With three days left in Trump's presidency, I turn to the most momentous of subjects... looking at songs that were popular in my youth and thinking about what the words actually meant. I figure I'm not alone in saying, "Wow, that was a great song" without thinking since then -- or even at the time -- just what the words actually meant.
Someone recently wrote that people think the best pop music is whatever was popular when they were at their most vulnerable and emotionally impressionable. Some of the music from the late 1960s does seem to stand apart, but I have no interest in claiming it is especially valuable. My only justification for this is writing about songs that were popular when I myself was young.
I should warn you that while I did well in just about all academic subjects at school, when it came to literature and understanding hidden meanings and allusions, I got Cs instead of As. Adjust your expectations accordingly.
I'll start with two songs by Simon and Garfunkel, "Cecilia" and "Fakin' It".
Just today I find people who actually comment on these lyrics and what they mean, as in
https://genius.com/3217217. I never could before. Cecilia as metaphor for artistic inspiration? If you say so.
But I'm just going to look at the literal message:
'Cilia, you're breaking my heart
You're shaking my confidence daily
Oh, Cecilia, I'm down on my knees
I'm begging you please to come home
Come on home
Making love in the afternoon with Cecilia
Up in my bedroom (making love)
I got up to wash my face
When I come back to bed
Someone's taken my place
Jubilation, she loves me again
I fall on the floor and die laughing
Jubilation, she loves me again
I fall on the floor and die laughing
First of all, I never before realized the lyric was "die laughing". I just thought it was "I laughing" and the grammatical mismatch was for some obscure reason I didn't understand. Well, that does change the meaning a bit! But not a great deal.
(This is a tiny example of a phenomenon called "mondegreen" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen. Maybe others will recognize "there's a bathroom on the right". One I heard recently was from "Helplessly hoping", heard as: "Helplessly hoping, her hard-lickin' lover's nearby". Admittedly the word "harlequin" is quite rare in the actual "her harlequin hovers nearby").
So this is a guy who thinks he's in an exclusive, committed relationship with Cecilia and would very much like to be, but discovers he is not -- and this is apparently not the first time she has strayed from his expectations. He is more than a little snarky in his example of how she has had spontaneous flings with other men, but that's OK. If he is literal in saying "come home", that implies they live together, which would add some weight to an expectation of exclusivity. And then when she does come back, he is overwhelmingly happy, even though he knows at some level that she might well stray again -- from his expectations. "Die laughing" or "I laughing" seem to only differ in degree of intensity of the emotion.
Now I turn to "Fakin' It":
When she goes, she's gone
If she stays, she stays here
The girl does what she wants to do
She knows what she wants to do
And I know I'm fakin' it
I'm not really makin' it
There's more to the song, where he expands on his self-doubt, but I'll just concentrate on this first part.
Once again, we have a guy who would like to be in a committed relationship, but the object of his affections does not act that way (we don't know what she says or he says, just what she does), and he is frustrated by this, and realizes that he is fooling himself to think that the relationship is what he would like it to be. This much is an entirely reasonable sentiment by the standards of then or today. "The girl does what she wants to do" is reflecting that she is not committed to the relationship and acts independently.
However, the next line intrigues me in characterizing what he would like a relationship to be. "She knows what she wants to do". Maybe this means that she is not straying out of weakness, in which she recognizes that she hasn't lived up her commitments to him (whatever they are). Instead, she has chosen without shame to do whatever she is doing that he doesn't like. But it also might mean that in his ideal world, he is he expecting that she would accept his ideas of what she wants to do -- that she would follow his lead not just in what she does but what she wants. That in a successful relationship, she should want what he wants her to want. There is no recognition of a symmetrical process where he too would adapt his wants as a matter of simple compromise. This is a creepy sort of submission, to my way of thinking.
I will note that neither of these songs fits in with the idea of a patriarchal culture, where powerless women submit to men's desires for the benefit of men. He feels he is at her mercy and powerless to get what he wants because she is the one in charge. He never dreams of using violence or blackmail or any other unethical method to get what he wants. He just hopes that she will of her own free will choose to be committed to him. If she doesn't, he just has to accept it.
No comments:
Post a Comment