I’ll bet Bruce regrets ever writing that thing. Too subtle for the room.

If memory serves, I believe R. Raygun tried to use this song also. Bruce shot that idea down rather quickly.

More recently, Jackson Browne had the same experience with Mcsame and Browne’s classic tale of existential wooliness (heh) ,’Running on Empty’.

I’m reminded of when, at a conference several years ago, one afternoon between sessions I wondered past what looked like a high school’s prom getting set up in the hotel ballroom. The theme was apparently “Every Breath You Take”, if the big banners were any guide, presumably a reference to the formerly everpresent Police song of the same name.

And why not? A melancholy love song from the perspective of a misunderstood crazy ex-boyfriend stalker guy sounds like a perfect choice. Truly, the stuff dreams are made of.

well, obviously peace has nothing to do with being a patriotic ‘Murican, so of COURSE this guy was existentially muddled …

And then there’s Krusty in what may be his most Magoo moment campaigning with Yankee Daddy and the song Gasolina at a visit with school kids. Dude stick with Fred Waring.

Yeah, and didn’t Ron call him “Bruce Springstein?”

I really hate people who only know the chorus.

It’s been Hannitized for your protection. Leave out all that context that just confuses the rubes.

I’d hate to find out what he thinks “Glory Days” is about.

he thinks it’s a glory hole that lasts all day ?

just guessing.

Bruce wrote that song (and much of the first side of “Born in the USA”) when he wrote the songs for “Nebraska,” and it shows. Especially when he does the acoustic version of BITUSA rather than the rawk version.

And it never ceases to amaze me when people don’t understand that song. It’s not like it’s subtle.

The world is full of people who don’t listen to the words. I don’t understand them, but I know they exist, my partner’s one of them. Months after we picked up Fountains of Wayne’s Traffic and Weather, months of singing along in the car, finally I hear “Hey, what’s a donut shop got to do with anything?” I shrug helplessly, too depressed to explain the entire damned song to someone who isn’t going to remember anyway.

Me, I dig sly lyrics almost more than the music itself. My partner’s just into a certain sound. For some people, music is just noise they like.

I remember when that bow-tied Poindexter George Will thought BITUSA was a sure-fire Republican rah rah sis boom bah, “Amerika Uber Alles” song. Sam Donaldson had to talk him down.

You know you’re in trouble when Sam Donaldson is hipper than you.

You do not actually expect wingnuts to be literate or to acutally listen to the words of the song do you? All they need to hear is USA and they know it has to be good. In this case they are right, but for all the wrong reasons (as usual on the rare occasions they are right about something).

Well, here are my favorite lyrics:

“Well my telephone was ringing and
they told me it was Chairman Mao
Well my telephone was ringing and
they told me it was Chairman Mao
You got to tell him anything ’cause
I just don’t want to talk to him now
I have a apolitical blues and
it’s the meanest blues of all
I have a apolitical blues and
it’s the meanest blues of all
I don’t care if you’re John Wayne
I just don’t want to take no calls
No calls”

Lowell George, A Apolitical Blues

One of the problems that I had with BITUSA (both the song and the album) when it came out was that its music–bright, brassy, very pop-ish compared to Darkness On the Edge of Town and The River–jarred with the lyrics. Maybe it’s supposed to be ironic contrast or something; it’s certainly grown on me since the original release. Then there was the Boss’ own image, where he’s all pumped-up and dancing with Courtney Cox in the video and so on, as opposed to how he looked on the covers of the two aforementioned albums: as if he’d just come off a three-day bender after breaking up with his girlfriend.

But, yeah, his smackdown of Reagan in that Rolling Stone interview was just awesome.

Brian Eno is (or was at one point) of the opinion that the most important part of lyric writing is simply making sure you have the right phonetic sounds in place for the song. He’d put the phonetics in place, then replaces them with actual words. (He once described it as the opposite of phonetic poetry, in which words are changed into pure sounds. Douglas Adams used a variation on this technique to come up with the character name Slartibartfast as a name that sounds terribly obscene but really isn’t.)

I bring this up only to explain that I frequently care less about the lyrics in a song than the overall sound. So I sympathize with your partner. (Though I do know what the donut shop reference in “This Better Be Good” means…)

That said, were I running for office, I would thoroughly vet the lyrics of any songs my campaign used at rallies…

Powerline has been my most reviled website since I first discovered how they combine stupidity with dishonesty to a degree rarely seen in the history of man/woman. But you all have pounded that well enough. How about that last line in their post? Give Peace a chance? Why is that not qualified as an “All-Americana Song”? That quip of an opinion from them tells me all I need to know about what a bunch of A-***** the people at Powerline really, really, really are!

Michael Stipe described his vocals on the early REM albums as another melodic instrument, and confessed that in many songs he didn’t actually sing any words. Said it put him in an uncomfortable spot when the record label asked him to write down the lyrics for the reissue of their back-catalog…

Saying republicans prefer jingoistic surface talking points rather than look at the subtance beneath? I’ve never heard of such a thing. How dare you Tbogg! POW POW POW POW.

I suggest the boys at Power Bottom use this song as their anthem and sing it into the hairbrush in front of the bathroom mirror every morning.

I thought young girls they got woolly from wearing that same old funky dress.

Maybe next time you should try a little tenderness.

The song “Won’t Get Fooled Again” is also one of the top misunderstood songs. People happily singing only on the chorus have no clue about the actual content of the lyrics.
http://www.sing365.com/music/l.....77002E72F9

TBogg writes: I really hate people who only know the chorus.

Sometimes they don’t even listen to that much of the lyrics, as evidenced by the fact that Ann Coulter was ushered onstage at the 2004 Republican convention to the three chords of “American Woman”.

American woman, said get away
American woman, listen what I say
Don’t come hangin’ around my door
Don’t wanna see your face no more
I don’t need your war machines
I don’t need your ghetto scenes
Coloured lights can hypnotize
Sparkle someone else’s eyes
Now woman, get away from me
American woman, mama let me be.

Are you singing along? Good, here comes the big finish:

Goodbye, American woman
Goodbye, American chick
Goodbye, American broad

I rued the day when Guess Who played at the White House and changed the lyrics of this song at the request of the Nixon gang. Hated them ever since.

Speaking of not paying attention to the lyrics, I think it’s pretty damn funny that McCain did an event with Daddy Yankee the other day, based on the afore-mentioned Daddy Yankee’s song “Gasolina.” “When asked what that song was about, the rapper smiled: “Energy independence.”" Uh huh…

http://www.dailykos.com/storyo.....765/575892

sightunseen: I’m told that Canadians hate the Guess Who also, preferring even the Lenny Kravitz version of the song.

captphealy: The lyrics as phonetics first is an interesting way of writing songs. You can get the phrasing right with basic gibberish then it gets challenging when you need to convert them to something that people can understand. The Melvins did a lot of songs in the early days where Buzz just left the songs as gibberish. For example:

http://www.lyricsondemand.com/.....yrics.html

“Our occasional contributor Joel Mowbray (jdmowbra@erols.com)”

This was either:
a) a harmless typo from powerline
b) proof that Joel Mowbray is too stupid to even spellcheck his name before getting an email address.
c) a strong suggestion that Joel Mowbray has many friends who refer to him as ‘Bra’ and felt it was a witty email address.

Or — and I’m just spitballing here — it’s an indication that his user ID was limited to a format of his first initial, middle initial, and the first six letters of his last name.

re lyrics written phonetically:

“Potato’s in the Paddy Wagon”, one of the songs Michael McKean and Annette O’Toole wrote for “A Mighty Wind”, is, according to McKean, based on the nonsense rhythmic mnemonic he and Annette came up with when they first came up with the melody, as a sort of placeholder for where lyrics would eventually go.

They liked the silly phrase so much that they decided to make it the subject of the song, forcing them to come up with a character named Potato and a series of events which placed her in a paddy wagon.

And then there’s Mike (Ommadawn, Amarok, etc.) Oldfield, who usually doesn’t bother to take it past the phonetic gibberish stage when composing lyrics (”I think they might mean something in Gaelic” was the slightly puzzled comment of one of his singers).