What Does It Mean?

Every once in a while my son Ben will ask me what some song or other is about. Inevitably it is some song I've liked and listened to for the last thirty years, so the most common answer I give him is..."Uh...I'm not really sure." I think this is very common. You get caught up in the catchy tune, and you can sing the chorus, because hey, they sing that part more than once! But it's usually too much work to try to decipher the lyrics and then try to figure out what they meant with the poetic language, dense symbolism, and obscure references.

Just off the top of my head here are a few songs that are commonly misunderstood.

Every Breath You Take - Sting

Do the kids still slow dance to this song? Sting himself was perplexed by this, saying the song was "(expletive) evil." Which isn't as good as "evil (expletive) " but there are limits to what can get airplay. What sounds after a casual listen like a song about idealistic romance on closer inspection turns out to be about an obsession with controlling someone you can't have - or no longer have, as it was inspired by bad feelings during his divorce. It is essentially about a stalker. So, not romantic, but don't you think "Sting Stalker" would be a cool name for a monster in World of Warcraft?

Puff the Magic Dragon - Peter, Paul, and Mary

This song is widely believed to be about smoking marijuana. Mostly by people who smoke marijuana, because, you know, there aren't enough songs about that. It was based on a poem by Lenny Lipton written in 1959 while he was a student at Cornell, which was expanded and set to music by Peter Yarrow, a classmate of Lipton's. Inspired by the whimsical poetry of Ogden Nash, it tells the story of a boy who outgrows his childhood fantasies. Yarrow said, "Even if I had the intention of writing a song about drugs, which I may have had later, I was 20 years of age at Cornell in 1959. I was so square. Drugs had not emerged." The group always included at least one song per album for children. Yarrow said of this, "What kind of mean spirited SOB would write a children's song with a covert drug message?"

Oh, I don't know, could it be SATAN?!

Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds - The Beatles (lyrics by John Lennon)

The title is commonly believed to refer to LSD - and the psychedelic imagery seems to support that. Whether or not this song is misunderstood depends on whose story you believe. John Lennon always maintained that it was inspired by his son Julian's drawing of a classmate, a story backed up not only by Julian himself but by his classmate Lucy O'Donnell. It was a cute story, and they seriously needed some cute instead of another Beatles Drug Story. But drawing or not, McCartney says it was about LSD. It's entirely possible that the drawing story is true and the song was also about acid, kind of like how Chinese food can be both sweet and sour. Impossible, you say? Nothing's impossible in China!

When A Man Loves A Woman - Percy Sledge

Is it just my imagination, or is this an incredibly unromantic song about not love, but a blind, destructive obsession for an aloof and controlling woman? Go read the lyrics to this song. It should be called "When A Man Loses All Sanity And Dignity For A Woman Who Cares Less For Him Than A Wet Badger."

Lola - The Kinks

In looking up info (I'm sorry- I can't call surfing the web for twenty minutes "researching;" I think real research somehow involves live animals and some kind of tubing) for this post, I was very surprised to find that many people don't know that "Lola" is about a naive young man's close encounter with a drag queen. I mean, really? Besides describing Lola as having all the attributes of a man, the punch line to the song is "I'm a man, and so is Lola." Get out the tubing.

Born In The USA - Bruce Springsteen

None less than Ronald Reagan and George Will praised Bruce for his patriotism - Reagan even going so far as to ask if he could use this song for his re-election campaign. Far from being a rah-rah flag waiver, it is a scathing indictment of our country's treatment of Vietnam vets.

While it's forgivable for those folks, who I'm sure wouldn't have been caught dead listening to Rock music, more perplexing was the drive by fans of the Bruce to make "Born To Run" the official state song of New Jersey. You'd think such die-hard fans would notice lyrics like "Baby this town rips the bones from your back/It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap/We gotta get out while we're young" and question their own logic. But then again, they were talking about New Jersey.

Imagine - John Lennon

This post was inspired by a friend's quip about John Lennon's "atheist song." No slight to my friend, he's in good company, myself included, of people who have misunderstood the song's meaning. But when I examined the lyrics closely, I realized that he wasn't specifically saying that religion, or countries, or possessions, were bad. He's asking you to imagine a world where there is no religion, no countries, no possessions - essentially, no divisiveness. What would that world be like? It would be at peace. As the song says, "Nothing to kill or die for." It is a bit cynical in its subtext, for the clear implication is that there is no peace because humans cannot overcome their selfish nature. To be at peace they would have to give up the very things by which they define themselves and appear to give their lives meaning. When he says, "I hope some day you'll join us," he doesn't mean "join us in giving up those things," he is imploring us to suppress our base instincts and make a rational choice to live peacefully in spite of them - by rejecting the social control of those things.

This is what Lennon himself said about the song in a 1980 Playboy interview: "If you can imagine a world at peace, with no denominations of religion—not without religion but without this 'my God-is-bigger-than-your-God' thing—then it can be true... the World Church called me once and asked, "Can we use the lyrics to 'Imagine' and just change it to 'Imagine one religion'?" That showed they didn't understand it at all. It would defeat the whole purpose of the song, the whole idea."

I'm not totally hopeless. When Ben asked me what Blue Oyster Cult's song Godzilla was about, I was ready. Godzilla is a metaphor for the rampaging administration of Ronald Reagan, who we all know was really a reptile in a human skin.