally means rock-breaking in a prison yard. Hell, the full quote from which the song takes its title is “I fought the law and the law won”. Now, I know there's a version which changes most of the lyrics and becomes “I fought the law and I won” but having read the lyrics, I think that's a bit self-indulgent.

Or one of the most overused songs of all time, Green Day's Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life). I remember seeing commercials for the last episode of Seinfeld with the song playing. I remember a farewell party of some sort that played this over a photo montage.
Guys... this is NOT a song about saying farewell to someone in a happy way! It's actually a break-up song with a little bitterness. Look at the title. See those first two words? Does that sound like something you'd say to someone you care about?

Now, I know by now you must think of me as some music snob or someone who's trying to tell you what to think. And I'm not, on both counts. But think of it this way: if you know someone musical or are dating someone who looks at the deeper meanings of songs and you bring these up and say something like “they remind me of you” and mean it in a loving way, they may think you're trying to be hurtful.

I know I haven't talked about a lot of songs, and there are a lot more I could go into detail about, but that could take ages and its time to move on to another musically related problem. Though that'll be in the next blog.