Sunday, September 10, 2006

How is the weather?

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:

Emma said...

Blogging again. Good

Gator said...

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.

tim r said...

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.

Gator said...

What can you do, though? It's that or Moto.

RC said...

what a fun post.

--RC of strangeculture.blogspot.com