And Then You Really Know What Its Like
Rihanna's "South&M" isn't really about sex.
If y'all thought Rihanna'due south 2010 hit "Southward&M" was about getting kinky, you might be surprised to acquire it's actually about her relationship with the media.
"The song can be taken very literally, merely it's actually a very metaphorical song. Information technology'south about the love-hate relationship with the media and how sometimes the pain is pleasurable," Rihanna told Vogue in 2011, according to The Sydney Morning Herald. "We feed off information technology — or I do. And information technology was a very personal bulletin that I was trying to get across."
REM'due south "The 1 I Love" is not a love song.
Despite the fact that the second line of REM's "The Ane I Love" clearly indicates the song is about a bitter breakdown — "This i goes out to the one I've left behind/A simple prop to occupy my time" — listeners still seem to believe it'southward a heartfelt love vocal.
"It's a brutal kind of song, and I don't know if a lot of people pick upward on that," REM front man Michael Stipe told Rolling Stone in 1987. "Just I've always left myself pretty open to interpretation. It's probably improve that they just think information technology's a love song at this point."
In a 1988 interview with the at present-defunct Musician Magazine, Stipe said the song is "lyrically very straightforward."
"It'south very clear that it'due south about using people over and again," Stipe said.
The Goo Goo Dolls' "Slide" is nearly dealing with an unplanned pregnancy.
A lot of people get hung upward on thinking the Goo Goo Dolls' song is a cute track about dear, but the lyrics tell a much more complicated story.
"I was thinking a lot about the neighborhood I grew upward in. 'Slide' is nearly a teenage boy and girl. They're trying to figure out if they're going to keep the baby or if she'south going to get an ballgame or if they're just going to run away," the band's front-runner John Rzeznik told Billboard in 2018. "They're dealing with these heavy life choices at a very early age. Everybody grew upwards way too fast."
In an interview with Stereogum that same year, the singer further described the song's intended meaning.
"That was a not-so-apocryphal tale about some hard choices and dealing with a very rigid culture with a lot of demands put on the people who are role of that community, whether it was religious pressure level, family pressure. It was really interesting to me to examine all those things," he said.
Greenish Day's "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" is a bitter breakup song masquerading every bit a feel-practiced track.
If you have fond memories of belting out "Good Riddance (Fourth dimension of Your Life)" at your center-school graduation or during the concluding night of overnight campsite with your friends, you aren't solitary. Many people seemed to misinterpret the lyric "I promise you had the time of your life" as an earnest ane, and ignore the first one-half of the vocal'southward title.
Green Day's atomic number 82 vocalist, Billie Joe Armstrong, told Guitar Legends mag in 2005 that he wrote the song while he was breaking up with his girlfriend who was moving to Ecuador.
"I was trying to be as understanding about it as I could. I wrote the song as kind of a bon voyage. I was trying not to be biting, but I think it came out as a little biting anyway," he said.
3rd Eye Blind's "Semi-Overjoyed Life" isn't near feeling dissatisfied. It'southward about drug addiction.
It'south pretty much a fact that "Semi-Charmed Life" is the best karaoke song of all time with its frantic tempo that tin exit you breathlessly trying to keep up with the lyrics.
But yous may not realize that vocal'south footstep really reflects its narrative about the roughshod bike of highs and lows that back-trail a drug habit.
"Information technology's a muddy, filthy song about snorting speed and getting accident jobs. It's really funny that people play information technology on the radio," Tertiary Eye Blind singer Stephan Jenkins told Billboard magazine in 1997. "I think people hear 'Semi-Charmed Life' equally a happy summertime jam. And that's fine with me. I don't call up the song should exist and so breathy that I have to come out and say 'couples who have speed tend to break up, so don't do it.'"
In a 1998 interview with Rolling Stone, Jenkins added, "Yes, it's funny. I wrote a song about drugs and f---ing, and I'm pretty much about clean living on the route. We can't even believe it got onto the radio. 'Coming over you' is merely really what information technology reports to be: 'She comes around, and she goes down on me.' It's non cryptic."
Don McLean's classic campfire song "American Pie" disguises its depressing nature with catchiness.
The iconic and undeniably tricky 1971 song "American Pie" is known to inspire grouping sing-alongs at bonfires and karaoke bars, but lyrically information technology'south rather dark.
The original release of the song clocks in at more than eight minutes long just, generally, people remember the song's rhyming chorus, which bids goodbye to "Miss American Pie."
They tend to forget that the lyrically dumbo song references the 1959 aeroplane crash that killed legends Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. Richardson every bit "the day the music died."
According to The Guardian, Don McLean said in a 2015 interview that the lyrics are intentionally cryptic.
"People ask me if I left the lyrics open up to ambivalence. Of course, I did. I wanted to make a whole series of complex statements. The lyrics had to practise with the state of social club at the time," he said.
In 2015, McLean also put the song's original manuscript upwards for auction at Christie'due south Auctions and Private Sales and told the auction firm, "Basically, in 'American Pie' things are heading in the wrong direction. Information technology is condign less ideal, less idyllic. I don't know whether yous consider that wrong or right, but it is a morality song in a sense. I was around in 1970 and now I am around in 2015 there is no verse and very picayune romance in annihilation anymore, and then it is really like the last phase of 'American Pie.'"
Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.s.a." is not a song that celebrates the country.
The catchy, repetitive chorus of Bruce Springsteen's 1984 hit makes it easy for listeners to overlook the song's actual message, which is a critique of America's involvement in the Vietnam War.
"But when you recall about all the young men and women that died in Vietnam, and how many died since they've been back — surviving the war and coming back and not surviving — you take to call back that, at the time, the country took advantage of their selflessness. There was a moment when they were merely actually generous with their lives," Springsteen told Rolling Stone in 1984.
Afterwards conservative columnist George Will lauded the song'south chorus as a "yard, cheerful affidavit," and Ronald Reagan dropped the singer'due south proper name on the entrada trail, Springsteen said that he idea the American people's need to experience practiced about the US after the Vietnam War was "gettin' manipulated and exploited."
He continued in the interview with Rolling Rock, "And that'southward why when Reagan mentioned my name in New Bailiwick of jersey, I felt information technology was another manipulation, and I had to disassociate myself from the president'due south kind words."
Co-ordinate to The New Yorker, Springsteen once chosen "Born in the United states" the "most misunderstood song since 'Louie, Louie.'"
Dolly Parton'southward "I Will Ever Dearest You" isn't about letting go of an epic romance.
The 1973 vocal (which was famously covered by Whitney Houston in 1992) was inspired by Dolly Parton's conclusion to motility on from working with her mentor, musician Porter Wagoner, and his series "The Porter Wagoner Show."
"I was with Porter for seven years, and I learned so many things from Porter. We had one of those relationships where we were just so passionate most what we did; it was like burn down and water ice," Parton told the Tennessean in 2015. "We kind of butted heads all the time, simply we loved each other. There was a great passion there. And I wanted to exit the prove. I had told Porter that I would stay with the show for five years. I wanted to get out on my own."
Parton said she wanted to make Wagoner empathise how much she appreciated him, so she wrote the vocal to let him know.
Semisonic's "Endmost Time" isn't actually an anthem for the last call.
Just because bars are still playing Semisonic's "Closing Time" as the final song of the night doesn't mean the vocal is actually virtually the last telephone call.
The band'due south singer Dan Wilson revealed the song is really about the nascence of his girl. Rather than write a cheesy song that was blatantly near the birth of his kid, Wilson hid the song'south real pregnant.
"And I hid it and then well in evidently view that millions and millions of people heard the vocal and bought the vocal and didn't get it. They think it's about being bounced from a bar, but it's virtually being bounced from the womb," he said on phase during his higher reunion at Harvard in 2008.
Disharmonism's "Rock the Casbah" was inspired by the 1979 ban on music in Iran.
If you've never saturday down and read the lyrics to "Stone the Casbah," you might be surprised to learn that the song was actually written as a response to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini'south 1979 circulate music ban in Islamic republic of iran.
According to WCSX radio station, in a 1991 interview, late Clash front human being Joe Strummer said he started writing the song afterward the ring's manager pleaded with them to write shorter songs.
"I started to wail about the muezzin and the sheiks and the oil in the desert. Somebody'd told me earlier that if you had a disco anthology in Tehran, you lot got 20 lashes. And if you had a bottle of Johnny Walker Blackness Label whiskey, y'all got forty lashes," he said. "I couldn't get this out of my mind, so I was trying to say fanaticism is nowhere. In that location'south no tenderness or humanity in fanaticism. That's what I was trying to say in 'Rock the Casbah.'"
Bryan Adams' vocal "Summer of '69" is not referencing the year.
Historically speaking, 1969 was a big year. That was the summer Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, Woodstock took identify, and the Stonewall Riots happened.
Only Bryan Adams' song "Summer of '69" isn't about any of that — it's almost sex.
"A lot of people think it's about the year, but really, it's more about making love in the summertime," Adams told CBS' "The Early Show" in 2008. "It's using '69 every bit a sexual reference."
Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight" wasn't written after he saw a man let another man drown — it's virtually his divorce.
The legends surrounding the backstory to Phil Collins' 1981 hit are plentiful and likely grew thanks to a reference in Eminem'southward vocal "Stan." Just "In the Air Tonight" isn't nearly, as Eminem put it, "that guy who could've saved that other guy from drowning, simply didn't."
"Unfortunately, none of information technology'southward truthful. I was merely pissed off, ya know? I was angry," Collins told Jimmy Fallon on an episode of "The This evening Testify" in 2016, adding that he was going through an emotionally taxing divorce.
John Lennon's "Imagine" isn't simply a vocal virtually unity and world peace.
Most people think the 1971 ballad by John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Ring is almost people putting aside their differences to change the world, only the song — which was cowritten by his wife Yoko Ono — is more than political.
According to a 2001 Rolling Stone article, Lennon once described the song as "virtually the Communist Manifesto, even though I am not particularly a communist and I do not vest to any movement."
The song conspicuously asks the listener to imagine a earth without religion or possessions, but Lennon admitted that he intentionally tried to "sugarcoat" his message with the song's sugariness.
"'Imagine' is a big hit nearly everywhere — anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic, but because it is sugarcoated, it is accepted," Lennon once said, according to biographer James Henke. "Now I understand what you take to do: Put your political message across with a little honey."
Sarah McLachlan'southward "Angel" is near someone who died from heroin addiction.
Almost listeners retrieve the song is virtually a profound, personal loss — or recollect most the commercials for the American Social club for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals — merely Sarah McLachlan revealed the song was inspired by the death of Cracking Pumpkins keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin, who died of an apparent drug overdose in 1996.
"I went to a cottage due north of Montreal to relax and write. I read on arrival in Rolling Stone nearly the Smashing Pumpkins keyboard player who had OD'ed in a hotel room," McLachlan wrote on Quora in 2014. "The story shook me because though I have never done hard drugs like that, I felt a flood of empathy for him and that feeling of existence lost, lonely, and desperately searching for some kind of release."
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Source: https://www.insider.com/misinterpreted-misunderstood-songs-lyrics-2018-11
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