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.
Blogging again. Good
ReplyDeleteI 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:
ReplyDelete'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...
ReplyDeleteI 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.
ReplyDeletewhat a fun post.
ReplyDelete--RC of strangeculture.blogspot.com