Do you understand song lyrics?

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alexptrans
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16 Feb 2011, 9:32 am

Blue_Star wrote:

I thought the thread was going to be about misinterpreting heard song lyrics. I do that all the time because many singers don't enunciate enough for my ear. Anyway, maybe one does have to go through love, breakups, heartbreak, and that pain before getting all the love songs. Idk because I understand them.

The one song I misinterpreted until last year was Britney Spears' "...Baby One More Time". I couldn't understand how everyone loved a song about a girl asking to be physically abused again... And then I figured out (finally) that it was an emotional punch she meant, the internal pain that comes from loving someone who does one wrong. She's saying that she loves him so much she'll accept that pain again if she gets him back. My friends in hs couldn't explain it to me even though I knew those emotions. They didn't understand how and why I didn't get it.

I always thought she meant she wanted to have sex with the guy one more time.

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16 Feb 2011, 9:39 am

I have simply never cared for lyrics. When I was a teenager, I was a singer in a band. I would use different lyrics every time we played live. There would be a theme to the song, but the lyrics were never the same (ad-libbed). To me, they were unnecessary. I only really listen to electronic/ambient instrumental music now.

ToughDiamond
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16 Feb 2011, 10:24 am

KBerg wrote:

Not a chance I'm even trying that one man! Once the Beatles got that into um 'recreational substances' I'm not sure anyone can decipher their lyrics. Heck, if anyone could imagine how scary that would be? Finding someone able to understand how Lennon's mind on worked on that stuff and translate that into something intelligible!

I'm not sure the drugs had much to do with the obscurity of the lyrics. Lennon published "In His Own Write" in 1964 - years before flower-power - and he'd been writing in that kind of wacky style since his school days.....he was influenced from childhood by Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. There's a lot more coherence and intelligibility in Sgt. Pepper than there is in most of that stuff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_His_Own_Write
"Walrus" was never meant to be anything more than a bit of fun with phonetics - the lyrics were chosen for the sounds they make rather than for their meanings. When people started trying to understand it, Lennon was annoyed, and deliberately put a totally bogus clue into "Glass Onion":
Well here's another clue for you all
The Walrus was Paul
He was taking the mickey. He likened the Beatles' music to trying on funny hats.

I can't understand the lyrics that the OP posted.....gave up after the first verse. There's a lot of stuff like that around these days, and I usually screen it out. It might mean something to the authors, though sometimes I think it's like this:

Critic: Why did you write "with kisses three?" Why three in particular?
Author: Can you tell me any other number that rhymes with "tree?"
(According to my English teacher, that actually happened to a 19th-century poet.)

AspieDa
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16 Feb 2011, 11:04 am

"I created the sound of madness, wrote the book on pain, somehow I'm still here to explain."

Philologos
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16 Feb 2011, 11:58 am

Lyrics come from people of many different types Generally the people with who I cannot communicate produce lyrics I cannot comprehend.

Bluefins
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16 Feb 2011, 12:19 pm

Blue_Star wrote:

I thought the thread was going to be about misinterpreting heard song lyrics.

Same. But I also have the OP's problem, which means I'm completely out there if I sing a song I've only heard :lol:

dunbots
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16 Feb 2011, 2:47 pm

KBerg wrote:

Hah, ok the Týr song I can explain.

Thanks.

That makes sense, but I never would've figured that out on my own. I pay close attention to the lyrics of songs, they're very important for me, but oftentimes they're very cryptic. :oops:

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16 Feb 2011, 5:01 pm

KBerg wrote:

The vibe I'm getting off the other song, The Flood, is somewhat similar in nature in terms of struggle, but with a difference. It's a young man's love song, there's a theme in struggle against others, others who are telling the singer what he can and can't do and perceiving even as evil. "they said we'd never dance again" "although no-one understood" and "seeing demons not what we are". Sounds a lot like how adults sometimes talk to a teenager doesn't it? The more primal aspect to the singer are mentioned in that first verb, comparing himself to cavemen, undeveloped yet.

I think that it is a song about youthful idealism from the perspective of someone who is older, who has seen his idealistic dreams fail, but feels that it is still worth the battle.

To me, dancing the rain, means that some people just try to live for now, to enjoy the present, but at they same time, they are ignoring the coming problems (the flood). And in the end, they dance no more. So they ignored the problem, but eventually, they couldn't avoid it.

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16 Feb 2011, 5:27 pm

Not really. Usually I concentrate on the tune more than the lyrics, and if I do concentrate on the lyrics often I find them impossible to understand.

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16 Feb 2011, 11:44 pm

There are lyrics to a few Beatles songs that I don't understand. 'I Am The Walrus', 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds' and 'Happiness Is A Warm Gun'.

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ToughDiamond
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17 Feb 2011, 4:35 am

CockneyRebel wrote:

There are lyrics to a few Beatles songs that I don't understand. 'I Am The Walrus', 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds' and 'Happiness Is A Warm Gun'.

"Walrus" has no meaning.
"Lucy" is about a picture that John's son brought home, and also about taking LSD, or having amazing dreams.
"Gun" was written after John had been reading one of those gun magazines....it mocks the gun culture as sexual deviation, though only during the end part. The main body of the song is meaningless.

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17 Feb 2011, 4:39 am

I don't think anyone ever will be able to understand the majority of song lyrics. You can think that you do but you can parade around thinking a song was written to parents and find out later it was written to a girl. Some songs are just drug induced senselessness (and are still awesome).

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alexptrans
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17 Feb 2011, 7:48 am

On the other hand, here's one example of perfectly understandable lyrics:

Link

YellowBanana
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17 Feb 2011, 11:18 am

alexptrans wrote:

There are some songs I can understand, but others I find completely obscure and incomprehensible. As an example, here's the lyrics for a song called The Flood:

I understand individual lines when taken separately, but the meaning as a whole escapes me. The flood is probably a metaphor for something, but for what? And why did no one understood they were holding it back? And that part about meeting the moon and stars and forgiving them - what the heck does that supposed to mean? Either it really is a collection of random sentences cobbled together, or there is a deeper meaning there somewhere hidden behind opaque figurative language. I'm not even sure it has to do with being AS, unless NTs find this perfectly clear.

I was talking to my husband about this song. Actually my words were "what the heck is this song about?". It bothers me somewhat because other than this I love the song (I usually go by the rhythm, especially if there are rhythm changes - I love rhythm changes, and songs that "fill my ears" with a million different sounds and tunes and instruments at the same time).

I am absolutely rubbish at understanding songs, poems or literature that don't tell things like they are - things that require interpretation, I guess. These days I avoid poetry and literature and movies, actually, that aren't straightforward because I spend too long trying to figure them out and I actually think they can't be. What's the point of that? Songs/Music have the additional rhythm bonus so I don't usually avoid them.

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17 Feb 2011, 11:45 am

I love trying to figure out what the writer meant when he was writing his song or poem I can spend hours doing it and, in school, there was never a wrong answer!

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