Exploring the Meanings of Classic Songs
olivertearle By Oliver Tearle
In 1956, the young playwright John Osborne wrote a play, Look Back in Anger (much of it supposedly written while the young Osborne sat in a deckchair on Morecambe pier). With this play, Osborne heralded the arrival of the ‘Angry Young Men’: British working-class twentysomethings who rebelled against the status quo and ushered in a new era of youthful expression in theatre, fiction, and music, without straying too far from the kitchen sink.
By Oliver Tearle
‘I have no idea what it’s about.’ Phil Collins’s words about what is perhaps his most famous – and certainly his most talked-about – song don’t exactly sound like a promising starting-point on our journey to discover what the lyrics of ‘In the Air Tonight’ actually mean.
By Oliver Tearle
Many stars of the music industry who subsequently become famous in their own right started out as backing singers or supporting artists for established groups. So long before he was telling everyone in roofless rooms to be happy, Pharrell Williams was appearing on SWV’s Michael-Jackson-sampling hit ‘Right Here’ in 1992, while Sheryl Crow appeared in the video for Jackson’s ‘Dirty Diana’ in the late 1980s before embarking on a successful solo career.
By Oliver Tearle
A song about female empowerment? A classic break-up song? A gay rights anthem? Just exactly what is the meaning of Gloria Gaynor’s disco floor-filler ‘I Will Survive’, which reached the UK number one spot in March 1979?
By Oliver Tearle
The 1990s witnessed a short-lived outbreak of bands going ‘mmm’ at us. In 1997, long-haired warblers Hanson gave us their gibberish classic ‘Mmmbop’, the same year that the American soul band Home Cookin’ released their debut album titled Mmm, Mmm, Mmm, complete with an album cover showing a woman in a rather revealing polka-dot dress bending over in front of an oven while giving the unassuming viewer a full-on shot of her backside. Their follow-up album (also their last) was called, fittingly, Pink in the Middle.
By Oliver Tearle
Few phrases have aged more quickly or more badly in the last decade or so than ‘social justice’, but back in 1987, before it was co-opted by shouty people with cartoon avatars on social media, those two words still meant something. And ‘Beds Are Burning’, by the Australian band Midnight Oil, is a social-justice song that means something, too.
By Oliver Tearle
Few songs can claim to have caused prominent film stars to be arrested, but Train’s ‘Drops of Jupiter’ belongs to this elite and illustrious club. But before I address the bizarre story of how a song managed to land Charlie Sheen in trouble with the law, it’s probably worth pondering the strangeness of that title.
By Oliver Tearle
Banning things can backfire in a spectacular way, and the ‘Streisand effect’ is a well-documented phenomenon. When the BBC banned ‘Relax’, the debut single from the Liverpudlian group Frankie Goes to Hollywood, it climbed to the top of the charts, displacing Paul McCartney’s feeble ‘Pipes of Peace’ from that coveted spot.
By Oliver Tearle
At some point, we’re going to have to have a moratorium on any use of defiant single-word adjectives – especially those ending in ‘-able’ – as song titles proclaiming one’s beauty, prowess, or sheer indomitability. Christina Aguilera gave us ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Fighter’, JFlow was ‘Unbeatable’, Kelly Clarkson and Tinie Tempah offered us ‘Invincible’, while Westlife, Michael Jackson, Alicia Keys, and Kelly Clarkson (again) have all been ‘Unbreakable’.
By Oliver Tearle
In the field of prophetic works of art, Kraftwerk occupies the same space in music as the novelist J. G. Ballard (1930-2009) inhabits in science fiction. Ballard’s short stories of the late 1970s and early 1980s, most notably ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ and ‘Motel Architecture’, foresaw our own world of videocalls, online meetings, internet dating, and much else, several decades before those things became a reality.