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Friedrich Nietzsche – Beyond Good and Evil
From time to time, I will present a list pertinent to the thorny realm of music critique. This week I decided to take a crack at what I think are the 10 most misunderstood – or at least misinterpreted – songs ever. Now, this is coming from someone who believes once a song – like a poem, painting, play, film, etc. – is sent out into the world, the ideas, themes, and “meaning” from the author/artist/songwriter is up for grabs. Each work of art has a recipient; it’s a two-way street for the art and its consumer.
Yet, this list goes beyond all that, because the celebration of the songs here has been so skewed beyond their original intent commentary is warranted.
I intentionally left out songs that are clouded with symbolism and metaphor, like John Lennon’s later work with the Beatles, most notably “Strawberry Fields Forever” (“No one I think is in my tree / I mean, it must be high or low”) or “I Am the Walrus,” which Lennon specifically wrote to fuck with us (“Yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog’s eye”). Also not on this list are songs with garbled lyrics like “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen or Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or nearly everything Mick Jagger is singing on the Stones’ Exile on Main St. I’m also avoiding vague lyrics about mystery subjects, as in Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” (It’s about Warren Beatty, come on!) or “You Oughta Know” by Alanis Morrisette (Do we care anymore?). And, finally, songs not in English with sinister meaning like “Macarena” by Los del Río that tells the sordid tale of a loose woman cheating on her man with his friends before he goes off to war or “In The Air Tonight,” which was Phil Collins way of dealing with being dumped by confusing people.
And so, with this as our guide… here we go.
10. “Angel” – Sarah McLachlan
This one is harder to miss than most of what is on here, hence Sarah McLachlan’s melancholy tune landing at the bottom of my list. It is most famously used to guilt people into donating to the cause of abused pets or couples professing their love at weddings, which makes sense given its gorgeously tender chorus: “In the arms of the angel / Fly away from here” and its haunting refrain, “May you find some comfort here.” But since almost every songwriter on here (and Sarah is one of them), has provided a song’s meaning through interviews, she is clear that “Angel” is about the horrors of heroin addiction.
Oh, a beautiful release
Memories seep from my veins
Let me be empty
Oh, and weightless and maybe
I’ll find some peace tonight
McLachlan told Rolling Stone in 1998 that she was shaken by the fatal heroin overdose of Smashing Pumpkins’ keyboardist and brother of the Revolution’s Wendy, Jonathan Melvoin, explaining, “I’ve been in that place where you’ve messed up and you’re so lost that you don’t know who you are anymore, and you’re miserable – and here’s this escape route. I’ve never done heroin, but I’ve done plenty of other things to escape.” She concluded in the piece, that “Angel” is telling us to try and “not to take responsibility for other people’s problems and trying to love yourself at the same time.”
9. “Let’s Go Crazy” – Prince & the Revolution
Speaking of Wendy and the Revolution, this rollicking good-time opener of the massively popular Purple Rain album and film that jump-started many a Prince concert – and still riles up crowds at sports arenas – has a deeper, hidden meaning. While the No. 1 song is indeed a fun-loving rocker, it reflects a theme Prince espoused openly in his music: his solemn Seventh Day Adventist beliefs. (Prince would later convert to Jehovah Witness.) “Let’s Go Crazy” is not a hedonistic paean to the party life, but about escaping the clutches of Satan, or as he’s referenced in the chorus, “de-elevator.”
We’re all excited
But we don’t know why
Maybe it’s ’cause
We’re all gonna die
And when we do
What’s it all for?
“The elevator was Satan.” Prince admitted in 1997. “The problem was that religion as a subject is taboo in pop music, so I had to change the words up because you couldn’t say God on the radio. And ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ was God to me. It was: Stay happy, stay focused, and you can beat the elevator. ‘Are we gonna let the elevator bring us down? ‘Oh no let’s go!’”
That opening sermon about the afterlife makes more sense now, huh? “Dearly beloved…”
8. “Revolution” – The Beatles
When researching my book Take a Sad Song – the Emotional Currency of “Hey Jude,” I discovered the erroneous narrative that John Lennon’s B-side was the reality-based alternative viewpoint of Paul McCartney’s slight, escapist A-side. Yet, while Lennon does repeat throughout “Revolution” that the violence and upheaval of 1968 was going to turn out, “all right,” its title is hardly a call-to-action or remotely a revolutionary rallying cry. If anything, the consistently wise-cracking Lennon fence-sits throughout, refuting “destruction” with a “count me out” on the single, which in the laid-back White Album version he switches to “in.”
This arms-length flip-flopping is underscored in, “You say you got a real solution / Well, you know / We’d all love to see the plan.” Even the song’s use in the 1997 Nike ad, which sent Boomers into a tizzy, seems misguided.
But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow
Lennon quipping that succumbing to Communism is likely to lessen your chances of getting laid is hardly fist-pumping fodder. Dubious of any movement that reaches beyond his scope, he suggests you “free your mind instead.”
7. “Mr. Jones” – Counting Crows
This one has been misread on several levels – the obvious being that it is an ode to the dream of everlasting fame that will get you girls and fix all your ills. Counting Crows first big hit, and an MTV staple, emphasizes the aim for so many struggling musicians who may be inclined to believe “when everybody loves me, I’ll never be lonely.” This so unnerves its songwriter, Adam Duritz, who later told me, “Winning a popularity contest cannot fix your life. You’re supposed to see through that in the song. The guy has a dream, and it’s a great dream – go ahead and want to be a rock and roll star – but that dream is not going to fix anything. I knew that even then; before it happened to me.” Later, when the band would play it live, he incorporated the Byrds antipathetic “So You Wanna Be a Rock and Roll Star” to the front of the tune.
And we all want something beautiful
Man, I wish I was beautiful
Then there was the untoward theory that “Mr. Jones” was a euphemism for the singer’s penis, which was so ubiquitous an interpretation, Rolling Stone was “forced” to ask Duritz about it. And finally, years later, the song was thought to either inspire or be inspired by the concept of Generation Jones – the airy period between the Baby Boomers and Generation X – coined by American cultural commentator Jonathan Pontell, who argues that the term refers to a distinct generation born from 1954 to 1965. Although Duritz, and yours truly, were born within that time frame, uh… no.
6. “Just Like a Woman” / “She’s Always a Woman” – Bob Dylan / Billy Joel
These two share a spot simply because they are essentially the same song – romantically-titled, warmly arranged, and tenderly emoted eviscerations of the noted “woman.” Both Bob Dylan and Billy Joel, well known for their tongue-in-cheek deconstruction of events surrounding their personal lives spun into art, take to these lyrics like rabid dogs. Dylan skewering his tumultuous love affair with Andy Warhol “It Girl,” Edie Sedwick, and Joel taking to task his then-wife, Elizabeth Weber, who had recently become his manager.
And she’ll promise you more than the garden of Eden
Then she’ll carelessly cut you and laugh while you’re bleeding
Many argue Joel’s complaints set to an appealing melody as loving his woman despite her many quirks, but they choose to ignore her ability to “wound with her eyes” and “ruin your faith with her casual lies,” while she can be “frequently kind and suddenly cruel.” This person sounds dangerously insane, and, let’s face it, the songwriter eventually divorced its subject in what was described in the press as an “acrimonious separation.”
As far as Dylan, who, as covered in this space weeks ago, could be relentlessly cruel in his depiction of failed romances, he pulls no punches in “Just Like a Woman,” in not only its verses, but its biting chorus refrains as he harrumphs, “she breaks just like a little girl.” Ouch.
Nobody has to guess that baby can’t be blessed
‘Til she finally sees that she’s like all the rest
With her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls
5. “Hallelujah” – Leonard Cohen
Its title and gorgeous refrain is arguably the most egregious con on this list, making it totally understandable that people would misread it. First, “hallelujah” is translated as “God be praised,” therefore it is of religious origin, and its first-verse references King David from the Old Testament. Second, it does act, even in its darkest moments, as a song of redemption – a key to Christian belief. But for Buddhist songwriter Leonard Cohen’s initial 150-verse poem (several versions claim certain verses and ignore others), this was “a desire to affirm my faith in life, not in some formal religious way, but with enthusiasm, with emotion.”
The most stirring line about a “lonely and a broken hallelujah” seems to accentuate Cohen’s thoughts about the fleeting joys of life, as does the sexually charged verse about being tied to a chair by a femme fatale.
And remember when I moved in you
The holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah
This level of closer examination makes it ever more confusing that this song is now routinely played during the holidays as a Christmas song! I’ll take kitschy tunes about the weather and shopping sprees as borderline tunes reflecting the season, but please leave “Hallelujah” out of it.
4. “Short People” – Randy Newman
When I was in high school and incessantly mocked for being short – a current malady – I was one of those who took this poorly. “Short People” was – and remains – Randy Newman’s biggest pop hit (even considering his cartoon tunes); it was everywhere and angered a lot of people. In classic American fashion, no one took the time to research the lyrics they vehemently protested or knew a damn thing about Newman’s then 10-year-plus career writing sardonic ditties sung by an unreliable narrator to get larger points across about bigotry, misogyny, and man’s general inhumanity to man. So, irrational backlash ensued, and I would say, in my lifetime, the most venomous reaction to a pop song possible.
Short people got no reason
To live
Ok, so that’s its catchy chorus repeated throughout. I get it. Newman then goes on to tell you why the vertically challenged need to be eradicated: “They walk around / Tellin’ great big lies.” There is also every “short” cliché in the book. But beyond a misreading of this satirical masterpiece, there is its redeeming bridge in which background singers derisively school the singer:
Short people are just the same
As you and I
(A fool such as I)
All men are brothers
Until the day they die
(It’s a wonderful world)
None of this has softened the blow, as I hear all the time about how horrible this song is and how much a jerk the guy with the froggy voice is for writing and singing the damn thing.
3. “Every Breath You Take” – The Police
Speaking of songs that were “everywhere,” this chart topper dominated the entire second half of 1983, and in its wake has been one of the most beloved wedding songs of the modern era. This is despite its blatantly horrifying “stalker” lyrics soundtracked by a creeping rhythm and eerily trailed by a repetitive guitar progression. Now, although there was a time in song and story wherein a man badgering a woman this ceaselessly was seen as “romantic” – I’m reminded of John Cusack holding aloft a boombox blasting Peter Gabriel outside a young woman’s house from the Cameron Crowe film, Say Anything – there was never a time when this was ok:
Every single day
And every word you say
Every game you play
Every night you stay
I’ll be watching you
Songwriter and lead singer of the Police, Sting, later said of his ode to damaged obsession, “It sounds like a comforting love song. I didn’t realize at the time how sinister it was. I think I was thinking of Big Brother, surveillance and control.”
Since, as I pointed out in a piece many years ago for another magazine, “There Are No Happy Police Songs,” this should have been a harbinger for anyone misreading demented surveillance as “love.”
2. “You’re Beautiful” – James Blunt
Its dreamy expressionistic tone underscoring the naked esteem of the narration, “You’re Beautiful,” which already manipulates listeners with an enticing title, devises a perfect vehicle to sell romantic notions of adoration. Too bad the song is filled with the stoned blather (“She could see from my face that I was fucking high”) of a morally bankrupt man-boy scheming to steal a complete stranger from her unwitting boyfriend. A plan hatched in the first verse, (“She was with another man / But I won’t lose no sleep on that / ‘Cause I’ve got a plan”) unfolds inside the singer’s head, never to be uttered to the woman in question.
There must be an angel with a smile on her face
When she thought up that I should be with you
But it’s time to face the truth
I will never be with you
Its singer-songwriter, James Blunt, knew he had a No. 1 smash on his hands – mainly because they did a single version replacing “fucking high” with “flying high” – and he was right, the song was a massive hit, but to his credit he was also open to coming clean, as he told Time magazine in 2017, “It’s about this guy who’s high as a kite stalking someone else’s girlfriend – and should be locked up and put in prison.”
1. “Born in the U.S.A” – Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band
Bow to the unquestioned champion of songs completely misused for patriotic purposes, most infamously by Ronald Reagan in his successful ‘let’s ignore reality and tell ourselves everything is fine in America’ campaign in 1984, the year this abrasively pugilistic number hit the streets. Bruce Springsteen’s tale of a broken generation returning from an immoral and failed war in Southeast Asia to face mental illness, torturous memories, and emasculating unemployment comes on strong from the first and never lets up.
Born down in a dead man’s town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
End up like a dog that’s been beat too much
‘Til you spend half your life just coverin’ up, now
First conjured as an acoustic protest song, “Born in the U.S.A.,” the title track to one of the most popular albums of the 1980s and by-far Springsteen’s best seller, was visually tilted by its flag-appropriated cover and the singer’s mid-American image. Shouted with a verve rarely exuded by the usually poetic songwriter, the painful images of a poor kid’s troubled past landing him in a situation he could hardly fathom and barely survive, the songwriter evokes the anger of a displaced victim of an American tragedy: “I’m 10 years burnin’ down the road / Nowhere to run, ain’t got nowhere to go.”
The Boss wrote this of the song in his 2016 memoir, Born to Run: “We hear what we want to hear. Willful or not, ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ says more about the song’s worst fans than the song itself.” He later concluded something that is quite evident in this exercise of interpreting or misinterpreting songs: “Records are often auditory Rorschach tests.”
