which_chick (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
which_chick) wrote2009-09-23 11:57 pm
which_chick) wrote2009-09-23 11:57 pm
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Since the release (be advised that I picked the word "release" very much on purpose, for this is the sort of writing where I use words that give you, dear reader, the most bang for the buck. For normal people, quality writing may be achieved by limiting the author to a certain number of characters. On FML.com, the limitation is 300 characters and it's amazing how well the entries read. For normal people, brevity is, yes, the soul of wit. Not for me. The times you get a quality crafted prose experience from me are either when I'm bitching about something or when I'm going all medieval on the entendres. I am not bitching today, so entendres, ho!) of Rammstein's new music video, I've been revisiting assorted and sundry pop music lryics in my mind on the grounds that a surprising amount of pop music is about what we shall delicately refer to as goings-on.
I'll grant that most songs are somewhat more subtle than Rammstein's lyrics of "You've got a pussy, I've got a dick, So what's the problem, Let's do it quick!" It is difficult to be *less* subtle than that, actually, but some bands have managed it.
Nine Inch Nails gave us "I want to fuck you like an animal" which is a nice visual (especially for our furry friends) and minces no words. There's not a lot of question about the song topic, there. I also grinned like a fool the first time I heard them sing "Head Like A Hole", which has the entirely-too-amusing lyric Bow down before the one you serve. You're going to get what you deserve.. Or maybe that's just me? I know that if I'd done the video, it'd be a different video than the one they wound up with.
Dead Kennedys, ages ago, brought us an amusing little ditty entitled "Too Drunk to Fuck". Again, the title says it all.
Yes, say you, but these are kind of non-mainstream bands with antisocial blah-blah-blah.
But then you have Frankie Goes to Hollywood, who, back in the day, said Relax. People wore t-shirts that said Frankie Say Relax. Straight, redneck youth at my high school, actually, wore Frankie Say Relax shirts. I had no idea what this song was about, at the time. Hell, it's on my mp3 player *now* and I still didn't give the damn song a whole lot of thought until the recent Rammstein video caused me to reconsider what I thought I knew about pop music. The internet, ever helpful, spat out the original music video for "Relax". The song makes more sense now.
And so it goes. I get to Toni Basil's "Mickey" -- I am so totally dating myself with the selection of pop music. Two reasons, or probably three if we want to be brutally honest. Reason one: I am not the target audience for and do not listen to current pop music. Reason two: Current pop music is not particularly coy. When both The Jonas Brothers and Rammstein can spray the audience with what is, well, yeah. You've seen the South Park episode with the Abusive Mickey Mouse, right? That. Reason three: the eighties were a seminal decade for me. *snerk* D'ya need a hand with the coming of age joke here, or can you get that far on your own? (Maybe you're dating yourself, too? This is the internet, after all. You totally could be, while reading this, even. Can you "barely see the road from the heat comin off of it"? <-- question is rhetorical.) Anyway, huge quantities of the era's lyrics are indelibly printed upon my brain in the same way that other generations know all the words to "Three Coins In The Fountain" or "If I Had A Hammer" or "Oops, I Did It Again" or whatever the hell Hannah Montana is currently singing. It is less work for me to select songs from my formative years and I'm all about the less-work thing.
Toni Basil's "Mickey": "Any way you want to do it, I'll take it like a man." My dirty mind is going pintle-to-arse, here. It's possible that the song doesn't mean the entendre but I'm betting otherwise given the utterly rich phrasing. Nobody says or sings things in that round, rich tone unless he or she thinks they are amazingly funny.
I was going to go more places with this but I'm tired now. Maybe another time.
I'll grant that most songs are somewhat more subtle than Rammstein's lyrics of "You've got a pussy, I've got a dick, So what's the problem, Let's do it quick!" It is difficult to be *less* subtle than that, actually, but some bands have managed it.
Nine Inch Nails gave us "I want to fuck you like an animal" which is a nice visual (especially for our furry friends) and minces no words. There's not a lot of question about the song topic, there. I also grinned like a fool the first time I heard them sing "Head Like A Hole", which has the entirely-too-amusing lyric Bow down before the one you serve. You're going to get what you deserve.. Or maybe that's just me? I know that if I'd done the video, it'd be a different video than the one they wound up with.
Dead Kennedys, ages ago, brought us an amusing little ditty entitled "Too Drunk to Fuck". Again, the title says it all.
Yes, say you, but these are kind of non-mainstream bands with antisocial blah-blah-blah.
But then you have Frankie Goes to Hollywood, who, back in the day, said Relax. People wore t-shirts that said Frankie Say Relax. Straight, redneck youth at my high school, actually, wore Frankie Say Relax shirts. I had no idea what this song was about, at the time. Hell, it's on my mp3 player *now* and I still didn't give the damn song a whole lot of thought until the recent Rammstein video caused me to reconsider what I thought I knew about pop music. The internet, ever helpful, spat out the original music video for "Relax". The song makes more sense now.
And so it goes. I get to Toni Basil's "Mickey" -- I am so totally dating myself with the selection of pop music. Two reasons, or probably three if we want to be brutally honest. Reason one: I am not the target audience for and do not listen to current pop music. Reason two: Current pop music is not particularly coy. When both The Jonas Brothers and Rammstein can spray the audience with what is, well, yeah. You've seen the South Park episode with the Abusive Mickey Mouse, right? That. Reason three: the eighties were a seminal decade for me. *snerk* D'ya need a hand with the coming of age joke here, or can you get that far on your own? (Maybe you're dating yourself, too? This is the internet, after all. You totally could be, while reading this, even. Can you "barely see the road from the heat comin off of it"? <-- question is rhetorical.) Anyway, huge quantities of the era's lyrics are indelibly printed upon my brain in the same way that other generations know all the words to "Three Coins In The Fountain" or "If I Had A Hammer" or "Oops, I Did It Again" or whatever the hell Hannah Montana is currently singing. It is less work for me to select songs from my formative years and I'm all about the less-work thing.
Toni Basil's "Mickey": "Any way you want to do it, I'll take it like a man." My dirty mind is going pintle-to-arse, here. It's possible that the song doesn't mean the entendre but I'm betting otherwise given the utterly rich phrasing. Nobody says or sings things in that round, rich tone unless he or she thinks they are amazingly funny.
I was going to go more places with this but I'm tired now. Maybe another time.
no subject
When I was younger I wound up seeing some special on television about naughty subtext in song lyrics and, given the number of examples they came up with, by the time it was halfway through it seemed an eminently sensible philosophy to me to assume that any song reference that at first hearing seemed nonsensical or incomprehensible was probably just about sex ("Lovin' Spoonful," "Pearl Jam").
Or maybe about drugs, since that seemed to be very Important in some way to the members of the artistic community at the time ("Welcome to my Nightmare").
Third runner up was some kind of sociopolitical allusion, but unless someone could state with confidence what the allusion was to, I rank this one last on my list ("Luka," "Strange Fruit," "Wonderful Stories").
Rush may be unique among rock groups in that I'm told they haven't once written a song about Love, Gettin' It On, or Partying Hearty.
no subject