Music Tropes/Fridge

A reminder of the rules of Fridge Brilliance:

This revelation can come from anywhere, even from this very page.

Also, this page is of a generally positive nature, and a Fridge Brilliance does not have to be Word Of God. In fact, it usually isn't, and the viewer might be putting more thought into it than the creator ever did.

If you know Hebrew, the song "Misparim" (Numbers) by Ha Dag Nachash is a rap about the status of Israel's economy. The last line is "and the last number, the one that represents hope but also tragedy, is one that makes every man stand still...six million." I always thought it was just 6 million Israeli Jews but then I realized it was the six million that died in the Holocaust.
The Belgian (dutch) song 'Dos Cervezas por favor' has a chorus saying "every Spaniard has a mustache" ("elke spanjaard heeft een snor"), which just seems like rhymes on a dime and national stereotype. But later in the song, he finds out his Spanish girlfriend has a mustache, so indeed, every Spaniard (even the women) has a mustache.
I sing the song Poor Wayfaring Stranger for music lessons and love it. But I didn't get the fact that he kept on saying that he was going "home" (heaven). Why was he walking around saying he was going to Heaven soon when he is still alive? Then my music instructor said that maybe he realized that we're all going to die, and traveled around, not doing anything, waiting for death to come. Put it in a new light.
I didn't get the song Handlebars (by the Flobots) at first, how it changes from sounding like Cake to more like Linkin Park. Then I realized that it tells a story: As the song goes along, the music gets more complicated, the feats get more impressive and the singing gets louder.
- After several hearings, I decided this song reflects the gradual sophistication (corruption?) of Western civilization, from simple inventions/tools to weapons of mass destruction. Of course, it's possible I'm way overthinking this...
  - Firstly, it's impossible to really appreciate Handlebars without the music video. Anyway, I really rejected this song because I leapt straight to that exact conclusion. I mean, inventing a fuel-efficient engine is a sleazy move on the slippery slope to an Orwellian dictatorship? But then I watched it again, and saw it as the story of one fairly ordinary guy with a gift for speech, one power-mad dictator with a few shady business ventures in his backstory, and how they were once great friends. From that standpoint, it's absolutely epic.
    - Agreed. Without the music video the song sounds schizoid to say the least. But when you see the vid, it's apparent that there are two different lists of achievements involved, being put to to different uses by the dictator and the revolutionary. At that point, the song becomes a tragedy in miniature as these two guys, both of whom believe that they are the hero of the story, move towards a clash. Neither really wanted it to get this out of control, but it did and...boom. The look on the dictator's face as his friend dies is what firmly convinced me of the brilliance of the song.
  - I always thought the message was that power corrupts. If you watch the video, the story becomes much clearer. It's two different guys who used to be good friends, but ended up going down different paths in life. The first stayed a normal guy, to whom "I once saw a platypus," or "I know all the words to I'm Proud to Be An American," or "I can keep rhythm without a metronome" are achievements. This is a normal, average guy. His friend goes into the world of business and politics and, at first, has good intentions. He does things that really will help people, like developing a new car engine or a new computer, but eventually starts to get sucked into that world. Eventually, he enjoys the power that comes with this new life and his goals become more about money and more about power, as at that point he starts to lose sight of his original goals and morals. At that point, he realizes that he can do anything he wants for nothing and eventually becomes a dictator.
- First and foremost (by my interpretation, which I believe is backed up by evidence in the song) it is a song about ego. The "story" builds as the character is first proud of small achievements (riding a bike without handlebars) to being proud of major achievements, to being obsessed with his achievements, to eventually becoming completely egotistical and discarding the value of the lives of others. The change in the musical dynamic of the song represents a building motion as the character's ego mounts ever higher. It's a very well designed song. The muted trumpet solo helps too.
- A LOT can be said about "No Handlebars," specifically how solemnly brilliant the line "I can lead the nation with a microphone" is. Moreover, the gradual build and bloom of the song (bursting at, approximately, "I can end the planet in a holocaust!") is so delicately done, so perfectly crafted, that it's hard to believe a band like Flobots did it. The music video makes it a lot more beautiful, basically animating all of the lyrics, and almost giving it a "What have I done?" quality when the narrator destroys the planet, but then reverts back to the knowledge that he can, in fact, ride a bike with no handlebars.
Funny how Summer of 69 by Brian Adams isn't REALLY about the Summerof 1969, eh?
Tracy Chapman's song Fast Car drove me bonkers when I first heard it. The verse was just so monotonous and repetitive, and the only part that seemed free and light and airy was the chorus. Then I got it.
"What's Up People?!" by Maximum the Hormone struck me at first as the usual spot of death metal; death metal in general and the song in particular certainly isn't without its share of talent in places, but it's not my usual cup of tea. The fact that they were using it to intro the second half of a smooth, cerebral detective show didn't help matters. Then, I thought about it a little, and then realized just how fitting it was for the series. The first intro involved the main character's ideals and choices, while the second was a comment on his mental state. Taken together, the statement is that while Light earnestly wishes for a better world and does what he does with a perfectly clear conscience...he's still completely out of his mind. As a result of this analysis (or over-analysis, whichever), the song's become a small favorite of mine.
Iron Maiden end their album "Somewhere in Time" with Alexander The Great. Think about it. The album has a futuristic sound and theme, and then they end it with Ancient History. Pretty cool!
- I'm not sure if this counts, but on the subject of that song, I never understood the clips they played with it. Then when I finally finished Death Note I watched it again...and the clips all made perfect sense.
Whenever I heard Zeromancer's song, Famous Last Words, I'd immediately pick another song because I don't like that much slow songs, as I need some catchy intro or initial lyrics to keep listening to the song. One night, I wasn't paying a lot of attention to my iTunes and missed the beginning of the song. Then, I noticed the chorus of the song and I was surprised since I didn't recall that song at all. When I realized it was Famous Last Words and paid attention to the whole song, I understood it and felt related to the song. It is now one of my favorite Zeromancer songs.
I love The Beatles, but hated Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da violently - it seemed like so much inane, pointless domestic rubbish. Then, one night, I heard the song at about five A.M. and suddenly realised that the name switch in the last verse implied Desmond and Molly were the same person. It suddenly became sheer genius. Even though I later found out that the name switch was a mistake, I still have a fondness for my interpretation.
- I still remember the day when I realized that the song was about a happily married crossdresser. Good times. -Tristan's Alive
  - Another Beatles revelation: I thought "She Loves You" was all right, but nothing special. But then I came to the conclusion that the narrator is also in love with the girl. I don't know why, but it made me enjoy the song all the more.
    - I felt the same way about "Hey Jude." It felt like there was this weird vibe that if Jude didn't get his girlfriend back, then the singer was going to fall for her himself.
      - I also felt that way about Hey Jude, but then I learned that it was basically written for John's son Julian by Paul, to help Julian get through his father's divorece. It's suddenly touching.
    - "You're Gonna Lose That Girl" is basically "She Loves You" rewritten to make that element of the scenario much more explicit.
  - More Beatles-I always thought the second to third-person lyrical change in "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" was weird, until you consider there to be two different women. The singer wants one, but instead is in a relationship another woman he hates because "she's so heavy" (the Beatles hated fat girls, clearly). He can't have what he wants, and it's "driving (him) mad." Also explains the emphasis placed on the word "you" (as opposed to "her) during the singing.
    - 'Heavy' was slang for 'sexy' at the time. Combine that with this being the time that John Lennon had just started hanging around with Yoko Ono, and had found that he just couldn't be without her at any time, even to the point of bringing her into the studio while the Beatles were recording (a huuuge no-no), and the driving, repetitive nature of the music, and I thought it was John Lennon being self-aware about his obsession with her. I can almost imagine a conversation going like this.

John, to Yoko: I want you. I want you so bad. I want you, I want you so bad, it's driving me mad, it's driving me mad.
Paul: Jeez, mate, what's so good about this girl?
John: She's so... heavy. (i.e. I don't know. I just love her. Shut up.)

- The opening line of "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" works with all of the definitions of the word "miss". "She's not a girl who misses much": 1-she's very smart and observant (supposedly the meaning Lennon intended); 2-she's very successful and no matter what she does, things end up going her way; 3-she doesn't have a guilty conscience, and never has regrets about people or things that have disappeared from her life. So with just seven words we have a complex portrait of a smart, savvy, vain, self-centered and perhaps even sociopathic woman. - Ezclee4050
  - Alternatively, she's not a girl who misses her target much. Though you'd have to be interpreting it literally for that one. -Snorlax422
- Revolution I is a slow, thinky kind of song. Revolution the single is a fast-tempo hard rock song with the distortion up to absurd levels. At first I found this odd, but went with it, because they're both pretty cool. Then I found out that originally John Lennon wanted the single to be the same as the album version, but the other Beatles wanted a faster rock song. In that context, the loud distortion makes complete sense - Lennon was basically saying, 'You want a fast, rocky number? Fine!' and turned it Up to Eleven.
- I slapped myself on the forehead when I finally realized what Joan, of Maxwell's Silver Hammer, was doing with a test tube on those late, lonely nights. Think of the shape.
- Norwegian wood. The guy set's fire to her house. Norwegian wood is pine! The refrain "isn't it good?" is about how easily it burns!
- I was listening to "Act Naturally" (I know, not really The Beatles, but they're pretty much the only reason anyone cares about the song anymore) when I noticed that it actually has sort of a depressing subtext to it. The movie featured in the song is "about a man that's sad and lonely," and the narrator is so confident in his performance "'cause [he] can play the part so well" - all he has to do is "act naturally," meaning that he's naturally sad and lonely. Throw in the fact that he can't help but call himself "the biggest fool that ever hit the big time" every chorus, and suddenly this silly little song about fame and celebrity has a pretty self-deprecating tone. Very fitting for Ringo.
I always wondered why Genghis Khan by Iron Maiden was so musically inconsistent- until I realized it's musically supposed to resemble the chaos of a battle.- The Sexiest Nerd Ever
I used to think metal was just loud and abrasive rock. However, I bought Megadeth's Greatest Hits at the urging of various internet users. I figured out that Dave Mustaine was talking about the modern world with all of his songs, taking whatever power he had to tear down the arbitrary rules of the world bureaucracy. Plus, the riffs grew on me, and the lyrics gained true deep meaning.
The Beach Boys's album SMiLE (or at least, the bootlegs and the Brian Wilson solo version) has a lot of musical fridge brilliance, notably in the way it re-uses melodies in different songs. A good example is how the melody of the waltz introduction of I'm In Great Shape is actually the counter-melody of the "Catina" section of Heroes And Villains on a different tempo. It's pretty subtle, but once you hear it, it's brilliant.
- Also how one of the melodies of Song For Children can be partially heard in the end of Good Vibrations.
I used to absolutely hate the Pussycat Dolls, considering their songs to be vapid, insipid things with over-sexualized videos. Then I realized "What are the Pussycat Doll? A burlesque group. What is burlesque? Erotic parody!" Suddenly, it all made sense that the Pussycat Dolls parodied songs with those kind of problems. I think much better of them now.
Dropkick Murphys' State of Massachusetts is a good song as is, but as a good Masshole I eventually realized that it is about the Bulger Brothers. Once I realized that, it became even better.
The Manic Street Preachers have a song called "4st 7lb", about an anorexic teenager. It starts out fairly fast and with lots of guitars, then for the last few verses switches to a much slower tempo with more minimalist accompaniment and a slightly altered melody. This never made me dislike it, but it did seem odd - until one day it occurred to me that the slower tempo and starker sound could be seen as a metaphor for the girl's metabolism and physical functions slowing down as she starves to death and her body shuts down. (Yeah, it's cheerful stuff.)
- I chuckled when I realized the title was an abbreviation for "Four Stone, Seven Pounds" -- or 87 pounds, which would be a very anorexic weight indeed. ]
  - It Gets Worse. 4st 7lb = 63lb
- The term "stone" as a measurement is British. The pound is British currency.
  - The term "pound" has the same meaning in Britain as it does in North America. The use of "pound" for currency stems from pre-Norman times when a Pound Sterling was literally a pound of silver.
  - 4 stone, 7 pounds is (apparently) the lowest wieght an adult male can reach before they die. the person who wrote the lyrics, Richey Edwards was anorexic himself. It's about him, really.
Lemon Demon's little-known but still vaguely popular song "Without My Tonsils" used to be my absolute least favorite song he's ever written. The melody was slow and boring, and the narrator was whiney and seemingly crazy. The strange slow shift from 7/4 to 4/4 really got to me, too. Then one day, I looked up the lyrics and realized that the entire song is actually some pretty brilliant meta-parody, pointing out things like the key it's sung in, the boring fade-out, and the annoying record-scratchy segue halfway through the song. As for the whiney narrator, I think he's actually parodying the whole "whiney song" thing, as bemoaning the loss of fangs and the central nervous system is NOT the usual subject matter. - BLT
The first time I heard "You Could Drive A Person Crazy" from the musical Company, it was ripped out of context and I found it weird and annoying (why were they singing so fast? and what was with the "do-do-do"s?). Years later, having heard some of the Andrews Sisters songs Sondheim was pastiching, and having had a chance to understand the lyrics and the place the song has in the show, I realised what a brilliant piece of work it was: using a bright, cheerful style of music, previously associated with inane, dippy lyrics, to deliver a scathing and rather bitter smackdown to an unresponsive boyfriend. - puritybrown
Many people, including this troper, have wondered why the Wu-Tang Clan's 'Protect Ya Neck' remains censored in all incarnations, considering that all other songs on the album and the Wu's catalogue are uncensored. Then it hit me: The skit introducing the song is a man calling into a radio station, requesting them to play the song. The track itself is the song being played on the radio, so it's censored!
I used to love the song "Endlessly" purely for the sound of it. I did listen to the music, but never really understood what it meant, thinking it to be some kind of love song. It hit me half-way through a youtube comment. The song is actually referring to love itself. How you can love love endlessly, and no matter what, you always will, but at the same time, love will never love you back. Only people can do that. - Moo
Originally I thought P!nk's song 'Long Way To Happy' from the "I'm Not Dead" album was about a relationship break-up, as is standard in pop music. Then I listened to it again and actually listened to the lyrics and realized it was actually a rape recovery song - making it instantly quite a creepy thing to find yourself singing along to.
I had been listening to The Beatles since I was a small illiterate child, so the spelling of the name didn't mean much to me. It wasn't until I was in my early teens that I realized it was a pun, and not the insect, and I thought it was just about the most brilliant thing ever. - Revolos55
- To top it off, The Beatles had a fondness for Buddy Holly. Buddy Holly's band's name? The Crickets.
I'm a big fan of Queens of the Stone Age and I enjoy their album Songs for the Deaf. But it wasn't until looking at the lyrics to all of the songs combined that I realized they refer to a heroin addiction. --Elk
When I was young, I was initially forced into a negative impression of the song Colors Of The Wind by a relative who thought it was all a bunch of new age treehugger hoo-ha. When I was old enough to think for myself, I listened to the song again and realized it was brilliant. Remember the lyrics How high does the sycamore grow?/If you cut it down, then you'll never know? She wasn't singing about deforestation! That sycamore is the native Americans, whose people and cultures were "cut down" by European settlers. Now we can never know what they might have become if we hadn't oppressed them.
- Same! I also thought the "How can there be so much you don't know/You don't know" was repetition...then it hit me.
It took me until about age 14 to figure out what the running baseball commentary was doing in the middle of Meat Loaf's "Paradise By The Dashboard Light." A definite "you're not a kid anymore" moment.
I just realized that "Gollum's Song" from the soundtrack to the Two Towers, isn't sung about Gollum, it's sung by Gollum. - Jarl
- I just recently spotted a moment of sheer brilliance in the soundtrack to the Return of the King. Six triumphant, joyous notes ring out as the good guys win. They are the opening bars of Mordor's theme, rewritten. This is exactly what happens to the music of Sauron's boss Morgoth in The Silmarillion. In fact, the major themes of the soundtrack for all three movies are as described by the late J.R.R. Tolkien in that book! Somewhere in Heaven there is a pub, and in that pub there is very good beer, and Professor Tolkien is sipping it and humming (probably badly) all of the best bits. - Jenny Islander
On the topic of movie soundtracks... I just realized that "Across the Stars", Anakin and Padmé's sweeping love theme from Attack of the Clones, is in fact a reference to the phrase "Star-Crossed Lovers". Sheer genius! ...This works from any number of different angles. Hell, it's even mentioned on that trope's page!
Long ago (about 6 years ago, give or take), when I first heard Interpol's "Turn On the Bright Lights," I thought it was a sweet album, but I felt that there was nothing more to it other than being a great entrance album for people who didn't understand what indie rock was. As I've lived in a city for the better part of 4 years now, elements from that album popped into my head here and there, but I couldn't understand. Now, as a music journalist, a few weeks ago (in April 2009), it all came to me: The album wasn't a random meshing of 90's indie-rock atrophy. It was a band making an image of New York City, the New York City outside of a few blocks that had everyone's attention because some buildings blew up, the New York City that existed and lived as though September 11, 2001 was really just another day in the grand scheme of all things. And it was prolly NYC at its best: Before the security lockdowns, before clean-up and glamour went into overdrive, before Williamsburg became gentrified and created a cancer that is killing Brooklyn, before the hipsters were identified as the new counterculture, cannibalized, and commodified. A New York City that was, in many ways, real. But more importantly, because of this imagery, it was the last great album to symbolize a regional sound outside of hip hop, just before Myspace decimated the concept of regional music. It was, very much, an album that was perfect for its time, like Michael Jackson's Thriller.
A little more of a lighthearted example to follow: The first time I saw the skit Space Olympics on SNL, I hated it. It was boring. It was stupid. There was autotune. It seemed like a dumbass excuse to put Andy Samberg in a wig and have shiny costumes. I have no idea what changed when I heard it again on Incredibad, but for some reason, it became my favorite song on the album. So delightfully stupid!
I hated The Statue Got Me High the first few times I heard it. It sounded like TMBG at their worst, with lyrics that sounded vaguely meaningful without it actually meaning much. After listening to it a bit more (due to having lived this trope before), I realized it was very deliberately meaningless - unlike most of their songs, it's just a song about a guy whose head blows up because of a statue. I love it now.
- It gets better. I didn't like Apollo 13 at all -- until I realized that its songs were all references to bad SF/Fantasy movie tropes. The Statue Got Me High is all about the black monolith at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and referenced in other Arthur C. Clarke's works.
"Self Inflicted" (by Kevin O'Donnell's Quality Six) seems to have a title completely at odds with its lyrics, which are specifically about how the singer didn't bring his suffering on himself, isn't melodramatically exaggerating or wallowing in it, and would do anything to be rid of it if only he could. Eventually it hit me that the title refers to something never explicitly mentioned in the song: the fatal wound.
The intro the song YYZ by Rush always bothered me. It seemed irregular and out of place. Ever since I found out the intro was, in fact, the phrase "YYZ" in morse code, repeated several times, it's fascinated me.
- I read somewhere about how airport regulations require that there be a transmitter broadcasting the airport's IATA code nonstop for the purposes of navigation. YYZ is the IATA code for Toronto, Ontario - The band's hometown.
Alphaville's second album, Afternoons in Utopia. This was a German New Wave synthesizer pop band big in the 80s, most famous for the song Forever Young from their first album, which was full of happy melodies with sometimes dark and sometimes hopeful lyrics. Afternoons seemed much the same, but some of the lyrics featured the word SMI^2LE. It wasn't until a couple of years later that I realized that SMI^2LE referred to Timothy Leary's idea of expanding your mind through psychedelics. Then I realized that many of the lyrics could be about opening your mind and becoming a "modern" human. It was a couple of years after that I realized that, underneath that, the songs were all addressed to a girl ("Carol Masters"), who was apparently stuck in a mental institution. The whole album was a series of love songs begging this girl to come out of her dementia. That's pretty deep stuff for a pop album.
After listening to the Vocaloid song "Dark Woods Circus" a few times, and deciding that I liked it, I decided to show a fanvid of it to a friend who I thought would also enjoy it. She pointed out that the song sounded cheerful, but had depressing lyrics, something I had noticed but not really paid attention to. And then I thought about it for a minute. Though most of the song describes just how miserable the freaks are, there's a part towards the beginning that states "All of the cast is jolly". And then I realized the reason behind the Lyrical Dissonance. It represents how the circus freaks act happy to please their audience, despite being anything but. I enjoyed the song before, but that realization makes it that much better.
- Miku's name. "Mi" is a homonym for one Japanese pronunciation of the number 3, and "Ku" is a homonym for one pronunciation of the number 9. Another way of saying 3 and 9 are "san" and "kyuu". 39 = "sankyuu" = "thank you".
- I ship Len and Luka. My Portmanteau Couple Name for them is LenKa. Then I realized: If you swap the "L" with "R", you get renka (lit. "love song").
- As of this writing, it is Valentine's Day. Or should I say, VaLENtine's Day? Even in Japanese, the pun holds: you can't spell バレンタイン (barentain) without レン (ren).
I realized soon after I heard the ballad Honest Questions by Daniel Bedingfield: to my mind the narrator could be singing to God (with the chorus as God's response). I'm an atheist, and a Christian friend with whom I discussed it never thought of that interpretation, so perhaps I'm wrong, but it gives the song (otherwise a generic ballad) an interesting twist.
I didn't really like Jonathan Coulton's song "I'm Your Moon" the first time I heard it...I thought it was a really forced love-song metaphor that didn't even make sense. I mean, "I'm your moon, you're my moon"? How can it go both ways? But about the second or third time I heard it, I realized that it wasn't a metaphor at all! It was entirely literal: the two "moons" are Pluto and Charon, which are close to the same size. Charon is singing to Pluto, telling it not to feel bad about being demoted to subplanetary status. Brilliant!
- Also, at one point Pluto and Charon were to be given double planetary status, making the name Pluto-Charon. If they're both equal, doesn't matter which is the moon.
I'd been exposed to The Grateful Dead since childhood, but hadn't really gotten into them on my own despite many attempts. It wasn't until I listened to this in my 20s that the whole thing clicked for me, and it pretty much blew my face off. Now they're one of my favorite bands.
The entirety of The Decemberists' album The Hazards of Love. At first glance (or listen, as it were), it comes off as a pretty stock-standard Star-Crossed Lovers story with just a bit of woodland fantasy mixed in, incredibly well written, and a joy to listen to, but cliche all the same. When I started listening to individual songs, characters, and delving deeper into the story, it started to actually unravel, there are character traits that seem... slightly off, as if the characters were not as fleshed out as the songs make them seem. Then, it hit me, the album isn't telling a cliche story, it's telling a story about a cliche story. As in: The characters, plot, settings, etc. are all taking place as part of a play. The characters that aren't human but appear as such because they're actually actors playing non-human characters. Actually, it's probably just me applying copious amounts of Fan Wank, but hey, it killed a couple of hours
- Dude, I had the same idea! When the Rake refers to himself as 'your humble narrator' and the random interludes explaining the story, I instantly thought- "this is a play/pantomine in album form!"
I only started listening to 3OH!3 because my friends listened to them a lot and I somewhat reluctantly developed a taste for their music, even if the attitude behind the lyrics didn't always sit well with me. Then when I became a fan of them on Facebook and actually saw them for the first time, I realized it was all a satire and I like their music a lot more.
- the 3Oh!3 song Richman has a line in it that goes 'I've got 200 seconds and I'm ready to go'. This seemed really strange and and excuse to rhyme with the previous line, until you look at the length of the song: 3:20, or two hundred seconds.
Despite loving the song Cry Little Sister, I always found myself confused by the lyrics - they seemed to run in random directions and never made a lot of sense. Until I realized that the narrator was telling the song from his prison cell, and the "Blue Masquerade" refers to the police.
- Then I thought about it again and realized that the "blue masquerade" refers to the act he's putting on for everyone else and that he's never actually acted on his feelings for his sister, and it made even MORE sense. And I felt kind of stupid.
I had listened to Dave Matthew's Band's 'Typical Situation' from the 'Live at Red Rocks' album maybe 70 times before I realized that it was just Dave in that particular performance. Made me appreciate how intensity and fullness(?) the man could generate with just his vocals and guitar.
"Why Don't You Get a Job?" by The Offspring sounds very similar to "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" by The Beatles. While I thought it was another example of an artist stealing from another, it all makes sense when you remember that the song is about mooching off others. - hrdcrnwo
- Another Offspring example: their song "Staring At the Sun" contains a lot of lyrics that seem really random at first. Then I gave a crack at interpreting them... and actually got into a small argument on YouTube about what we each thought they meant. The song suddenly seemed a lot more like the pieces of poetry I read in English class, which are open to multiple interpretations. So it's really a complex poem. - 2writeis2life
'Shasta' by Vienna Teng sounds like a getting over a breakup song. Listening intently to the lyrics reveals it's about a woman who decides to not get an abortion. - killerlynnja
"Crownless" by Nightwish is a song about arrogance, but it didn't seem to make a lot of sense, lyric wise, until I thought about it in the context of 'Macbeth.' The first two stanzas are the people of Scotland talking about Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, the refrain is always Macbeth himself, the bridge is Lady Macbeth, the first two lines of the last stanza is also Macbeth, and the last three lines of the last stanza is the ghost of Macdonwald. - Kintatsu
In A Lonely Place, the main character's theme from Oldboy, is atmospheric and appropriate and awesome. But there's more. In the movie, the main character Oh Dae-Su is imprisoned for fifteen years in a room where the only wall decoration is a rather horrifying picture of Jesus Man of Sorrows, complemented by the first line from Ella Wheeler Wilcox' poem Solitude: "Laugh and the world laughs with you / Weep and you weep alone." On the soundtrack, the song is preceded by Oh Dae-Su reading the line from the poem out loud in Korean. Now listen to the song with the poem next to it. Count the first line as read. Count the number of times the piano theme recurs. Not only does it fit the number of lines in the poem, it also breaks when the poem does, and rises and falls like the lines in the poem do. Yes. Oh Dae-Su's theme is Solitude set to music. Brilliant. - Dessek
A lot of songs by Pulp passed me by when they first came out, being dismissed as just more of the usual "Britpop" of the era. Then, revisiting the songs about ten years later and actually listening to the lyrics really brought home the incisive and vicious wit behind the songs. To this day I am convinced that the version of Common People I heard was an emasculated radio edit that took out all the bile and barbed turns. And talking of lyrics, Me and Mia by Ted Leo and the Pharmacists at first appeared to be an incredibly catchy power pop song - then you realize Anna and Mia are shorthand for Anorexia and Bulimia, and it's suddenly the most compassionate song written for a sufferer of eating disorders ever
- It probably was an emasculated radio edit. The version played on radio was cut down by about half.
'Collide' by Howie Day. At first, I was just thinking, "Oh, that's interesting, he's changing the ends of the words a bit to make it rhyme, but it sounds natural, cool." Then I read through the lyrics while listening, and, well...

Even the wrong words seem to rhyme.

- Bonus points for actually emphasizing seem for completely reasonable rhyme scheme reasons, in context.
The Smashing Pumpkins album title Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness just clicked with me. Mellon Collie. Melancholy. It blew my mind. How did I miss that? - c
When I first listened to Hüsker Dü's album Zen Arcade, it seemed like a messy collage of violent noise with very little going for it. How people fell in love with the album baffled me. And then I read that the album had a story to it. A young boy disappointed with his family life, runs away from home, and then discovers that the world outside is colder and harder than the world he used to know. And then it hit me: this is exactly the type of music that someone in those circumstances would make. It's loud, angry, angsty, full of guitar distortion and screaming, and ballsy. Awesome.
I'd always thought it was ironic that the most well known piece of circus music is called "Entrance of the Gladiators," as gladiators were men who violently fought to the death, and the circus is a silly spectacle. It wasn't until just the other day that I made the connection that gladiator fights were the main attraction of Roman circuses. -Tatterdemalion
- Also, it was originally a military march
My first listen to Gorillaz's Plastic Beach left me thinking that it was pretty bland compared to their previous album, having almost no guitar, tons and tons of synths, and with 2D's vocal being almost completely devoid of feeling. Then I realized that this was all reflecting the themes presented by the albums.
- Also on the topic of Gorillaz, think of the lyrics to Feel Good Inc., the hit single about hedonism and how it only makes you sad. Specifically, this line: "My dreams, they've got to kiss, because I don't get sleep, no.." So his hedonism engulfed him so he no longer sleeps at night due to his raunchy ways of fame and lust. But dreams can also mean hopes, so not only does the lack of sleep literally make him stop "dreaming" but he also loses his hopes and dreams to the way of life. Poetry! -Hitchcock
- Watch the videos for "Feel Good Inc." and "El Manana". The videos show Noodle, and her guitar, and her island as representing innocence, and the destruction thereof. Noodle's "skyland" is attacked by two helicopters, which she attempts to hide from inside the windmill, though it is eventually critically damaged, plunges into a canyon, and is destroyed. Then "On Melancholy Hill" rolls around, and opens with Noodle on a cruise ship. She presents a decidedly more adult appearance, wearing lipstick and stockings-she is 19 now, after all-and instead of making her way to the "lifebewtz", takes her gun and actively attempts to fight off the flying pirates, managing to down one but not the other before the cruise ship is bombed and sank. She's not innocent anymore, but she has grown up. It probably also means something that we never see her eyes. By contrast, Cyborg Noodle hasn't grown up-Murdoc based her on his memories of the last time he saw Noodle. She likes Robert Pattinson, for Pete's sake!
- There has been a debate in my house about how Russell and/or Noodle would know how to get to Plastic Beach. Until I finally realized why...because Murdoc told everyone the coordinates in his Pirate Radio broadcasts!
- The band is named after The Monkees.
For the longest time, I never understood "Thumb Cinema" by The World/Inferno Friendship Society. I got that it was a rant about consumerism, materialism and excess, but it didn't seem to fit with the rest of the songs on "Addicted to Bad Ideas", which is about Peter Lorre's life and generally narrated from his point of view. Suddenly, a year and a half later, it occurred to me that since the album was heavily based on a recent biography which elaborates more on Lorre's friendship with Bertholt Brecht, the song might be from Brecht's point of view instead. After three songs where Lorre rants about his career decline while deciding to just give in, Brecht criticizes the excesses of Hollywood and how they've damaged Lorre, and begs him to return to postwar Germany with him: "You're not happy, well, no one gives a shit/ This is a game and you're part of it/ Maybe it's time for you to quit." It would fit the album's timeline as well with the next song, "Addicted to Bad Ideas", being about Lorre's growing addiction and despair after returning to Hollywood when his German comeback film flops.
Rammstein's song "Benzin" is about someone who really likes petrol. The line "Brauch keine Frau, nur Vaselin" very roughly translates to, 'I don't need a woman, just Vaseline'. The reference to masturbation was obvious; it wasn't until much later that I remembered what Vaseline is made from. - Dane900
- I got one while watching the Haifisch video. "Haifisch" is German for shark. During the video, Richard and Paul (I think, it's been a bit since I've seen the video) got into an arguement that devolved into the five remaining members fighting. The fight started when one of them got punched in the nose, drawing blood...which attracts sharks.
  - Not to mention that at the end of the music video, Till sends a postcard to the rest of the Rammstein band with a picture of him catching a Tiger Shark.
The song "Hella Good" by No Doubt is actually about sex not dancing. What she really wants him to do is keep on screwing not dancing. This explains why the waves keep on crashing on her and why his love keeps on coming like a thunderbolt. It also explains why she keeps gasping as she sings the song.
- Dude, all the songs about dancing are about sex. Even (especially!) stuff from the early days of recording, and earler. Those 30's and 40's songs are actually incredibly dirty. This is a trope in its own right.
The song "Death Cab For Cutie" by the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. I enjoyed it, though preferred others like Humanoid Boogie -- until I realize that what the doo-wop singers were really singing, instead of generic doo-wop nonsense (best transcribed as 'Veygahran doo-wah'), was baby, don't do it. She enjoyed it a lot more since then.
- Also, Humanoid Boogie has its own -- despite having read the lyrics, I prefer to hear the chorus as 'Some people say they're glad, some people say annoyed, but you know, ain't many tryin' to say they're humanoid' instead of what it actually goes like. Why? Because if you hear it like that, it's easy to interpret it as a group of aliens coming to Earth and trying to ask people if they're, well, humans, using the nearest socially-acceptable term for 'what are you' -- 'how are you'. Finding no people answering with 'Human', they make the song to put out a sort of wanted-poster for humans on the radio, like the rat catcher of Hamelin...
- "Mr. Apollo". I thought it was just a regular, kind-of-campy song about physical fitness -- until I listened to the lyrics, whereupon I thought up the idea that it might be about bullied nerds dreaming up their own fantasy world where someone would teach them how to defend themselves, and going slightly hysterical, perhaps even insane, in the process. This put a dryly sarcastic spin on the tidbit of the chorus that went "Cause everybody knows that a healthy body makes a healthy mind", and was reinforced by Vivian Stanshall bursting into the chorus, hysterically yelling "And you can--beat up bullies 'til they cry! Oh crikey! Oh jove! Let's go you rotter--oh, don't punish me--!". I thought he had gotten a bit too lost in his fantasy world, and had actually run out, challenging a bully to fisticuffs -- and getting beaten up in the process, of course.
- "Noises For The Leg", at the end, has the sound of a balloon losing air wildly darting from left to right stereo. I thought it was just weird -- until I remembered the old cartoon tidbit of a balloon flying wildly through the air after getting its knot untied.
- This one might be Spotify-exclusive (or, at least, it used to be), but if you search for The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band on Spotify, the song order is so that "Look At Me I'm Wonderful" comes right before "Jazz -- Delicious Hot, Disgusting Cold" and "I Left My Heart (In San Francisco)" comes right before "Dr. Jazz". I always chose to interpret that as an over-arrogant Ted Baxter of a singer doing a pep talk to himself before going out on stage -- and when he's out there, his band members upstage him by not letting him get a word in with their constant playing. He manages to get one song, but before he can finish it, they start with their nonsense again. Frustrated, he leaves.
- "Laughing Blues". I thought nothing special of it -- just traditional oddballery. Then she realized 'Blues' can also be said to describe depression, and depression is sometimes a sign of madness, making the title "Laughing Mad". Which you can say about many Bonzo songs.
- "Joke Shop Man". I thought it was a fairly regular jingle-type song -- until I realized that the music sounded slightly sadder at the verse "Joke Shop Man, help me if you can / it's really oh-so-hard to understand". The 'joke shop man' is an optimist, or a fellow with humor, and the singer is depressed with the world. There are no words toward the end of the song, with only silly noises, because of one of two causes -- either the joke shop man is helping the singer, well, understand, or the singer has killed himself.
- "Quiet Talks And Summer Walks". I was annoyed with how the voice was barely audible over the music...and then thought back to the title. Also, it finishes with a sound not that unlike a buzzsaw or similar -- the forest the singer was walking through is getting cut down as he walks.
- "Busted". I thought of the song as mostly nonsense...until I heard one verse that went "I think it'd do more good to try and understand the other guy". That combined with the chorus made me realize that the singer had been, well, busted for a crime (or just busted up in the skull, for even more simplicity, or busted like a toy, or even bested) and driven to madness by the pressure put on him by society to either reform or prove he didn't do it (or prove he really was as good as he seemed, et cetera). All he wants is some sympathy, but due to society stamping labels on him, he never gets it.
  - Or, considering that Vivian Stanshall, the singer, does his "Look At Me I'm Wonderful" voice, you can even think it's the same singer from "Look At Me", busted as a fraud/hack/with no skill.
- "Hello Mable". I thought that the fact that the trumpets got more triumphant toward the end of the song was just traditional progression exaggeration -- plus, I was a bit annoyed with how the repetition went on and on, in comparison to the other Bonzo songs (also, the 'chaperone' part implied she already had a boyfriend). Then I realized that the singer had to ask again and again for Mable to come with him, in more and more exaggerated ways. His request for her to "leave your chaperone / so we can be alone" references that he just wants her to walk out on her own, either so he can observe her or so he can ask her to give him up...and the calmer end to the song suggests there was a happy ending for the two.
- "The Trouser Press". Your everyday pop novelty song, really -- I found it average, but prefered others. Then I learnt two things -- that the line "Oh, you're so savage, Roger", spoken from a decidedly male voice, wasn't just a one-shot joke with random name -- Roger-Ruskin Spear was one of the fellows in the band and the one who had discovered them, saying "I couldn't believe anyone was that bad" before changing his mind. The line could have simply referenced his savage critique. And the second thing was that it had featured a solo on an actual trouser press.
- "We Are Normal". The slow, strange, spoken intro always bugged me -- until I realized that was what it was supposed to do. The song began with a bubbling sound, which I didn't understand -- until I understood it was a metaphor for a new type of people (or, heck, aliens) bubbling up to the surface. The title, too -- it's not meant to be 'We are ordinary', they actually call themselves 'Normal'. The spoken words were basically jeers, with lines such as "Well, here come some normals! They look like...normal..." and "Look at his head! 'E--'es got a head on him like a rabbit!" These continued through slow pace, as a slow, fast-forwarding sound appeared, which turned into a quicker fast-forwarding sound, which turned into a jittery rapid fast fast-forwarding -- until it became the actual song. This represents the years of insults that seem to pass so quickly, so uneventfully -- up until rebellion, as the song itself is rather rocky, the verses going mostly "We are normal, and we want our freedom!" And, finally, the song closes with around fifteen or so seconds of ocean-against-the-beach noises, calling back to the bubbly opening. In the end, despite a few new bubbles, the ocean is big and alike.
- "By A Waterfall". The strangely distant-sounding 'Yoohoohoohoo' of the chorus after the singer exclaims 'All together now' can be explained this way -- the singer is a Third Person Person, and is actually singing by a waterfall, out on a cliff. The distance is due to echo. - all above twists of perfectly good Bonzo songs can be attributed to Farmelle
In classic Fridge Brilliance style, I liked the music video to In Bloom by Nirvana, but didn't really understand why they were referencing the Beatles, who didn't seem to have anything to do with the song at all. Then later I learned that the Beatles occasionally shouted Nazi slogans into crowds because they knew that nobody was actually listening to them, or could even hear them over the roar - which basically sums up the song In Bloom.
- I took it more as a general sarcastic comparison of the band's sudden rise in popularity to Beatlemania, but come to think of it that also fits into the meaning of the song a little bit.
I was recently listening to the song Wander, by Kamelot, and something occured to me. The lyrics in the first half of the chorus isn't just Ariel reflecting on how much he misses Helena. It's an eerie character-doesn't-realize-it foreshadowing towards the events that occur later on.
- Just realized something else. In both Epica and Black Halo, the center of the universe is also called "Epica", where you find the meaning of life. On the Epica CD, Ariel calls his homeland the center of his universe. He finds the meaning of life, or more specifically HIS life, in his homeland. I think my brain just exploded from the..er..epicness.
It took me several listens before I fully figured out that Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk" is about the Elephant in the Living Room, in the form of a dying relationship (and various infidelities) neither partner wants to discuss. - Carty
At first I thought Taylor Swift's "Love Story" was just your typical pop teenage love song. I was always disappointed that she used "Romeo" and "Juliet" for the names of two perfect lovers for obvious reasons and I assumed that she simply Did Not Do the Research... but then I noticed a very subtle change at the bridge. The whole song, she sings to her "Romeo" directly, referring to him as "you". At the bridge though, the precise line is "Is this in my head? I don't know what to think/he knelt to the ground and pulled out a ring..." In other words, the entire climax of the song may very well entirely be in her head, the wistful dreaming of a heartbroken girl, which fits the Romeo and Juliet imagery perfectly. (Also makes more sense of the echo at the end.) Now I hear the song as a bittersweet love that never was, rather than the bubblegum pop love that everyone seems to think it is.
- Or the switch to the second person means that her really Romeo, the one who proposed, is someone else, and she's sharing the story with the boy who missed his chance. Never thought about it that way before...
- If you want to link it back to the actual Romeo and Juliet, the song could be seen as an alternate ending to Romeo and Juliet, with Juliet narrating to Romeo, where Paris proposes while Romeo is in hiding in Merano and Juliet, tired of waiting for her Romeo to return, accepts.
In the song Every dog has it's day by Toby Keith I thought the line "when the big dog throws him a bone," was just a random line to set up the next rhyme. It wasn't until later that I realized "The Big Dog" is Toby Keith's nickname. He's talking about himself.
I always thought Billy Joel's "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" was about two old friends in the eponymous restaurant reminiscing about a couple they happened to know years ago in high school, but what if they themselves are Brenda and Eddie?
- When I first heard it, I didn't like the song "She's Always a Woman" because it seemed to paint the subject in a very negative light. A little while later, it finally hit me that the narrator isn't bad-mouthing her at all. He's merely acknowledging her flaws, and saying that he loves her anyways. D'awww. ]
  - I listened to Billy Joel's own explanation of this song and then re-listened. Notice how all the negative characteristics are nearly all in the second person "She can ruin your faith", 'She can lead you to love" but the key phrase is 'She's always a woman to me '. And the penultimate line is 'Blame it all on yourself '. Its a man defending his love to an ex-partner and saying that all her supposedly negative characteristics were down to the way he treated her.
I never understood or fully appreciated the song "Hole Hearted" by Extreme until I realized that it was not a love song but a hymn to God. (Apparently there is even some linguistic support for this: someone here told me before someone inexplicably erased the previous version of this entry that the literal meaning of the Hebrew word "sin" is "to fall short".)
It took me a while listening to the Ludo song Lake Pontchartrain before I realized the significance of the line "They both had crawfish, strictly chicken for me." Before, the song had a b-movie horror vibe, but that shifted it straight into the Lovecraft zone.
It took many years of loving the [[[Pet Shop Boys]]] song "Being Boring" to realise it's meaning, I thought the melancholic music and wistful words were merely evocing a lost youth. Then I heard the line "All the people I was kissing, some are here and some are missing in the 1990's" and I realized it was a eulogy to a friend who'd died of AIDS.
The titles of albums (that aren't collaborations) by Finnish experimental electronic duo Pan Sonic mostly consist of single Finnish words, so their 1999 album called simply A may seem merely a weird exception from this rule. Not quite... Pan Sonic first named themselves after a certain well-known electronics corporation, and were forced to drop one letter from their name to prevent having further action taken against them. Guess what A's album title most probably pays tribute to.
One of Sting's albums, 'Brand New Day' commences with the song "A Thousand Years" which is basically about the constancy of love even through reincarnation ... and ends with the song "Brand New Day" which talks about resetting the clocks to zero and starting all over again. The very end of Brand New Day is the same riff that starts "A Thousand Years". The whole album is a cycle of rebirth.
That cool song from the Watchmen trailer, "The Beginning is the End is the Beginning" by The Smashing Pumpkins. It's another version of the cool song from Batman and Robin, "The End is the Beginning is the End." The movie the Watchmen trailer was attached to? The Dark Knight.
At first, it seemed that the Korean song "Wannabe" by Epik High had very little to do with the otherwise amusing music video which was based on the Korean horror movie The Host and had many references to other movies, such as a lightsaber. But after looking closer at the lyrics, the song is singing about imitation, hence why the one singing the song is a wannabe.
"In Noctem", from the Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince soundtrack, just sounds like your typical (if hauntingly beautiful) Ominous Latin Chanting... Until you take a good, hard look at the lyrics (which are the same in English as they are in Latin). It's the "Love Conquers All" message of the entire series in two minutes, and it underscores the parallels between Harry and Snape.
When I first listened to The Wall‍'‍s opening track ("In The Flesh"?), I didn't understand why it started with a man saying "We came in." (a seeming non-sequitur). Then, listening to the final track (Outside the Wall) end with 'Isn't this where-?', it occurred to me; it was to connect the beginning of the album to the end (Isn't this where...we came in?), turning the album into one big cycle to recommend that what happened to Pink in the course of two vinyl discs could very well happen to someone else (or to put it differently, one wall comes up as another one goes down). My god! =Roger Waters was creative!
Also on The Wall, the song Another Brick in the Wall Part III has these really intense strings in the background. They fade out as it goes into Goodbye Cruel World... but if you crank the volume all the way up, you'll hear that they never fade out completely. The agitated string music almost subconsciously cranks it up from "deep depression" to "full-fledged nervous breakdown." This troper has been obsessed with Pink Floyd for eleven years and just noticed this last week.
U2's "Where The Streets Have No Names". At first, it sounds like a basic "searching for a dream world"-song, with the whole "Streets have no names"-thing being mainly a cool line. Then you read up on it, and learn that the title is a reference to the religious conflicts in Northern Ireland. Since people almost always follow the tradition they grow up in, there are places where you can tell a persons religion just from the name of the street where he lives. Therefore, the place "Where the streets have no names" becomes a metaphor for the place where you are judged for who you are, not where you grew up.
- In the clip for Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me, Bono's character is seen become into a Batman-style villain after being struck by a car as he is distracted by reading a copy of The Screwtape Letters. This metamorphosis into an evil character is a sharp contrast to the theme of the book written by C.S. Lewis where the demon Screwtape advises his nephew Wormwood that "the safest path to hell is the gradual one."
For years, I thought the Steely Dan song "Deacon Blues" was about an ultra-hip jazz musician who's had some hard knocks, but he's still the shiznit and he knows it. "They're singing about the coolest person in the world," I thought. Then I read where it's actually about a wannabe who fantasizes about being this hip jazz cat but doesn't have the guts to go out and make it happen. The more I think about the lyrics, it makes sense: "I'll make it this time/I'm ready to cross that fine line," turns to "A world of my own/I'll make it my home sweet home."
The 2010 Eurovision winner, "Satellite" sounds like yet another pathetic love song at first listen, but then, when you start thinking about the lyrics, you realise that the song really is about a half-psychotic stalker probably halfway to a complete postal spree already. - Belrondis
The Simon & Garfunkel song 'Richard Cory' tells the story of a wealthy and successful businessman named Richard Cory. The chorus goes 'But I work in his factory / and I curse the life I'm living / and I curse my poverty / and I wish that I could be / Richard Cory. Pretty simple so far, but then the last verse describes Richard Cory committing suicide, and the chorus repeats after that. This annoyed me for quite a while, but then.. I understood.
- Have you not read the poem of the same title? I don't recall offhand who wrote it, but it's rather nice iambic pentameter. . .
  - Edwin Arlington Robinson.
Not necessarily Fridge-y for everyone, but: I was listening to "Total Eclipse of the Heart" for the singer's emotional delivery and tune, because the lyrics just seemed sort of...eh. I still picked up "Total Eclipse of the Heart," because you have to. I figured it was talking about how she was without his love, her heart was in total darkness (whatever that means...), and then another line made its way in: Your love is like a shadow on me all of the time. She is in complete darkness because he loves her that much. And suddenly it fit much better with, "Turn around, bright eyes." She knows he loves her, and that's what the song is about, not how "every now and then [she] fall[s] apart." When she asks him to hold her, he's there. And then it went from weepy to dramatic expression of love.
When first listening to the Therapy? song Polar Bear, the song seemed very simple and the lyrics monotonous. However, think about what the lyrics say about being a polar bear in a zoo. Out of all of the zoo animals, the polar bear is not only one of the the most potentially vicious (there have been several past cases of suicide by polar bear) but also one of the most out of place and out of its natural environment. Add that to the fact that the music gets slowly more out of control, going from tight basslines to the messy pick scrapes and strings being caught on the guitar to the final bludgeoning outro. It's lyrically and musically a journal of being alienated and completely out of place and becoming more and more agitated to the point of losing control - Slave
Weird Al's "Wanna B Ur Lovr" from the Poodle Hat album is an Intercourse with You song consisting entirely of cheesy, off-the-wall pickup lines that would never work on anyone in real life... EXCEPT other fans who had heard the song. Anyone who understood the context would love it, thus subverting its original intent as a parody of such songs, making it the perfect Intercourse with You song for Weird Al fans.
Why do so many Japanese songs have upbeat melodies but depressing lyrics? It's because it's an "in the moment" song. The times between the people mentioned in this song are good, but there are also bad times, and even with those still going on, it makes the good times even sweeter. Even if there's a melancholy to the lyrics, the song stays upbeat because the "memories" that come with them are worth it.
"Love (Can Make You Happy)", a big hit ballad for the One-Hit Wonder band Mercy in 1969, is one of the sappiest songs of all time. The whole thing seems like a banal celebration of how wonderful it is to be in love. Until you look at the lyrics a little more closely. Most of the lyrics are written in a conditional tense: "love CAN make you happy/IF you find someone who cares.." or "IF you THINK you've found someone you'll love forevermore." The narrator isn't saying "love has made me happy", so odds are they aren't currently in love, but they're trying to distract themselves from thinking about their current lonely state by imagining a perfect romance. Or, they've just suffered a horrible breakup and are pondering how elusive true love can be. Love can make you happy if you find someone who cares, but when you don't it's a living hell. Or the narrator is going through unrequited love: "Your mind is filled with the thoughts of a certain someone that you love/your life is filled with joy when she is there." It doesn't say anything about her reciprocating those feelings. Also, the song is sung as a male-female duet, so maybe it's about mutually unrequited love. - Ezclee4050
- There's also the lines: "If you think you've found someone you'll love forevermore / Then it's worth the price you'll have to pay." In other words, even if you get your heart broken every other time, that one time when you do find true, everlasting love makes all the heartache worth it.
"Absolutely (Story of a Girl), or, as you may know it, Trope Namer for When She Smiles: At first I thought that, "And though she looks so sad in photographs, I absolutely love her When She Smiles," being shortened and, "And though she looks so sad in photographs, I absolutely love her," was just a cut off, the sort of thing you end with a dash. Then I realized, no, that's a complete sentence. And the, "aw..." factor went way up.
This is probably an obvious one, but... I enjoyed the song "High School Never Ends" by Bowling for Soup, but I thought it was a bit repetitive. Then I realized the song was all about how when you leave high school you think things will be different, but they're not. The entire world is filled with people who are "just as obsessed with who's the best dressed and who's having sex". So, it makes perfect sense for a song about how nothing changes anywhere to be repetitive!
"Fantastic Rose" by Geoff Smith. I was listening to it with a Fan Vid to Doctor Who, and it was surrounding the Doctor and Rose's relationship. I thought it was a love song, and there was just a nod to her leaving at the end...then I realized, no. It's an upbeat song, yes, but it's and upbeat song about a good breakup. It might have been I Just Want My Beloved to Be Happy, it might have been them realizing they were Better as Friends, regardless, it was a (bad) breakup that he's good with now. But they're not together anymore, and you know what? That's okay. It's a love song about how it's okay to break up with someone and then move on without leaving the person you broke up with in the dust. It's...it's a happy breakup song for both parties. This was the first song I'd ever seen with that as the message. And it was perfect for the Doctor and Rose. Addendum: I just found out he wrote it about Rose Tyler. Win.

Rose, all that I ever could show you was love...
And Rose, you taught me how to let go of love..

The album False Priest by Of Montreal seemed a bit weird to me- not musicwise, bit the way the songs were structured. The two albums up to this one, Hissing Fauna Are You The Destroyer and Skeletal Lamping, both had a long epic mood-changing song in the middle of them, which False Priest doesn't have. But the real Fridge Logic moment came about when I realized that False Priest has absolutely no mention of Georgie Fruit, Kevin Barnes' alter-ego, in the lyrics. So that's why it sounded so weird...
I have always been a fan of one specific song by The Police, "Synchronicity II", but the lyrics always seemed a little odd to me, in that these two events described in the lyrics have no relation to one another. Recently I listened to "Synchronicity I" from the same album, and it suddenly hit me. In the lyrics of the latter the singer explains the concept of synchronicity, seemingly defined as an intangible, almost imperceptible link. Then I listened to the former again and realized it was presented as an example of the previously defined concept. Now it makes so much more sense to me!
For a while the lyrics to "The Sharpest Lives" left me rather confused, until I realised that they aren't supposed to make sense,the narrator is drunk and the lyrics are his drunken ramblings.
I have had a few moments of musical Fridge Brilliance in my life, but perhaps the most satisfying was that which accompanied figuring out exactly what Wire's (utterly baffling) B-side "Former Airline" was about. Then I lost it. I'm still trying to recover my wee epiphany... That said, unraveling the lyrics to the same band's "Silk Skin Paws" comes damnably close. In short, they are from the perspective of a Manipulative Bastard banker watching the stock market implode, realizing what he has done/become, and finally snapping under the pressure and committing suicide. It's so subtly written, so insidious and sardonic that you don't quite get the full picture until the last lines:

I have nothing like it
I've seen nothing like it

- Later, revised versions alter the lines, but keep the impact:

I have nothing for it
I know nothing of it

I had a fridge brilliance for Techno (this stripped-down, dark and robotic subgenre of electronic music) recently: why was there no melodies, cool fat synths like in Electro-House? 'Cause it's made for live performance. Live, cool synths often get completely squashed: only remains the drums and the bassline, which are THE elements that will make a human dance. Since that, I love techno.
The first time I heard The Vaselines' "I Hate The 80's", I liked it, but also thought the verse riff was too much of a Psychedelic Furs rip-off. Then it occurred to me they were likely going for deliberate irony by de-romanticizing The Eighties while borrowing from a song best known as the theme song to a John Hughes movie
Sometime around my fifteenth viewing of Florence + the Machine's "Drumming Song", I stopped staring at her fantastic legs long enough to realize that the backup dancers didn't really exist. Florence is just imagining them. She might be imagining the whole video, which explains why said dancers go from angels, to devils, to representations of her mental state. Sometimes more than one at once.
- It took a few listens for me to get this bit of Drumming Song. It's about a girl who tries to hide her love for another person and drowns herself in the ending. Perhaps a reference to Ophelia from "Hamlet" - the narrator of the song tries to hide her heartbeat by hiding in a church (vaguely mirroring the 'Get thee to a nunnery!' scene in "Hamlet"), then drowns herself to stop the beating (Ophelia drowns herself in the play).
I was listening to "Happy Birthday" by The Birthday Massacre again, and it hit me: in the chorus, when she sings "'You're a murder tramp, murder tramp'/I think he said/'You're a murder boy, birthday boy'/I think I said", he's not repeating 'murder tramp', it's what he's calling her by, just like how she's calling him 'birthday boy'.
A trademark of The Melvins is to put the track-list on the front of their cd's and what would normally be considered the "cover art" on the back (while the vinyl versions of their albums are oriented the normal way). I initially thought this was just done for the sake of being weird, but there sort of is a practical reason for designing it that way: the back cover of a cd is a little bit wider than the front, so they get to have a slightly larger cover image by putting it on the back insert instead of on the front of the booklet.
A while ago, I was listening to Lady Gaga's 'So Happy I Could Die' and I realized something: there's more than a few references to masturbation in there, along with the repeated line 'So happy I could die'... and 'die' was repeatedly used by Shakespeare to mean orgasm.
- It's not just Shakespeare, "the little death" is the literal translation of the French word for orgasm, hence 'why' Shakespeare used it. He didn't make it up, it's just archaic.
Patron is an expensive brand of tequila that has made its way into a lot of rap/r&b lyrics. I thought that, because a bottle costs so much, Patron was popular with music artists because of this association with the excess of success. Then I realized that Patron just rhymes with a lot of words. I think you can make a similar case for Henny and Goose.
The Coldplay have quite a bit of Lyrical Dissonance in their songs. But if you think about it they're actually cases of Unreliable ~~Narrator~~ Singer;
- Viva La Vida: The lyrics might seem sad to the perspective character, but he's a self admitted tyrant. Everyone else is probably quite pleased he's been deposed.
  - He sounds like he's happy to have been deposed. It's almost like he's experiencing true sanity for the first time in his life...but with it, he knows he'll probably be punished for his misdeeds in life.
- Shiver: Conversly, while the perspective character's quite stalkerish, he's probably quite happy.
Took this troper quite a while to realize that the song "Horse on the Moor" by the Deadfly Ensemble isn't the story of a husband murdering a wife that loves him still and burying her with one of the maids... after which she proceeds to climb back up, telling the husband she loves her still. When I re-checked it years later, it became obvious that the wife didn't come back as a zombie, she was buried ALIVE.
In the song "The Fear" by Lily Allen, there's the line "I'll look at the sun and I'll look in the mirror". The song is about trying to become famous, so I always thought that it was "look at the sun" (symbolizing hope) and "look in the mirror" (vanity). I just got that there are two meanings to that line: She'll also look at The Sun and The Mirror (the tabloids) to see what she needs to do to be famous. To be fair, I'm American, so even though I like British shows and music, I'm not part of the culture.
While reading about Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' model of the Five Stages of Grief, it suddenly hit me, after years of assuming it to be drug-inspired randomness, that THAT is what Bohemian Rhapsody is all about (through the eyes of a man on death row).
The Okkervil River song 'Plus Ones' mentiones the 'hundredth luftballon' and 'lighting candle seventeen.' The relevance didn't hit me until long after first listening.
Sara Bareilles's 'Gravity' is obviously about a lover she keeps falling for, however the lyrics can also literally be about gravity.
This may make me an idiot, but only after listening to Christmas music at work for weeks on end after living through 20-something holiday seasons did I realize the actual humor in "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Clause;" rather than it being a laugh for the singer's father to see the title going on, Santa IS her father in disguise.
I was listening to 'Lady Of The Flowers' by Placebo on repeat and I literally stood in my room after the second listen and said, "Oh. It's about vaginas."
Mae's "Mistakes We Knew We Were Making" is about a soon-to-be mother and father expecting their first child. The last verse is about the birth, and I had previously always interpreted it to be about joyous new life. But then I really thought about what the words said: "What can now be said, oh, little one / On the other side? / Dance until the band stops playing, / Sing with all your might. And then I realized "the other side" might also mean the baby had died, and the dancing and singing was meant to help cope with the grief of a miscarriage. The chorus also has the line "Don't think about chances we're taking / Don't think about rules we were breaking" which could also tie in with either the anxiety a couple can have in starting a new family, or the knowledge that the pregnancy may have complications.
The line "Put on your red shoes and dance the blues" immediately makes David Bowie's "Let's Dance" darker than most dance tunes of the early 1980s if you know your Hans Christian Andersen.
One More Minute by Weird Al Yankovic is the most accurate description of putting on a brave face when confronted with heartbreak ever written. He's telling her "Psh; you're no big deal, I'd rather jump into a thumbtack pile than spend time with you," but every painful thing he describes is how living without her and watching her dating someone else feels. The only thing in the world he wants is to spend one more minute with her. I've never been able to hear the humor in that song; I love it but it's absolutely heartwrenching.
The song Your Woman by White Town. I already knew most of the lyrics had double meanings, but reading a quote from the song writer made it clear that he meant wanted it that way. From The Other Wiki: "The lyrics could mean 'Being a member of an orthodox Trotskyist / Marxist movement. Being a straight guy in love with a lesbian. Being a gay guy in love with a straight man. Being a straight girl in love with a lying, two-timing, fake-ass Marxist. The hypocrisy that results when love and lust get mixed up with highbrow ideals.' Many listeners also likened the song to a breakup letter, where the man reading the breakup letter imitates the woman's voice."
On first listen Tim Minchin's You Grew On Me is a funny song that just can't be taken as a serious love song. But then I realised that all of it is one deep, intelligent love simile/metaphor. It's really quite beautiful. - Blade Satoshi X
I first heard the Black Eyed Peas song "Imma Be" during the Todd in the Shadows review, and agreed with him that the title sounds entirely too much like "I'm a bee", and the single's cover itself admits it. Upon reflection, that may have been the entire point of the title. The video is apparently about the evils of assimilation and the whole idea of producing music mechanically, with visuals involving robots and being literally stuck in a rut. In essence, creating a hive mind. In fact, the repetition of the line throughout the first part can only be described as droning. Then you add in the actual verses about standing out from the crowd, and the term "Imma be" is now a positive message about having aspirations and personal interests. While sounding exactly the same as the previous term with the opposite meaning.
The song "Ironic" contains absolutely no irony in the lyrics. That's what is ironic about it.
- Well, my mind was just blown. Irony is getting the opposite of what is expected. You'd expect a song called "Ironic" to be, well, ironic. It's ironic because it isn't ironic.
  - My aching head...
"NTF" by illScarlet: The other day I was listening to this, and in an instant, the meaning dawned on me. Initially, I just assumed it was a generic break up song. But then I realized it was actually about get repeatedly rejected by a girl, and trying to move past his feelings for her. Not an amazing epiphany, but it hit me right where it hurts, because I've been there before.
ICP's Joker's Card albums, at first casual glance, seem like mindless violence and black comedy music, and the whole "We believe in God" thing sounds like a cop-out. That is unless you read Revelations and really listen to the albums, reading between the lines, and then it all makes sense. The albums point out the signs of the End Times in a jumbled order. Observe:
- Carnival of Carnage: The rise in violence and arrogance. Humanity getting into wars and killing each other in a carnival of madness and chaos. The political slant is also rather brilliant, as it points out that the governors of the world will be the initiators of the chaos, which is represented by the Dark Carnival visiting their rich neighborhoods.
- The Ringmaster: The rise of the Antichrist and the second coming of Christ. The "Forks up, Forks down" symbol is about more than gang harmony, it's the contrast between good and evil.
- The Riddle Box: The uncertainty after death, and the dead rising during the End Times to be judged by Jesus Christ for their sins.
- The Great Milenko: The wicked seeming to inherit the earth as the Antichrist rises in power. Only by resisting the pressure to give in to your dark impulses like everybody else can you ascend to a higher spiritual plane.
- The Amazing Jeckel Brothers: The good and evil inside all of us. They represent our conscience, as well as the weight that our actions will carry when the end finally arrives.
- The Wraith-Shangri-La and Hell's Pit: The good and just will ascend to Heaven, while the wicked will be left behind on a ravaged earth to repent. Hell's Pit isn't the end, it's a warning, a taste of Hell's horrors to those that wish to change, while Shangri-La is a taste of the beauty you're promised if you remain kind-hearted and pure.
- Bang! Pow! Boom!: (Yes, even this one.) The evil souls of those who didn't repent being cast into the lake of fire.
  - I might be reading too much into all of this, obviously, but it's still rather interesting. Also, as another piece of Fridge Brilliance for you, you might be asking yourself: "That's all well and good, but why dress as clowns? Why are they so vulgar?" Here's the reason: Because they can spread their message easier that way. A court jester, in the medieval era, was actually one of the king's most intelligent advisors. However, rather than risk being decapitated by insulting the king's idiocy, he would play the fool and drop hints that the king is fucking up under the guise of playful acts of comedy. Insane Clown Posse are modern court jesters for society, explaining our flaws to us and the solutions that are within our grasp under the guise of two high-school dropouts who wear paint and act hard, and even this could be a satirical statement about mainstream rap being gaudy and ridiculously commercial drivel hiding under a loose facade of toughness. Why has nobody mentioned this yet?
    - Word of God confirmed this.
When I first heard 'Dog Days Are Over' by Florence + The Machine I merely thought it was about how everything was "looking up". Then I read the lyrics and watched the video (the 2008 version) and realized that perhaps she is trying avoid being that happy.
When I first started listening to OK Go, I wasn't much into 'A Million Ways.' But today, I was listening to it in the car when I heard them chanting. I started it again and laughed when I realized they weren't chanting, they were saying one million as a numerical value.
The Minutemen included a live version of their cover of "Don't Look Now" by Creedence Clearwater Revival on Double Nickels On The Dime, which is otherwise entirely a studio album. I had always wondered why this was, especially since it's not a very clear recording of the song, and you can hear the audience talking over most of it. I figured maybe they really wanted the song to be on the album, but couldn't seem to do a good studio performance of it, so they just grabbed the best live recording they happened to have of it. Then I read the book from the 33 1/3 series on the album, and it was noted that a friend of the band had made the recording from the audience, and convinced them to use it because he thought the audience chatter actually added something to the song. It suddenly started to make sense: "Don't Look Now" is sort of about taking conveniences for granted (and more specifically the hard work that goes into those conveniences), so using a live recording where the audience seems to be too busy talking among themselves to hear the message of the song adds a level of irony.
On Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, the first song includes the line "then the sky filled with herons", and on the last song, there's a Gil Scott-Heron sample. Wow.
The chicken sounds in the breakdown from Buckethead's "Jordan" are used by an effect pedal and a guitar technique called "chicken picking".
George Michaels song "Father figure" has squicked a few of my friends who think it is a paedophile singing to his next victim. I think its perspective of older man - younger partner stems from the narrator being a vampire. When he says he'll love his baby to the end of time, he really means it.
"Dirty Water" by The Standells has a couple of seemingly throwaway lyrics at the end that actually change the meaning of the whole song: "Have you heard about the strangler?\ I'm the man, I'm the man!". Unless those two lines are actually meant to be unconnected, that means it's actually a Villain Song from the point of view of an infamous serial killer. Definitely puts a creepier spin on lines like "But I'm wishin' and a-hopin' that just once those doors weren't locked".
Hate to do another one of these so soon, but: There's a line in The Wrens' "Everyone Choose Sides" that makes much more sense when you know a bit of the backstory to The Meadowlands. The Wrens put out their first two albums on an independent label called Grass Records. After this, the label was bought out and the new owner wanted the band to sign a bigger contract and record more radio-friendly songs. When they refused, they were dropped and their albums were pulled out of print. Grass Records subsequently became Wind-Up Records (whose most successful act was Creed, by the way), and The Wrens were left quietly working on new material while simultaneously looking for a new label, which they eventually found 6 years later. Thus the somewhat punny Take That "Greener grasses fade from where you wind up".
In Ana Ng by They Might Be Giants there is the line "I saw this painted on a BRIDGE, "I don't want the world I just want your half." Guess what section of the song it happens in? Here's a hint, it's not in the verse, chorus, intro, or outro... also the answer is in caps.
"Hey Ya!" by OutKast was/is very popular and very catchy, yet has the culturally unpopular message that love fades. I always found it funny that no-one ever talks about the lyrics, then realized that the line 'Y'all don't want me here you just wanna dance' after a verse shows that the band predicted this phenomenon. After this, I've noticed many Outkast songs have lines that seem to bash mainstream music and ways of thinking, while remaining pop songs themselves.
I was just listening to Steely Dan's song "Black Friday", and the first line is "When Black Friday comes, I'll stand down by the door, and watch the gray men when they dive from the fourteenth floor." It just hit me: Many buildings don't have a thirteenth floor; they go straight from twelve to fourteen, so technically the fourteenth floor is actually the thirteenth.
For a while, I've been wondering why Angelspit named a song "Homo-Machinery", as I was thinking of the name as the insult. Several months, many Biology lessons and another look at the lyrics later and it hit me... their point is that by following constant routines, we are becoming humanoid machines, or Homo machinery- Homo as in the genus. God, I'm an idiot sometimes...
I kept misreading the song on Them Crooked Vultures' self-titled as 'Interlude with Lutes', which made no sense but I figured it was just another Word Salad Title that Josh Homme appears so fond. When I actually looked and saw it was 'Interlude with LUDES', the reason why it seemed so psychadelic compared to the rest of the album was suddenly so obvious - the 'Ludes' of the title refer to Quaaludes.
"Grenade" by Bruno Mars would make so much more sense when viewed as being from a bodyguard's point of view. The bodyguard gets into a brief affair with his client, who decides to toy with his feelings. And although it hurts him, he's got no choice but to keep protecting her because it's his damn job.
- Oddly enough, this parody made me start thinking the original would also make more sense if it was from the point of view of Mario, or really any protagonist of a video game series known for constantly reusing the Save the Princess plot
- I recently had a case of Fridge Brilliance with this song. The reason why the singer's "this is what I'd do for you" bits are describing things that would cause immense pain or death? It's the "I don't want to live after this girl dumped me" kind of song fused with the "I would do anything for you" kind of song. The whole thing is a collision of the "I love you" and "I hate you" kind of songs that are filled with hyperbole. This revelation made this song a whole lot deeper to me. Oh, and for Todd in the Shadows' confusion about the "Should've known you were trouble from the first kiss, had your eyes wide open" lyric? Maybe the first kiss happened when other people were around and the singer's knowledge of here eyes being open came from the other people who were there.
In They Might Be Giants' "Weep Day", there are the lines "I didn't write the words you hear me singing \ I didn't sing the line before this one", which fits in perfectly with the Mind Screw self-contradiction of the rest of the lyrics. But John Flansburgh repeats those lyrics right after John Linnell sings them, and when he sings them, they're both true: Flansburgh didn't write the lyrics and didn't sing the previous line.
I fell in love with 'Wedding Song' (the first track) from "Hadestown" by Anais Mitchell almost the first time I heard it. For those of you who don't know, the whole album is a "folk opera" based on the Greek myth Orpheus and Eurydice, which is about a husband who goes down to Hell to bring his wife back to life. Originally I could only think about how sweet and romantic it was. Then after hearing 'Hey Little Songbird' all the way through a couple of times, I realised: 'Wedding Song' is sweet, but it's what brings Eurydice into this mess. She's freaking out about the wedding and he's all "don't worry about it, my natural talent will bring everything about because I am totally awesome", leaning on his voice to bring them all they'll ever need. And then when she sees Hadestown and meets Hades, he tempts her with riches and things that her husband isn't willing to work for to provide, leading to their eventual downfall.
Because it was sold out, I have Act II of The Protomen, but not Act I. So after hearing act II multiple times, I decided to go back to Act I. That's where I remember Proto Man's last lines, which serve as the overarchng theme to the opera: "A Hero's just a man who knows he's free." This is a Broken Aesop in Act I though, because the good guys are higher spec robots than their foes. Then Act II comes. One of the heroes is a guy named Joe, who is a norma member of Wily's society, except he realizes that something is wrong. Later he beats a Sniper Robot, before helping Light in his attempt to take Wily down. It is this act - this proof that humans can beat Wily's robots - is what turns an Average Joe into Sniper Joe.
Re: Talking Heads - the Sand in the Vaseline collection drew connections I hadn't seen.
- 'Once in a Life Time': "You may ask yourself, where does that highway lead to?" answered by "we're on a 'Road to Nowhere'" not just as a Q and A, but one is coping with life being no great meaning, and the latter accepts that, but says to enjoy it anyhow.
- 'And She Was': Even though it is supposedly about a friends Acid Trip, it seems even more clearly a song about death and afterlife.
- '(Nothing but) Flowers': is a inversion of the classic 'Big Yellow Taxi' and its lyric "They paved paradise and put in a parking lot" - when society fails (apocalypse?, end of gasoline reserves?), nature will reclaim the parking lot and other symbols of modernity.
  - 'And She Was' could alternately be about an affair. The lines about her moving above the earth could be an allegory to her graceful movements, 'She isn't sure just what she's done, no time to think about what to tell them, no time to think about what she's done' Them being her husband and children.
What was originally one of the more puzzling lines in "Intergalactic" is now one of my favorite examples of The Beastie Boys' tendency towards intentionally silly Boastful Rap. The line in question is "Got an A from Moe Dee for sticking to themes". As it turns out this refers to Kool Moe Dee, who infamously published "report cards" for other rappers in his album liner notes: He did in fact give The Beastie Boys an A for "sticking to themes"... and straight C's for everything else. That's sort of like a high school kid bragging about the A they got in Phys. Ed when they're otherwise a straight C student, and knowing their humor, that's probably the joke
The Pink Floyd Greatest Hits Album Echoes has a few examples of deliberately placing songs from different eras of the band with similar lyrical themes next to each other. One such case took a while to fully creep up on me, namely following "Wish You Were Here" with "Jugband Blues". I knew enough about the background of both songs to get the most obvious significance of this: The former is often interpreted to be about original lead singer Syd Barrett's mental breakdown, and the latter is the last song Barrett wrote with the band (and can be viewed as a Sanity Slippage Song). But why put "Wish You Were Here" first then? Well, because it makes "Jugband Blues" seem like an Answer Song to "Wish You Were Here" despite being recorded first. Especially because of the first few lines: "It's awfully considerate of you to think of me here / and I'm much obliged to you for making it clear / that I'm not here"
Del Amitri had two songs this troper couldn't stand...until he heard the crucial last lines. 'The Last To Know' sounds like a man wangsting about his partner leaving him for another man.... until it gets to the end and you realise that he cheated on her first and its about him realising what an idiot he's been. And 'Nothing Ever Happens' at first just sounded like someone complaining about his life sucks until you get to the end line 'We'll burn down the synagogues at six o'clock and we'll all go along like before' and you realise the narrator's trying to warn people about the rise of fascism...but people are too wrapped up in their lives to listen.
"Spark", by Tori Amos, is a bout a miscarriage. Wow.
- Most songs on 'From the Choirgirl Hotel' allude to miscarriages, since Tori had had two (she would have one more later on, before giving birth to a daughter). "Playboy Mommy" is the most obvious example.
Chameleon Circuit's song Exterminate, Regenerate features the lyrics: "No matter how hard you try to remove me, I think you will agree that if one of us dies then the other will too, I am locked in war with you." This song was a duet between Davros and the Doctor, but it could also be interpreted as a song about the fight between the Doctor and the Daleks, and indeed many people hear it this way. Now, the other day I realized: in the new series, nearly every time the Doctor regenerates, some Daleks die, therefore: "if one of us dies then the other will too"! Also, "I am locked in war with you"- subtle reference to the time-lock on the time war? I think so. Brilliance.
Not exactly a moment regarding lyrical content, but of compositional brilliance: I have been working on arranging Lateralus for SATB performance, and as I listened, I realized--Tool used two major themes the whole time, but broke them down and made little alterations to it so you heard what sounded like totally different movements. There is the 9-8-7/8 of the main riff, and then the softer riff heard in the intro and middle section. It blew my mind when I realized it. This is coming from a (hopeful) future major in Music Theory & Composition. - Valbinooo
The song "Homecoming" off the Kanye West album Graduation (also released as "Home" on a previous mixtape) at first seems like a love song about a girl named Wendy. It isn't until hearing the last line "If you ain't know by now, I'm talkin' 'bout Chi-town" that you realize the girl he was talking about was actually West's hometown of Chicago.
- The opening line of the song is "I met this girl when I was 3 years old/and what I loved most, she had so much soul" is a near exact copy of the opening line to rapper Common's song "Used To Love H.E.R" which instead personifies rap music as a woman (H.E.R standing for Hearing Every Rhyme).
- Also, Chicago is known as the Windy City, and a lot of people pronounce "Wendy" with an I.
In P!nk's music video for "Raise Your Glass", it bothered me that the non-outcasts were being treated like...um. Outcasts. Then came the prom scene: everybody's having fun; it's not the closer-to-average people who are being treated like that, just bullies.
Queen's 39' isn't about someone who returns from World War II. It's about an astronaut in 2039, who returns from colonising other planets to find that time dilation has made him only one year older while his love has grown old.
Angus Young of ACDC pointed out in Long Way To The Top: Stories of Australian Rock & Roll that the chord sequence in "Long Way to the Top" is A, C, D, C.
I always thought Papoose's song Gun of Mines (also known as Drop It) was just another gangsta rap track he put out, but when I took my first look at the lyrics realized the song title should have been "Gun to Mind", because it's a song that explores the advantages of both. For example, the chorus. It's basically Papoose asking, "Knowledge or Power/Violence: which one is more important to survival, and why?" The rest of the first half of the chorus is him saying knowledge is more important because the mind drives all action refines the ignorant, and gives man a way to protect himself from anything he may encounter, while the rest of the second half is him saying that when the shit hits the fan, power/violence is your umbrella. Further backed up by the fact that the first verse is the argument in defense of knowledge, while the third verse is the same for power. But that leaves the question: What about the second verse? The middle verse by Busta Rhymes basically bridges both ideas by basically saying they're both valid (and necessary) means of survival, which is why he lives by both.
Frank Zappa's "Why Does It Hurt When I Pee" is obviously a parody of over-dramatic rock opera songs, and based on some crude humor, but consider this: What can be more heartbreaking than contracting an STD from someone you love and trust implicitly?
The video for Iamamiwhoami's "Clump" alternates between a static shot of Jonna Lee from the neck up lip-synching while laying on a toilet paper bed and bobbing up and down rather suggestively, and outdoor scenes in a thicket of tall grass and reeds. Sometimes the latter shots only occur for half a second. It took someone's youtube comment to make me realize that they cut to the outdoor shots every time Jonna closes her eyes, and cut back to her on the bed every time she opens them again. Thus, those scenes are apparently what she sees when her eyes are closed, or just what she's imagining.
The classic '80s song "867-5309/Jenny" by Tommy Tutone contains the lines "Jenny, Jenny, you're the girl for me/You don't know me but you make me so happy." That rhyme is a bit of a stretch. Can you think of a different word that starts with H and rhymes better with "for me"?
Marilyn Manson's song "Kaboom Kaboom". The lyrics in one part is "I hope this hook gets caught in your mouth." When I was younger (15 or so), my mind always went to someone with a fishhook in their mouth. Okay, typical Marilyn Manson imagery. It was only until just recently (I'm 20 now) that I realized it's also a bit of Fridge Brilliance/Logic: The part of the song that line is in IS the hook! He's saying "I hope this song sticks with you, long enough for you to start singing it." -N37
The line "kick out the jams" among the rebel slogans in David Bowie's "Cygnet Committee" seems like Narm born of ignorance with the knowledge that "kick out the jams" wasn't meant to be anything subversive or countercultural, as many theories had it, but just a way of telling the audience "do I look like Jerry Garcia to you?!" However, recall that the song was inspired by the creative bankruptcy Bowie saw in the Arts Lab he had been trying to set up, when people would go for his performances, contributing nothing, a kind of dynamic being not only endorsed but enforced by MC5 - he knew exactly what it meant, tying the two "acts" together.
Exist Trace: An all female Visual Kei metal band 4/5 of whom are Bifauxnen... in a genre where pretty much the same proportion of men are Wholesome Crossdressers! -Yun
Self's "Trunk Full Of Amps" would practically be a Single-Stanza Song if not for the fact that every verse namechecks a different rock band or vocalist ("Got a trunk full of amps, motherfucker / like (insert musician here), motherfucker!"). What do all the acts mentioned have in common beyond being famous rock musicians? They all have songs prominently featuring the word "mother" (or "mama") in their titles or lyrics! Lenny Kravitz's "Mama Said", Electric Light Orchestra's "Mama" (or possibly "Ma-Ma-Ma Belle"), Queen's "Tie Your Mother Down" (or less obviously "Bohemian Rhapsody") and of course Danzig's "Mother".
Blue Man Group, "The Complex". The line in question is "I work on the highest floor / there's nothing in my way / but I saw my picture on the bathroom door / today". It took me a while to figure out what that means. Why would they put someone's picture on a bathroom door? And then I remembered that a lot of bathroom doors have one of these, and realized: The singer is concerned about losing his individuality and identity.
When I first heard Bad Brains' "Sacred Love", I thought it was a good song somewhat ruined by a gratuitous vocal effect that made H.R. sound like he was singing through a telephone... Then I found out he was singing through a telephone - he was doing jail time for marijuana distribution while the album was still being finished, so the producer suggested he finish the vocals for that song by phone. Given the circumstances, it's an extremely good vocal performance.
I've listened to Les Miserables for years, since I was too little to understand it. Recently I realized how "What Have I Done" (Jean Valjean's epiphany from Act One) and "Javert's Suicide" (Javert's epiphany from Act Two) basically mirror each other musically - except for the ending. Valjean, having been shown true Christian kindness by the Bishop, sees an opportunity to become a new man and make up for the time he has lost. Javert, on the other hand, is shown Christian kindness by Valjean and is forced to see what he has done to himself by doggedly pursuing Valjean, and sees no other way out except to kill himself.
- On a related note, Javert is the only character in Les Miserables who actually dies miserable. Think about it: Fantine dies knowing Cosette is safe, Eponine dies saving the love of her life, Enjolras and the other students die fighting for their causes, and Valjean dies surrounded by the family he has created. Javert is the only one who dies alone and conflicted.
A My Chemical Romance example; Danger Days is incredibly pop-based, which was a turn-off to some fans. I was one of those fans, however, I decided to give the album a second listen before writing it off as crap, and found it a lot more enjoyable the second time around. That's not the brilliance part. The next day, contemplating how awesome the album was, something occured to me -- the album is being broadcasted from a radio station. What does the radio play more than anything else? Pop. That was the brilliance part.
- Keeping in theme, the first half of the album is relatively upbeat and rebellious. Then, Dr. Death Defying chimes in with a news report about the death of two killjoys. From that point forward, the album takes a much more serious tone, since it's no longer "just fun and games"
The song "Come on Eileen" by Dexy's Midnight Runners has been rumored to be able an orgasm or something sexual, but it's about a guy reuniting with a girl he liked as a kid. One part of the song starts off slow and gets faster and faster at the end like an orgasm, kind of like Mr. Mojo Rising from "L.A. Woman" by the Doors.
This may in fact just be me reading too much into things in order to solve my own headscratcher, but... in Nirvana's "Sliver" the line "fell asleep and watched TV" always struck me as a Lyrical Shoehorn, and not even a particularly necessary one, because the more logical "watched TV and fell asleep" would have fit just as well. However, you sort of could sleep while watching TV - if you fall asleep with the TV on, for a little while you could still be just alert enough to sort of follow what's going on by hearing dialogue.
I used to hate Lady Gaga's "Paparazzi," because I have done a lot of reading about true crime, I learned a lot about stalkers who act all romantic long enough to control a person, isolate them, and possibly kill them if the real person doesn't measure up with the image the stalker has invented to feel good about him/herself, so I hated listening to people singing "I'll follow you until you love me" as though that was romantic and loving when I knew how many people had died in situations like that, until I told my brother about this and he explained that, in the music video, people actually did die, so appearently Gaga knew what she was talking about, so now I love to listen to the song to mock the people who listen to the song.
- Second level of FB that just occurred to me reading my previous: people think the song is romantic, but it's actually about a type of psychopath that people think are romantics, so they fall for the fake romance in the song the way they would fall for it in real life
"Tribute" by Tenacious D is a legendary story about two young rockers and their Deal with the Devil (actually "a shiny demon") in a friendly music competition that results in them creating: "The Greatest Song in the World". The joke is, of course, that they couldn't remember the song that they ACTUALLY played that day, and that this song is "just a tribute". Then it occurred to me that any song worthy of the title: "Greatest Song in the World" could never actually be PLAYED. The moment that you HEAR a song, you automatically categorize it and compare it to every other song you've heard, which reduces its greatness. So the "Greatest" Song in the World would have to be the one that only exists in the listener's imagination. -- Draconius
- Also on Tenacious D is the subtle realization that everything J.B.'s father said to him in "Kickapoo" was correct. The Pick of Destiny, the source of all great rock musicians, was forged from the Devil's fang. Gaining its power cause J.B. to fall out with his best friend and lose direction in his life. Eventually, it causes them to deliver the Pick into the Devil's hands. His father had warned him that rock came from the Devil and would cause J.B. to lose his heart and become a puppet of the Devil.
At first I thought the Lupe Fiasco's 'Dumb It Down' was just a bit of irony; the lyrics in the song are far from dumbed down, they're possibly the most complicated lyrics I've read. But when I saw the video for the song, which is in black and white, and only really features Lupe and a few other people, I realized how brilliant the song was. Everything has been dumbed down, EXCEPT the lyrics. The song also ends with 'but I flatly refuse I ain't dumb down nothing.' Which confused me until I realized that he hasn't dumbed down anything that matters. He's dumbed down everything but the lyrics, and uses just the lyrics themselves to show how much he doesnt need fancy videos and money etc. The lyrics are all that matter.
Bush's "Glycerine" has a seemingly arbitrary The Beatles Shout-Out ("...when we rise it's like strawberry fields"), while "Everything Zen" has an equally arbitrary David Bowie Shout-Out ("Minnie Mouse has grown up a cow, Dave's on sale again"). The thing "Strawberry Fields" and "Life On Mars?" happen to have in common is Word Salad Lyrics, something Bush themselves are also known for. Maybe those shout outs are their way of saying "Yeah, none of this makes any sense, but hey, you let The Beatles and David Bowie get away with it..."
"The Devil Went Down To Georgia" by The Charlie Daniels Band seems to show Johnny victorious, but that's only in the short term. In beating the Devil, Johnny claimed a golden fiddle and mockingly declared his superiority, thus commiting two of the Seven Deadly Sins: Greed and Pride. Not only that, but he did so in full knowledge that taking the bet was a sin. As such, he has committed at least one mortal sin, potentially damning his soul. So long as Johnny does not repent and gain forgiveness, the Devil was the real winner.