submissions
| Pete Townshend – Somebody Saved Me Lyrics
| 16 years ago
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It's about traumatic moments that are either blessings in disguise or provide a stern wake-up call. Most of the song seems to be about Theresa Russell, an actress Pete was infatuated with in early 1980 and who ultimately rejected him, causing Pete much emotional distress and hastening a drug problem. The soul in whom Pete could depend in the last verse is probably Kit Lambert, whose death in 1981 catalyzed Pete's recovery from heroin addiction. |
submissions
| The Boomtown Rats – I Don't Like Mondays Lyrics
| 17 years ago
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A Telex machine is an old proto-Internet device that was mainly used for sending news feeds to and from news organizations such as Reuters and the Associated Press. It's kept clean....I dunno, cuz it rhymes?
This song's meaning has beguiled me for quite a while. Not the actual literal meaning, mind you; the first time I heard the song on the radio, the inspiring school shooting was mentioned. But is it meant to be funny? For the longest time, I thought it was a lighthearted black comedy poking fun at the incongruity between the horror of the events and the perpetrator's nonchalance. However, when I saw Mr. Geldof perform this at Live 8, he was wringing every ounce of emotion from his voice, obviously considering this to be a song with a dramatic and important message. Has he ever spoken out about his intent? Moreover, does anybody else giggle a little when they hear this song? Or is my sense of humour just that morbid? |
submissions
| Franz Ferdinand – The Fallen Lyrics
| 18 years ago
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This song is filled with double meanings, which is only appropriate because it functions just as well as a religious commentary (along the lines of: society is so that if Jesus came back we'd probably kill him again, and the ones fundamentalists call 'sinners' are closer to God than those who hypocritically kill in God's name) as a near-perfect party song custom-made for dance parties inhabited by outsiders such as the sinning, supermarket-robbing, hard-drinking and violent main character.
According to Wikipedia, Kunst is the German and Dutch word for "art," so the Kunst appear to be the high and mighty who spurn the hero of this song. It is also more than likely that it is a pun on "cunts", seeing as how they regularly censor the word when playing the song live (at least on TV appearances, where the FCC may not be friendly to such a double-entendre) and the fact that Franz has dabbled in the same type of punnery in their past work (see the "Do You Want To" video where a member of the band removes the letter O from an art exhibit containing the word COUNT).
The prophets of Tesco that the narrator spurns, playing off of the prophet/profit homonym, could either mean the funds of the supermarket branch or a sardonic name for a group of people who view the supermarket (and, by extension, capitalism) as a type of religion.
"Five thousand users fed today" always sounded to me like "Five thousand uses for today." I still think the latter is a better and less awkward line (how often are misheard lyrics improvements?), but seeing the other double meanings and slanted pronunciations in this song, it could well be intentional. At least that's what I'm hoping. |
submissions
| Weezer – 367 Lyrics
| 19 years ago
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Upon further investigation, it seems as if the title simply comes from the number of the take used. I'm a touch embarrassed about writing such a grasping-at-straws interpretation based on a connection I later learned to be a coincidence. Still, given Cuomo's brainy tendencies (going back to Harvard for English next year) and his sometimes obscure literary allusions (Pinkerton's lifts from Madame Butterfly), an extra significance to the number 367 doesn't seem quite outside the realm of possibility. |
submissions
| Weezer – 367 Lyrics
| 19 years ago
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In Ayn Rand's book "Atlas Shrugged," Dagny Taggart, pining for her true love John Galt, uses the number of his house as a symbol for his vacancy in her life. The number is, of course, 367. This song similarly paints a portrait of an unrequited love between the narrator (Dagny) and a person viewed as superior (Galt, Rand's symbol of totally fulfilled human achievement). The song's lyrics are too vague or universal to completely draw a parallel, but the words the narrator studies "to check your style" could be Galt's 80 page radio speech, just as "the things that should not be" could refer to the future of the world as controlled by the looters, etc. |
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