Or maybe you still love it, but now you have a different perspective.

  • nowherelord@lemmy.world
    50·
    25 days ago

    Semi-Charmed Life, by Third Eye Blind. Basically, it’s a song about doing meth… Spent almost twenty years just singing the chorus with absolutely no idea what the rest of the lyrics were. Now, it kinda feels weird, ngl.

    • undercrust@lemmy.ca
      23·
      25 days ago

      I, as a child, did a music class presentation on “my favourite song of the year” on this little ditty.

      Whoops!

      Edit: To clarify, then, much like now, I listened to the music and not the lyrics. I don’t know if that’s common at all, but the singing is basically another instrument to me, and I hardly ever pay attention to the actual words.

      • Lookorex@lemm.ee
        14·
        25 days ago

        Much of the time I can’t even make out the lyrics, so I listen to music the same way

      • nowherelord@lemmy.world
        7·
        25 days ago

        I think it’s fairly common to not always pay close attention to the lyrics. Most of the time, you hear a song on the radio, and you can’t always make out what it’s saying, but you’re still able to enjoy the music and the singing melody. Until you pay more attention or you seek out the lyrics, then you’re often surprised about what it’s saying, cause the lyrics weren’t the point when you used to listen to the song. It doesn’t mean that it’s world-changing or anything, but it just takes you by surprise.

      • Subtracty@lemmy.world
        6·
        25 days ago

        I listen to music the exact same way. I will maybe pay attention to the chorus or catchy line, but a lot of lyrics are lost on me.

      • Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world
        2·
        24 days ago

        You’re not alone there, snoop had an album come out the year before and after that both sold as explicit but that album didn’t.

    • WhiteOakBayou@lemmy.world
      16·
      25 days ago

      But it’s about how the excitement of meth, like that of a new relationship, fades and leaves the speaker wanting something more substantial while still fondly reminiscing about the good times.

      The speaker thinks of the girl as a “sunburn” he “would like to save.” He describes meth as something that “will lift you up until you break.” I think these characterizations point very strongly toward nostalgic longing and away from the glorification of addiction or even that of drug use. So no reason to feel weird I think.

      • everett@lemmy.ml
        8·
        25 days ago

        I think these characterizations point very strongly toward nostalgic longing and away from the glorification of addiction or even that of drug use.

        There’s also an extra verse, which wasn’t in the radio edit, that I think further supports what you’re saying.

      • nowherelord@lemmy.world
        2·
        25 days ago

        I guess you’re right, I just never gave the song much thought. It’s just that it kinda felt like some happy song and I never paid attention to what it was saying, then I looked them up one day, out of curiosity, and I guess it juat felt unexpected to me, and that’s why it felt weird. Thinking about what you said makes me want to give the song another listen with an open mind, I guess.

    • zaph@sh.itjust.works
      14·
      25 days ago

      Not so much a song about doing meth as it’s a song about the ramifications of doing meth. “Doing crystal meth will lift you up until you break” it mentions lockjaw at the end and even talks about watching the love of his life die to an od.

    • nafzib@lemmy.world
      6·
      25 days ago

      I didn’t know it was about Crystal meth for a really long time because I only heard it on the radio for many many years and they only played a clean version where the phrase “Crystal Meth” is cut out in a way that’s not really obvious it was edited so I just never understood the lyrics.

    • Sporkbomber@lemm.eeEnglish
      5·
      24 days ago

      I love people being surprised by this song when a verse literally says ‘doing crystal meth will lift you up until you break’.

      • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
        5·
        24 days ago

        "It won’t stop, I won’t come down

        I keep stock with the tick-tock rhythm

        I bump for the drop, and then I bumped up

        I took the hit that I was given, then I bumped again

        Then I bumped again"

        That entire verse, but honestly rereading the lyrics, I’m amazed that got radio play in the Bible belt. I know it did, because I heard it uncensored in southeastern Indiana.

    • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
      5·
      24 days ago

      Fun fact: Semi Charmed Kinda Life made it into a late '90s Disney film about surfers. They didn’t even bleep anything because, I assume, they couldn’t understand what he was singing.

      • gnuplusmatt@reddthat.com
        3·
        24 days ago

        Another fun fact is that the original radio edit that charted is different from the album version / version that is on streaming these days. It lacks verse 3

        And when the plane came in, she said she was crashing The velvet, it rips in the city We tripped on the urge to feel alive But now, I’m struggling to survive Those days you were wearing that filthy dress You’re the priestess, I must confess Those little red panties, they pass the test Slides up around the belly face down on the mattress one And you hold me And we are broken Still it’s all that I want to do, just a little now

  • Schal330@lemmy.world
    43·
    25 days ago

    Mr Brightside by the Killers. The tune was good and felt energetic when it came about, but it’s about a guy being cheated on. Having had someone cheat on me around the time it came out it hit really close to home and I just don’t enjoy listening to the song.

    The problem with being in the UK is that it’s so overplayed and I just have to tune it out.

    • zaph@sh.itjust.works
      51·
      25 days ago

      It’s not. It’s about a guy who can’t beat jealousy and believes he’s being cheated on “except it’s all in [his] head”

        • zaph@sh.itjust.works
          11·
          25 days ago

          From the article “The lyric is about a man who is obsessed with a girl that is seeing another man… and the thoughts that go through his head, imagining what they’re doing behind closed doors…” I guess I was wrong, it’s envy not jealousy.

    • Classy@sh.itjust.works
      4·
      25 days ago

      I second one of the other commenters who says that the song is about the perception of being cheated on. It’s funny, after the first day I ever went on with my partner that song played and for a little while we considered it our song, then eventually kind of faded as they both realized the song didn’t relate to us very well. Now I can look back years later, after going through a lot of therapy and self enrichment and I can realize that those kind of paranoia really did plague our early relationship. I’m glad that we were able to move on from it

  • felixwhynot@lemmy.world
    431·
    25 days ago

    “All that she wants” by Ace of Base. I read a deep dive into the band and it seems like they may have been formed after a neo-nazi group and that song might be about Jews trying to dilute the bloodline… so yeah kinda weird now.

    • snooggums@lemmy.worldEnglish
      20·
      25 days ago

      Oh fuck, no way.

      Ok, I read thenlink and the bassist was an opely total piece of shit before joining the band but I didn’t see anyhing about the AoB songs being hidden propaganda or the rest of the band’s history. Where does the speculation come from?

      • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
        5·
        24 days ago

        https://www.cracked.com/blog/how-90s-pop-band-secretly-sold-nazism-to-america

        That was my first exposure to the theory, I’ve never been able to confirm nor deny it conclusively, especially since cracked.com back in those times was only mostly satire. Like 99% of the pieces were satire, and then they’d publish something that wasn’t satire, and this could be a good example of that. Either way, I bought their CD way back when.

        • snooggums@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          24 days ago

          That seems completely serious and not satire at all.

          Since I never saw the videos, my assumption was that ‘wants another baby’ was wanting to sleep around with multiple partners as in ‘I love you baby’, not having a literal baby. The six pointed stars and the cradle is pretty fucking clear it is about a Jewish woman sleeping around to have multiple babies, and yeah that is apparently one of those ‘Jews are taking over’ racist stereotypes.

          Now I’m guessing that the Sign is a swastika.

          Thanks for the link, I’m gonna go throw that album in the trash and feel like a jackass for not catching on earlier.

  • pastermil@sh.itjust.works
    32·
    25 days ago

    Pretty much all Linkin Park songs.

    Listened to it since elementary.

    Around high school, I figured the lyrics were kinda dark.

    Then the vocalist hung himself.

    • nafzib@lemmy.world
      40·
      25 days ago

      Sadly, Chester grew up being horribly abused and then using a lot of drugs. He was super close with Chris Cornell, who had also killed himself some months prior to Chester. Chester had been sober for a time but ended up staying the night alone after traveling and drank a little and hung himself on Chris’s birthday.

      Mike Shinoda has stated in interviews that when he and Chester would write lyrics, they would focus on the emotion and not necessarily just the exact experience. So the lyrics would slowly evolve until they both could sing them truthfully while relating them to their own separate lived experiences, which is part of why they can be so universally related to - because none of their songs are truly only about one specific thing, but rather about the feelings people experience.

  • Chip_Rat@lemmy.world
    301·
    25 days ago

    Richmen North of Richmond.

    I love the sound, and at first it sounds like a pro worker union song (and it kinda is).

    But there’s way too much dog whistle… An old soul in a new world… Dude the south lost and slavery is bad. I’m sorry

    And then he slips in some super disappointing language about fat people on welfare.

    • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
      151·
      25 days ago

      Dude the south lost and slavery is bad. I’m sorry

      WTF? Don’t be sorry about that!

      I know it’s just sort of a reflexive idiomatic politeness, but still, it is really important to make it absolutely crystal clear how irredeemably contemptible the “lost cause” shit take is, at every opportunity. Never, ever be polite about it!

    • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
      3·
      23 days ago

      An old soul in a new world… Dude the south lost and slavery is bad. I’m sorry

      I think that’s an uncharitable reading. Which is understandable, but still.

      I think that there are a lot of people–myself included–that would like to be able to make a living doing something that seems to matter, or where you make something. Like, factory work sucks in most ways, but it still feels like you’re doing something. Spreadsheets and order projections? Staring at a screen all day, sending polite emails to people you’ll never meet about ways to spend a lot of money electronically?

      This “new world” of work and socializing ain’t great. I think it snuck up on a lot of people, and now a lot of people are feeling like they don’t know how to navigate the new reality of depersonalization.

      • Chip_Rat@lemmy.world
        1·
        23 days ago

        I agree. Nearly every lyric in that song, when isolated, sounds fine and agreeable. Even when he attacks people on welfare “if you’re 5’- 3 and 300lbs, taxes ought not to pay, for your bags of fudge rounds.” Isn’t wrong.

        Taxes shouldn’t be used by fat cats to get fatter. But he isn’t saying that. He is punching down and attacking a group of people who are suffering in “the new world” just like him, and a fucking bag of cookies is one of the few joys they can still aquire. He could have chosen to attack the elite, even if he only meant the ones to the North. He didn’t.

        “It’s a damn shame, what the world’s gotten to, for people like me, and people like you.”

        Sounds great. Now picture his audience. Who are they, and who are they thinking of when they hear that line?

        This song is called “Richmen North of Richmond.” It’s the Northerner’s fault all these bad things are happening.

        It’s that movie with Rowdy Piper and the glasses. You have to put them on to see the whole message. Dog whistling at its finest.

        If he had made a few small changes it could have been a powerful pro-worker lament and I would be playing it to death. Instead it was #11 on Trump’s “Standing on the stage for 44 minutes swaying back and forth because America is so easy to con so why not?”

        It’s a damn shame.

        • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
          2·
          21 days ago

          He is punching down and attacking a group of people who are suffering in “the new world” just like him, and a fucking bag of cookies is one of the few joys they can still aquire.

          I know a lot of people that are quite overall politically liberal that feel this way. I know a lot of people that get upset at the idea of inmates being given “free” educations in prison because they still have student loans 20 years after school. People that support the ideas of helping people up, that are fully on board with LGBTQ+ rights across the board, think DEI is a good idea, think it’s critical that women have bodily autonomy, and so on, but still have a knee-jerk reaction to things that they don’t fully get, or haven’t had explained to them.

          I don’t know if he meant the song that way, or what. I do know that the people coming into the White House in a few months aren’t likely to make things any better for people like him. Or people like you. Or people like me.

  • Zarxrax@lemmy.world
    301·
    25 days ago

    Well, one that maybe went full circle for me is “bring the pain” by mindless self indulgence. At first, it just seemed like a really fun song that I loved. Then one day, a black dude was in my car listening with me, and he was like “wtf is this song about?”. That’s when it hit me that the song actually sounds REALLY racist. I looked up the lyrics and that just confirmed it for me. And then years later, I found out it was actually a cover of a method man song, and not really racist at all, I guess. But thats a weird one, maybe best not for white guys to be singing it…

    • i_dont_want_to@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      201·
      25 days ago

      Yeah I used to love MSI and never really listened to the lyrics closely. Dude covers songs by black artists and straight up sings the N word.

      See also his cover of “Big Poppa”

      The more I looked into Jimmy Urine, the more problematic it got, like grooming a teenage girl.

      • Notyou@sopuli.xyz
        2·
        24 days ago

        I saw MSI sometime in the mid to late 2000s. It was at a club in DC and Jimmy Urine said, sorry I can’t stay after the show and make-out with anyone because I got mono for some teenagers I made out with a few days ago.

        It was very odd to announce in the middle of the set. I knew he was a year or so older than me and I found it very disgusting that he was talking about making out with teens so nonchalantly. Jimmy was probably about 30 at the time as I was late 20s.

    • MrFappy@lemmy.world
      6·
      25 days ago

      The cover definitely goes hard though. I’m legitimately stunned to see MSI mentioned at all, especially at the top of a thread. I’ve been a huge fan of theirs for decades, and rarely if ever see anyone mention them.

      • Wild Bill@midwest.social
        1·
        24 days ago

        Same. I don’t condone them but their songs go hard. I don’t fund them either since I downloaded the music. Did you listen to their most recent release?

        • MrFappy@lemmy.world
          2·
          24 days ago

          No, but you’d better believe I’ll be bumping that on the way to work tomorrow. Even though they’re one of my top bands, I haven’t check much as of late since their last release was about 9 years ago, and I didn’t think it was too good.

  • takeheart@lemmy.world
    291·
    24 days ago

    “Vamos a playa” by Righeira carries a lightweight, upbeat tune that vacationers might hum on the way to the beach. But the Spanish lyrics reveal that it’s about the devastation left behind by nuclear armaments. And the schism between trying to live an ordinary life whilst having a nuclear Damocles sword waver over your head. That it became such a world wide hit makes it all the more ironic. I love it all the more for it.

    • Susaga@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      341·
      25 days ago

      Dang. Just looked it up. It’s a song about a girl he met once and was dating someone else, but he still wrote a damn ballad and sent her a copy. Then she had to live her life surrounded by a song about a stranger’s feelings for her.

      And looking at the lyrics, they’re sweet if said about a long-distance partner, but really weird to sing to a vague acquaintence.

    • criitz@reddthat.com
      53·
      25 days ago

      Scott Weiland was compelled to write the lyrics after an incident in which a girl he was dating was raped by three high school football players after a party. Thus, Weiland has stated the song is an anti-rape statement, not a song simply about sex, saying: “This song is really not about sex at all. It’s about control, violence and abuse of power.”

      Weiland found himself in the position of defending “Sex Type Thing” to individuals who took the first-person approach he used in the song (“I am a man, a man/I’ll give ya something that ya won’t forget/I said ya shouldn’t have worn that dress”) literally. "It was, ‘All right, the “Cop Killer” controversy’s dead, let’s try to find something else,’ " says Weiland, who has been outspoken in the press about women’s rights and contends that he wrote the song in the mind-set of what he has called “the typical American macho jerk” because he didn’t want to sound peachy. “I never thought that people would ever seriously think that I was an advocate of date rape.”

    • cranakis@reddthat.com
      9·
      25 days ago

      I got that back when it came out and always wondered why folks treated it like alternative pop. It’s seems like a dark mirror on rape to me.

      • snooggums@lemmy.worldEnglish
        13·
        25 days ago

        That is what it was.

        It was criticizing something from the first person perspective like Nirvana’a Polly, or The Police’s Every Breath You Take.

  • MrGerrit@feddit.nl
    221·
    25 days ago

    Jump by Van Halen when found out that it’s about hanging yourself.

    Well, I still like it but it’s with a double feeling.

    • nowherelord@lemmy.world
      24·
      25 days ago

      From genius.com : “The original inspiration for the lyrics came from David Lee Roth watching a person on TV who was threatening to commit suicide by jumping off of a building and Roth figured someone in the crowd must be thinking, “Go ahead and jump”. It was, however, not written about suicide – the song is about ‘jumping’ on the opportunity to hook up with someone.”

      Though I can see where you got that.

      • MrGerrit@feddit.nl
        42·
        25 days ago

        The lyric “I jump up and nothing gets me down” jumping off a stool/chair but because of the noose he doesn’t get down.

        But I can see your point.

        • nshibj@lemmy.world
          3·
          24 days ago

          Doesn’t it say “I get up and nothing gets me down”? I always thought that sentence described being motivated and not letting anyone ruin your good mood.

  • son_named_bort@lemmy.world
    191·
    25 days ago

    Brown Sugar by the Rolling Stones. It’s a song about banging a slave, but I didn’t know that as a kid.

  • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
    181·
    25 days ago

    The period between hearing and knowing what the song was about was nearly instantaneous but “Smack my bitch up” has an incredibly catchy tune.

    It’d be really nice if they released an instrumental version one day.

  • Ephera@lemmy.ml
    171·
    25 days ago

    Not sure, if I stopped listening to mainstream music around that time, but uh, both of my examples are from 2011, apparently:

    • Kind of a classic response to this question, is “Pumped Up Kicks” from Foster The People. It’s got that upbeat melody, and the lyrics are this:

    All the other kids with the pumped up kicks
    You’d better run, better run, outrun my gun
    All the other kids with the pumped up kicks
    You’d better run, better run, faster than my bullet.

    • And my other example is “The A Team”, apparently originally from Ed Sheeran, and apparently also with an upbeat melody. I think, I only ever listened to a cover version. But yeah, it’s about drug use and sex work, and how those kind of necessitate each other…
    • garbagebagel@lemmy.world
      6·
      24 days ago

      I think pumped up kicks is actually a really poignant statement on how normalized gun violence is in the states, to the point where this song was all over radios and I’m sure all over high school dances and nobody thought twice about it. Like obviously the band did it intentionally but the fact that the point was missed so hard by everyone who sang along. It is like Hey Ya vibes to me, or smells like teen spirit for the older crowds. The point is to take these very serious ideas and use them to highlight people’s willful ignorance.

  • mx_smith@lemmy.world
    12·
    25 days ago

    Closing time by Semisonic I thought it was about going home with someone after a night out at the bar. It’s about the lead singers child being born.

    • chetradley@lemm.ee
      3·
      24 days ago

      Sort of, Dan Wilson said he had the idea while writing the song because his wife was pregnant so he slipped it in as a double entendre. It’s like 90% bar closing with a couple lines alluding to being born: “Closing time, this room won’t be open till your brothers or your sisters come”.