| Scandal (US) – The Warrior Lyrics | 7 years ago |
| This is a very enjoyable song. I just wish the lyrics were better. "Your eyes touch my physically"?? That's pretty creepy. When I sing along, I often have to change that line to something less weird, such as "your eyes move me emotionally." | |
| Judas Priest – Johnny B. Goode Lyrics | 7 years ago |
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This song rocks! And it does what a cover should do: it takes a great original song and changes it enough that you have to wonder if this isn't how it should have been recorded the first time. Too many covers are carbon copies of the original, acting as a tool for musicians who can't write songs. But this is a cover in which the artists have transformed the original into something just as great but just as original. |
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| George Michael – Father Figure Lyrics | 7 years ago |
| @[mlissadarling:17561] "Put your tiny hand in mine" was not written to conjure images of a grown man. | |
| George Michael – Father Figure Lyrics | 7 years ago |
| @[jmg21:17560] The line "Put your tiny hand in mine" suggests someone a lot younger than 16, and a really fucked up songwriter. | |
| Bruce Springsteen – Johnny 99 Lyrics | 8 years ago |
| I don't agree that he wants to shoot himself when he's arrested. I think he's threatening everyone else. He only becomes suicidal after he's sentenced. | |
| Live – I Alone Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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This is about the garden of Eden, but these are not the words of the serpent. These are either the words of God, or of Adam and Eve having come to regret their defiance. It's easier not to be wise And measure these things by your brains In other words, you're better off not eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. It's easier not to be great. The serpent told Eve that knowledge would make her equal to God. Here, the speaker says people should not strive to enjoy that benefit. And the greatest of teachers won't hesitate To leave you there, by yourself, chained to fate The serpent will educate you, but he won't stop God from punishing you. I sank into Eden with you The speaker came from above, from heaven. I alone tempt you This could be God accepting responsibility, if one believes that God is in control of everything, including in control of the serpent. I'll read to you here, save your eyes This line reminds me of 10,000 Maniacs' "Cherry Tree," in which the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge symbolically represents literacy. "I Alone" may be picking up on that idea, but the speaker is saying, You don't need literacy/the Tree of Knowledge. |
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| Live – Selling The Drama Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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And to Christ: a cross And to me: a chair I will sit and earn the ransom From up here There's a lot of debate about what this chair is (electric chair? church pew?), but I think the clue is in the word "up". This is an image of someone sitting in heaven because Christ paid the ransom on the cross. Whether the songwriter considers that a true image or a false one, I'm not sure. But the lines before that suggest to me the songwriter sees religion as fake: It's the sun that burns It's the wheel that turns It's the way we sing that makes 'em dream The sun, the wheel, these are tangible things that operate with no need for God. But the singing choir and the vocal preacher make people dream there's a God orchestrating these things. And to right or wrong And to meek or strong It is known, just scream it from the wall He's saying we don't need religion to tell us right from wrong - it is known. Therefore, he is saying the "dreams" religion sells us serve no good purpose. |
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| Pat Benatar – We Belong Lyrics | 9 years ago |
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It's about a married couple that fight all the time. Part of her wants to leave him, but she doesn't. She's been putting up with him for a long time, and nothing's changing. She tells herself she's invested too much time in this relationship to leave it, but that's just rationalizing. The more honest reason emerges when she says their relationship is "a habit." She feels the pain, but she didn't leave before, and nothing has changed to push her out. "the words we've both fallen under" is their wedding vows. She made a commitment to this marriage and, for better or for worse, she's sticking to it. |
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| Pat Benatar – If You Think You Know How To Love Me Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| This is such an awesome song! | |
| Pat Benatar – Le Bel Age Lyrics | 9 years ago |
| Uh ... Those are the lyrics to "Sex as a Weapon," not "Le Bel Age." | |
| Patty Smyth – The Warrior Lyrics | 10 years ago |
| Very enjoyable song, though I must admit I'm a little grossed out at the line "Your eyes touch me physically." | |
| Simple Minds – Don't You Forget About Me [From the Breakfast Club] Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| This is a great song. Of course it is about the best scene in The Breakfast Club, where the characters discuss whether they can still be friends Monday, or whether they'll cave in to peer pressure in their cliques and deny one another. Will you "have the balls to stand up to your friends and tell them you're gonna like whoever you wanna like"? | |
| Eagles – Certain Kind Of Fool Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| This song is basically a double-entendre. It's deliberately written so that it could either be about a gun-fighter or about a guitarist. In fact, most of the album is awesome in that all the songs use cowboy imagery, but most of the songs don't necessarily have anything to do with cowboys. Desperado uses an outlaw as a metaphor for a man unable to commit to a woman. Out of Control could be simply about a boys night out, but it uses the imagery of a gang coming off the trail. | |
| Adele – I'll Be Waiting Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| She's saying, "I know I left you speechless," to GOD? That would be one hell of an ego. | |
| Shampoo – Trouble Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| I first discovered this song (and Shampoo itself) on the soundtrack of Foxfire. I found the song very catchy. | |
| L7 – Wargasm Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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Except for all the lines that are even better: Tie a yellow ribbon around the amputee Masturbate watch it on TV Crocodile tears for the refugee That pretty much says it for me, though bloodlust has rarely been described more poetically or with more edge than: Smutty, bloody pictures, ecstasy Blue balls waiting impatiently From Alcatraz to Lady Liberty |
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| L7 – The Bomb Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| This is the best song they ever recorded, and one of the rare songs that really makes me wish I'd seen it played live. | |
| L7 – Fast And Frightening Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| That line is so bold (clitsy?) I still remember the first time I heard it. I was standing in line at the grocery store. I had to rewind my Walkman to be sure I'd heard it right. Da-amn! Great line, Ladies!! | |
| Peter Wolf – Come as You Are Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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I'm pretty sure he's actually singing: Ain't gonna be no *masquerade* woop, woop, Come as you are, or don't come at all. |
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| Queen – Fat Bottomed Girls Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| This song is well-written, but also disturbing. It's about a person raped as a child who finds his sexuality screwed up as a result, trying to rationalize what was done to him as harmless or even somehow positive, focusing on it to the point that he rejects attractive women to zero in on women who resemble his rapist so he can re-enact the trauma. If only the writer had gotten therapy rather than rationalizing his problem and embracing his sickness as though it were his only healthy aspect. | |
| .38 Special – Little Sheba Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| There's barely one stereotype about rednecks that isn't supported by this song. From low-class entertainment to being dumb enough to think jello-wrestling is a sport. But a fun song nonetheless. | |
| Huey Lewis and the News – Workin' For a Livin' Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| Selling souls, rock n roll, any other *game* | |
| Shampoo – Dirty Old Love Song Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| For all of Shampoo's camp, this is one song I think is genuinely good. | |
| Evanescence – Going Under Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| I agree. That how it sounds to me, and it fits the context better. | |
| Billy Joel – Tell Her About It Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| Good advice for men - and for women, too. Everyone feels insecure. Talk to your partner. | |
| Natalie Merchant – Tell Yourself Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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"Ever since Eden we're built for pleasing everyone knows" She's saying that women are seen as existing to please men, that this is why there's so much pressure on women to meet some standard of physical beauty, and she's laying the blame for this at the feet of the Bible. This book that our culture warships as the word of God says women were created to make men happy, and not the other way around. Natalie Merchant has often shown that she knows the Bible and thinks about it, but doesn't accept it as true or even something that reflects the right values. In the song "Cherry Tree" she condemns the view that eating from the tree of knowledge is a bad thing and that ignorance = innocence. |
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| Natalie Merchant – I'm Not Gonna Beg Lyrics | 11 years ago |
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She likes the guy, but she's frustrated that he doesn't seem to care about her and won't even tell her what he feels. ("give me the straight talk Tell me what's on your mind if it ain't love.") These are some beautiful, powerful lyrics capturing the frustration and confusion that most of us have gone through at some point in our love lives. |
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| The Pretenders – My Baby Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| This is a beautiful song about falling for someone you admire. She knows he's out of her league, but she can't give up her crush on him. | |
| Huffamoose – Wait Lyrics | 11 years ago |
| I actually don't think the characters in this song are having sex yet. I think this is about a guy who sees a hottie on the dance floor and wants to sleep with her. He's afraid she's out of his league ("you are rhythm, I'm a cold shower"). He's imagining the seductive things he could say to her, but he needs time to get up his courage, and in that time, she could disappear. That's why he hopes she will wait. | |
| Jewel – Cleveland Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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To me, the last verse sounds like she's in a fight with her boyfriend. They're having problems in their relationship, the emotional distance feels great, but she wants to make up with him. She wants her and her boyfriend to gain a perspective where they see the problems in their relationship as small and see the emotional closeness they share. "Depending on which map you use" refers to her uncertainty that he is willing to see things from the perspective she wants, willing to pilot that plane with her. He might still see their problems as huge and the distance between them great. She's reminding him he has the choice to see things differently, to see their fights as pointless and to see his fears (of commitment? of whatever they might be fighting over) as petty. |
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| One Inch Punch – Pretty Piece Of Flesh Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| In Shakespeare's day, "pretty piece of flesh" meant "well-endowed." Clearly the song writer got that, as this song opens with the raunchy boast "I will split you in two." | |
| Heart – Shell Shock Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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I think the line is actually "Something BIT me, no remedies." And maybe it's just me, but I always thought she was saying "rifle to my heart," the rifle being a phallic symbol that fits the theme of the song. |
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| Heart – Shell Shock Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| No comments yet? I think this is the best song on this album. Not as good as the earlier songs the sisters wrote themselves, but still pretty cool. | |
| Blondie – Kung Fu Girls Lyrics | 12 years ago |
| This is a song about a badger game, where a prostitute (or a woman pretending to be one) lures a man into a place where he is jumped (“He was kicked to the floor”) and robbed (“Fistful of money, mouth full of gold. Soon to be free of all.”) | |
| Blondie – Maria Lyrics | 12 years ago |
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JakeOfClubs makes great points, but to my ears, it still sounds like she’s saying “Latina.” It’s especially clear the third time she sings the chorus. With Window Media Player, you can play a song at slow speed to hear it more closely, and in that third instance, at least, there in no way she’s saying “The Diva” or “Regina.” I agree “The Diva” would make more sense. Now that I’ve read all the above arguments, I even think “Regina” would have been a better choice. Members of Blondie may be kicking themselves that they didn’t think of those words. But in that third instance, at least, it’s clear as a bell “Latina.” Ethnicity is a rather trivial detail for the songwriter to throw in, unless we assume someone (the writer, the guy in the song, or the woman singing it) has a real thing for Latinas. Then again, this is the same band that gave us “Kung Fu Girls,” which emphasizes to an uncomfortable degree that the woman in the song is Chinese. A few decades passed between “Kung Fu Girls” and “Maria,” and attitudes about race shifted, but Blondie does not strike me as a band that bows to political correctness. I’m not sure Debbie Harry is singing “Latina” every time. There might be a deliberate switch, as you say. Hell, it’s even possible that, the third time, she just sang “Latina” by mistake and no one bothered to fix it. But the word she sings at that moment is clear. |
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| Dire Straits – Romeo And Juliet Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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Maybe it’s just me, but I thought the line was “All I do is keep the beat to Bad Company.” Bad Company’s best song IMHO was “Silver, Blue, a Gold,” a song that the narrator of THIS song would likely identify with and listen to as he dwells on his heartbreak. “Silver, Blue, and Gold” is (like THIS song) about a man who thinks he’s found true love, then gets dumped. I taught Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. This song is not connected to that story. MK calls the characters “Romeo” and “Juliet” for two reasons: 1) he wants us to see that the narrator believes his romance with the woman is as perfect and as passionate as the legendary romance Shakespeare made famous; 2) he wants to show us, in the sharpest terms, that the woman in the song does not share those feelings, at least not anymore. It would be out of character, shocking, and heartbreaking if Shakespeare’s Juliet said, “Oh Romeo, yeah, you know I used to have a scene with him." MK WANTS us to feel shocked and heartbroken because that’s how the narrator feels. Had the characters been named Mark and Holly, there would be less emotional impact. MK is CONTRASTING his story with Shakespeare’s, not imitating or augmenting it. Whether the line is “bars of a rhyme” or “bars of Orion,” either way it’s a good line. When I first heard it, I thought he was singing “Orion.” That’s still what it sounds like to me. But until someone finds a direct quote from MK himself clarifying what the line is, we won’t have a definitive answer. Those who hear “bars of a rhyme” have done a great job explaining that interpretation. Here’s an explanation for “bars of Orion.” This man feels distant from his love. He exaggerates, thinking he’s as far from her as the stars are. Being without his “Juliet” feels like being in jail, hence the “bars.” (In Shakespeare’s play, Romeo said that being exiled away from Juliet was like being beheaded. Perhaps MK thought life-imprisonment was a better analogy for a more civilized era.) “Bars of Orion” could also relate to Shakespeare’s play, Act III, Scene 2. As Juliet prepares to consummate her marriage to Romeo, she prays, “Give me my Romeo, and when he shall die [“die” could be taken either literally or as Elizabethan slang for “have an orgasm”], take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night...” The narrator of this song, equating himself with Romeo, may feel like he is dead because he has lost his woman's love, that he is now in the stars as Shakespeare’s Juliet would have wanted, and still trying to kiss his woman the way Shakespeare’s Juliet would have wanted but his own woman apparently does not. The one line I don’t like is “it was just that the time was wrong.” Nothing in the rest of the song supports this notion. The only way I can explain it is that this is something “Romeo” is telling “Juliet” to try and get her back, trying to convince her to give him another chance, that this time she’ll be happier with him because … er, well, now it’s a different time. Someone asked for an explanation of the line “And I bet, then you exploded in my heart.” Beginning a romance is like gambling. You take risks because you hope for a big payoff. You risk getting rejected. You risk having to spend a date with someone who is wrong for you. You risk getting your heart broken. This song’s “Romeo” took a chance with “Juliet,” and now he looks back on that time when he thought he’d “hit the jackpot,” when he thought he’d found his soul mate. (His heart was filled with such joy, such passion, it felt like an explosion.) But now he not only feels he lost, he feels he was cheated out of what should have been his (“The dice was loaded from the start”). |
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| Bruce Springsteen – Working On The Highway Lyrics | 13 years ago |
| I don't think he's BACK to working on the highway. At the beginning of the song, he is on the chain gang, and the song is him explaining how he wound up out here. | |
| Bruce Springsteen – Jungleland Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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I don’t know what “Jungleland” is about, but I find it interesting that most of the song is filled with romantic imagery, then in the last verse, everything is starkly de-romanticized. First, everything is grand and sweeping. Even violence and crimes are described as operas and ballets. The Magic Rat and the Barefoot Girl are so committed, they pursue their love affair even in the face of a world so set against them it would send a lawman chasing after them. They will risk it all for a moment of happiness. Even the Rat’s death is probably a romantic gesture of his commitment to Barefoot. I find it interesting that others assume he died because he was in a gang or she was. I see no indication that either lover was connected to the gangs any more than the jilted groom in “Reason to Believe” is connected to the guy who ran over the dog or to the people at the funeral. Springsteen often tells multiple stories to illustrate a common theme, and I believe he is doing so here. All we actually know about the Rat is that 1) he had a love affair with Barefoot, 2) a cop chased them, and 3) Rat was shot. I’ve always assumed these three facts were connected. The affair was frowned upon and probably illegal. One or both lovers could be under-aged, or possibly the couple was interracial in a time when that was illegal, or bringing her back across the Jersey state line may have triggered the Man Act. (Police arresting lovers is a theme Springsteen would return to in “Working on the Highway” and possibly “Darlington County”.) “The Rat's own dream guns him down.” His dream was to be with the Barefoot Girl, and he died because of it. Perhaps he knew the risk but felt she was worth it, or he just wanted to defy those who would frown upon this coupling. In the last verse, however, romance is stripped away. “The poets down here don't write nothing at all. They just stand back and let it all be.” Earlier, the rumbling gangs produced art, but now even the poets aren’t poetic. “They reach for their moment and try to make an honest stand. But they wind up wounded. Not even dead.” People with romantic dreams in their heads often want a glorious death. A death can be a powerful statement, and grand gesture. (As Springsteen would later write in “All that Heaven will Allow” “Some they want to die young, young and gloriously.”) They get hurt, but are denied their romantic dreams of a glorious death. They won’t be celebrated as people who died making their stand. They are denied the moment they were reaching for. |
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| Bruce Springsteen – Darkness on the Edge of Town Lyrics | 13 years ago |
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I see this as a very bitter song. The singer (I agree this is the same character from “Racing in the Streets”) is still clinging to a dream that racing is going to make him rich. His wife didn’t share his dream. She moved on to another man who is more successful. Fairview sounds like a nice suburb. By contrast, the singer says he’s living under a bridge. Whether he is literally homeless or is exaggerating how poor and outcast he feels, he certainly is not living as well as his ex-wife and her new man are living. That bitterness is more clear in the third verse. “Some folks are born into a good life.” That’s his ex-wife’s new man, and the singer is suggesting that man did nothing to earn his wealth and happiness, he had everything handed to him; in contrast, the singer believes himself hard-working and honorable (“I'll be there on time and I'll pay the cost”), a man who has paid his dues but has wound up with very little. “Other folks get it anyway anyhow.” This is a biting description of his ex-wife. He’s saying she only cares about money, and she’ll do anything to get it — even break the heart of a good man (as the singer sees himself) and give herself with a less-deserving man (as the singer sees his rival) just to maintain a richer lifestyle. “I lost my money and I lost my wife. Them things don't seem to matter much to me now.” This sounds like sour grapes. He claims he doesn’t care about these things, but he can’t shut up about them. His ex-wife is enjoying a new marriage with money, living in comfort, while the singer feels down and out. He feels like an outcast, living on the edge of society, relegated to the darkest parts. No one cares about him: no one asks him any questions or looks too long in his face. He is a nobody. I think his “secret” is how much it hurts him, how much he still wants his ex-wife and the money he thought racing would bring him. He knows if he doesn’t cut himself loose from his bitterness and his longing, it will drag him down, keep him from getting on with his life. He tells himself he is cutting these things loose (“Them things don't seem to matter much to me now.”). But in fact, these things are dragging him down. Instead of looking for a new love, he’s sending messages to his ex-wife about where she can find him; he won’t accept the fact that she has moved on, she doesn’t want to see him. He’s easily found, but she hasn’t found him yet because she isn’t interested. |
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| Poison – Tearin' Down The Walls Lyrics | 36 years ago |
| I'm surprised no one has commented on this one yet. This is, by far, Poison's best song. I love the way the tempo increases to a fervor. | |
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