Heavyweight champion of the world – Reverend and the Makers.
I too had hopes and dreams, but here I am. Mortgage buying a 3 bed semi in the burbs, got a job in a supermarket, I have 2 kids and a plump wife, and maybe I’m kind of plump myself. This isn’t me but it’s people I know, a lot of them. There’s nothing interesting about my existence except for the ways I make my life unique, the choices. That uniqueness involves doing the exact same things as everyone else does, but just in a different order. Like a shuffled pack of cards, the cards remain the same 52, but the shuffle makes the order different. We’ll drag the brats around national trust properties at the weekend so they can annoy other people than ourselves, leave them round to nans on Sundays so we can have some alone time to have that boring sex, and during the holidays we might cram them onto a plane with everyone else’s small humans to go to a family friendly resort that has watered down booze and women that really should not be wearing swimwear in public. We’ll ogle the pretty young things till the wife catches us and disapproves, and we’ll secretly hope they live the same life we have lived and make the same bad decisions, because we’re jealous enough of their youth but we’d positively hate them if they went on to live the dreams we once had.
People found the song upbeat, uplifting, Stephen Hendry used it as walk on music for the snooker, but in truth it is about a nearly-was, a disappointment, all the things he once thought he could be, and the dreams he gave up just to get by and live everyone else’s life. Struggling with his mundane existence he still believes he has unreleased greatness in him…
Be like everybody else…
Be like everybody else…
Just be like everybody else…
I’m not like everybody else…
I know how the guy feels, so do you likely. I had the idea that I could be somebody when I was younger, but as I hurtle towards 50 I’m looking back at missed opportunities, too little effort, words said and not said, mistakes made, ambitions lacking, the nice guy finishing last, naivety in colossal proportion, and many more aspects that have gotten me to where I am as I write this. What happened to the guy that was nearly good enough at football, the guy that was nearly good enough at snooker, the guy that was once excellent at maths? I am the epitome of the nearly man, hardly ever found anything I’m bad at, yet never found anything to excel at? You’re wondering the same I’ll wager. I’d resent you if you weren’t just as disappointing and as disappointed as I am. Don’t get me wrong, I’m perfectly happy nearly 99% of the time that I’m not at my place of employment. I love my other half with a never diminishing passion, for that I guess I’m in the minority, most couples I know tend to focus their happiness on their brats or their brat’s brats and merely put up with each other like old comfortable slippers. I’m being unkind, there’s likely that spark occasionally, but for me it’s every day.
Kinky Afro – Happy Mondays.
Son, I’m thirty, I only went with your mother cos she’s dirty
This is about the most honest lyric I know of, a man saying it like it often is. Offered as some sort of placation here, maybe as an excuse, or in face of an accusation our writer reveals something that every man has once done, an attitude he has taken, a choice based on a preference that seemed important at the time. He desired her because she could scratch the itch he had as a man, the itch to be pleased by someone who was willing to please and willing to go to lengths to do so that are beyond the normal prudish perspective of the typical British female. We all remember the girl that was “Dirty” as he puts it, and at the time this song was written that was indicated by signs that maybe were less subtle than they are now. Today’s facially and bodily disfigured fish-lipped pumped-assed thick-eyebrowed ultra-tarty looking girl has no guarantees that she is a bit “dirty“, that’s just a look now. Back in the day you could bet that the tarty girl was actually a bit of a tart and most of the time you’d be correct, that’s why they looked that way, the bright flower to the bee.
All you, All Day – Camera (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh9_YOQo1z0)
Oh words they seem so right, when they don’t get said.
Of all the lyrics I have ever heard, this one got me the most, it resonated with the disappointed self. I, as you, have done and said the wrong things many times and many times again. I have regrets, bad decisions haunt me, utterances that cannot ever be taken back nor forgotten by their audience. My life is a series of decisions that have landed me here. I take most of the responsibility for that fact, but the things I should have said, and didn’t, are the opportunities lost that maybe could have made the greatest difference. Again don’t get me wrong, I am happy being me and where I am, but I could have been a different me and happy somewhere else if I had just said the words that were on my mind, or maybe I would have said them and ended up here anyways. The point is that you leave a situation and then you know what you should have said, the best thing to say, and it’s too late, the moment has passed.
The weird thing is that I know the guy who wrote this lyric, I’ve told him what it says to me, yet he says he didn’t write it for any other reason than it was a good fit lyrically within the song. I believe that he believes that to be true, but like I say, I know the guy, and I can attest to him possessing a fierce curiosity about life and it’s nuances, coupled with a not inconsiderate intellect, so I’m not sure that it just happened, I suspect that the subconscious may be the true wordsmith in this case. Noel Gallagher does this, he writes lyrics with deep meaning just like Dylan and Knopfler, yet he claims they mean nothing when they fall out his mouth, I doubt it. They fall out of a mind that sees all around it and makes thoughts out of observations, then it falls out as lyrics. Just because they don’t know how the machine works does not mean it is not operating well.
There are thousands, if not millions of great lyrics, each of them reveals a deep insight that artists have about the world. Great art changes the world much more than a military and politic, art shapes the way we think through romanticising certain things that just seem mundane most of the time, it reframes the situation so that you look at it differently, it gives hope and unites people in a common cause. Oasis spoke the time they were in, as did the Beatles and the Stones and the Who and the Clash. In many ways these are the protests against the ills of society, they are a movement. By the same token, and in quite the opposite way, some pop artists do the reverse, people like Ed Sheeran and Beyonce and Taylor Swift are the sedatives, the non-stimulus, the mainstream. Their lyrics focus on stability, the Disney outcome, love songs that reflect nothing of life and its reality. I would go as far as to label a lot of pop songs to be toxic positivity, catchy nursery rhyme melody lyrics, that mean nothing to anyone, they might as well be humming or whistling or just an instrument. That’s not to say that music does not please us and arouse in us an emotional response, of course it does. Anyone that can play an instrument at all will understand tension and resolution in a progression, and anyone that has watched a movie knows that the score is one of the most important components because it heightens your emotions just at the right time and calms you when you are supposed to feel good. But while the music provides that, the lyrics should maybe mean something more that the usual nonsense of “I love you, please come back, lost without you, forgive me, I would do this and that for you, and on and on ad nauseum.
Above are just some of the great lyrics I have heard, the ones I can summon as I write this, you will have your own and they will mean something to you, they will speak your life in a way that you could not. That is art..
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