Or maybe you still love it, but now you have a different perspective.
Not so much found out about but songs that didn’t used to bother me now kind of bother me. I was a very big Stone Temple Pilots fan, Even though the rhythms slap the songs are a little too rapey these days for my taste.
A cute girl I knew a few years ago got the Orion Experience (group) on my radar and I learned recently that while yes the songs are clearly about a sexual deviant (which is what made them cool bruh), it’s about that kind of sexual deviant, because Orion very much likes kids apparently
That fucking ruins everything and they’re bops that I can’t get out of my head sometimes, so that’s nice
Do you remember the name of the movie?
Someone should make a spotify Playlist of all of these songs
“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.
99 luftballoons is similar.
The 80s was oddly dark.
Ay dios mio! I never knew this and always thought of it as cheesy vacation song.
Tears in heaven from Eric Clapton. I always liked this song, and didn’t have a special connotation. But after learning its backstory, now I just feel sadness when I hear it. :-(
Well, as I said, I never paid attention to the lyrics before I looked them up. 🤷♂️
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Such an upbeat 90s pop song with lyrics like “doing crystal meth will lift you up until you break.”
most of Rammstein, but specifically Mutter
For me it was Mein Teil. I’m used to most of Rammstein’s dark stuff, but man, this one is deeply disturbing.
Lyrics for those who are curious and not squeamish
https://genius.com/Genius-english-translations-rammstein-mein-teil-english-translation-lyrics
In case people were unaware, this references a real event where a man posted an ad for a man willing to be killed and eaten.
In the other direction from most of them here, “Losing my Religion” hit a lot harder before I realized it was just about anger.
Wait till you read and watch Take me to church
Brown Sugar by the Rolling Stones. It’s a song about banging a slave, but I didn’t know that as a kid.
Similarly, watching the music video for Africa by Toto changes the entire vibe of the song. It’s about wanting to bang a black woman. Bless those rains, I guess.
Based on the lyrics I always thought it was about werewolves.
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…
Constipated by Weird Al. That changed me.
Constipation blues - Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
A song about true pain.
Hard Habit To Break by Chicago is pretty straightforward, but I liked it on the radio as a kid because it’s peppy and has an orchestra.
Decades later I get access to music service libraries and give it a listen.
I was a jerk and you left me, and now you’re with another guy. I’m not sorry. I’m not going to do better. But I have an orchestra!
I still like it, but have perspective now.
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.
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.
I can hear that.
Staying sober at home with family can be hard enough, but when traveling, that’s hardcore mode.
Fuck, man, that is some depressing backstory.
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.
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”.
Did he sing about his wife’s womb as a pub that’s closing and expelling the drunkards?
Seriously? Well he could have made that more clear.
