You know this lyric in The Turtles' 'Happy Together'?
"No matter how they toss the dice, it had to be /
The only one for me is you, and you for me /
So happy together..."
Now read it again. Parse it. Or, better still, listen to it. I don't know how I'd managed to miss this before, since I pretty often call this my favourite song of all time, but it's a hidden admission of unrequited love, right? "The only one for me is you, and you for me". Ouch. What about her? Does she get a say? I don't think so. The whole song's fantasising about the unattainable, surely. But what I love most is how — with the easy rhyme there, which lulls you time and again into missing the actual meaning — it seems to convince itself every time you hear it, and how that relentless march-beat escorts song and listener up, up, and over the moon.
5 comments:
Blogging again. Good
I love pop songs that smuggle in ambiguity or ambivalence past border control. Think of all the couples for whom The Police's "Every Breath You Take" is their song:
'Can't you see you belong to me?.... Every breath you take, every move you make, I'll be watching you...'
Creepy.
Exactly. You know, I was once literally stalked by that song, on a driving holiday. It was on the radio. Then it was playing at a Little Chef we stopped at. Then it was playing at the next Little Chef we stopped at...
I think maybe someone was telling us to stop stopping at Little Chefs. They had a point.
What can you do, though? It's that or Moto.
what a fun post.
--RC of strangeculture.blogspot.com
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