And then, a moment of clarity

I was listening to the song "House of Fun" last night, and suddenly realized what the song's about. The protagonist is trying to buy condoms, and using euphemisms to tell the clerk at the chemist's what he wants.

Jeez, that understanding took me only, what, 27 years!

Surely I'm not the only one on this board who's been startled by such a moment of "insight" at a song's lyrics.

Same thing happened to me about 10 years ago. Makes the song even funner. Those last lines are the old ladies coming in and right as the chemist has just figured out what he's tying to buy.

Don't feel so bad, last week I was reading the chapter on 2-tone in "Rip it Up and Start Again" and that song was explained and I finally got it as well.

I think I've mentioned before that for decades I thought New Order's "Love Vigilantes" was about a bureaucratic snafu and not the ghost story it in fact is.

I didn't realize Jim Carroll's "Crow" was about Patti Smith until about ten years after I'd heard the song.

About 10 years after Achtung Baby was released, I found out that the song "One" is about the relationship between a son and his father (in this case, our protagonist would be one Bono Vox)...then, about a year ago, it dawned on me that the "father" he is addressing may actually be God.

Crowded House's "Sister Madly"...I honestly don't know what I thought it was about originally, but I vividly recall listening to it on a road trip in the mid-90s, and blurting out, "this song is about waking up in the middle of the night and noticing that your sister is having bad dreams!" My wife was suitably unimpressed.

I witnessed someone else's moment of clarity once: I had a friend in college whom I happened to be walking with across North Campus one day in 1988 or '89, when he suddenly exclaimed, "Hey! 'Why Can't I be You?' – The Cure song – what do you think that is actually about?" "Well, it seems like he's head over heels for some girl, I guess," I hesitantly replied. "No, man! That's what I thought until just a second ago! He actually hates this girl: the way she makes him feel, how cool she is, how he can't even figure out how to approach her...it's supposed to be ironic or something. I can't believe how obvious the point of the song really is," he breathlessly semi-yelled as passerby just tried to avoid the crazy guy. I have to admit that I had never given the song much thought of any kind, but I've since concluded this was a pretty solid interpretation, although I haven't listened to the song in a number of years, and have no interest in doing so now.

It's to my eternal mortification that I only recently put it together that the "Bob and Greg and Grant" mentioned in "The Thing That Only Eats Hippies" by The Dead Milkmen is a reference to Husker Du. It never once ever occured to me.

I also strongly suspect that Robert Johnson's instruction to have his lemon squeezed might be some sort of veiled sexual euphemism.

"You know what I'm talkin' about."



"When you tawk about havin' yer lemon squeezed 'til the juice runs down yer leg ... THAT'S what yer talkin' about!"

Not long ago I suddenly realized that Salt-n-Pepa's A Salt with a Deadly Pepa was a play on "Assault with a Deadly Weapon."

I wasn't very observant in the 1980s rap scene.

On the other hand I understood "Love Vigilantes."

Hey now! In fairness to me, my original interpretation is a perfectly logical one for that song, although I have to admit that a wife getting an erroneous telegram always seemed like an odd thing to write a song about. But I just figured whatever, and never bothered pondering it beyond that.

Also, Bernard Sumner is not generally known for his forays in top-shelf lyric writing (putting it diplomatically)...

I'm reminded of that scene in Meet the Parents where Ben Stiller's character is trying to explain to Robert Deniro what "Puff the Magic Dragon" is really about. And Deniro is explaining back in as straight a way as possible that, no, it really IS about a dragon.

imagine another chunk of adolenscence ripped off a me when i realized that blondies 'sex offender' was really x offender.

steve - t' other way around