Too Dumb to Live/Music

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • That girl with a white flag in the last verse of "Hero of War" by Rise Against. So, you're in the middle of a war, and a soldier carrying a BFG is asking you to stop. What do you do? Why, keep walking! Of course she got shot, white flag or no white flag.
  • The narrator of Billy Joel's "You May Be Right" is self-admittedly Too Dumb to Live:

I've been stranded in the combat zone
I walked through Bedford-Stuy alone
Even rode my motorcycle in the rain
And you told me not to drive
But I made it home alive
So you said that only proves that I'm insane!

That fateful night
The car was stalled
Upon the railroad tracks
I pulled you out
And we were safe
But you went running back.

    • And what was so damn important that she was willing to throw herself back into the path of an oncoming train?

They said they found my high school ring
Clutched in your fingers tight...

  • Reinhard Mey (German songwriter and singer) had a song Die Legende vom Pfeifer (there's even an English version called The Whistler) about a gunman who always whistles before he shoots. Someone convinces him to go to the sheriff and tell him who he is and that he'd like the bounty that was offered for himself. He gets sentenced to die, and hung - or they try to, but the branch keeps breaking until the movie director decides to call it a day and continue shooting the final scene the next day...
  • Amateur Rebels Filk Song by Leslie Fish (see the lyrics here) argues that the cast of Blake's 7 didn't approach seriously enough a pastime which inherently involves large number of people trying to shoot at them.

The question is not: "Where did we go wrong?"
The question is how we lasted this long.