Over time, we’ve all had at least one song
that we’ve listened to, grooved along to, and
misinterpreted like there’s no tomorrow. It
happens. Like Dave Grohl of The Foo Fighters (and
formerly Nirvana) said, “That’s one of the great
things about music. You can sing a song to 85,000
people and they’ll sing it back for 85,000 different
reasons.” However, at times, one perhaps needs to
connect with the actual meaning of the song, and
then derive what it means to them.
Let us take a classic case for instance. The
39th President of the United States of America,
Jimmy Carter, once went as far as to say that John
Lennon’s much-lauded song, ‘Imagine’ was
“used almost equally
with national
anthems”.
However, the former Beatle’s ubiquitous hit, named
the Rolling Stone’s the third greatest song of all
time, is claimed to have some serious Communist
underpinnings, despite the feel-good sentiments
behind the song. Lennon’s hallmark lyrics were
described in writing, as “22 lines of graceful,
plain-spoken faith in the power of a world,
united in purpose, to repair and change itself.”
However, Lennon himself had previously referred
to the song as “virtually the Communist
manifesto”. Once the song became a hit,
he went on record saying, “Because
it’s sugar-coated, it’s accepted.
Now I understand what you have to do—put your
message across with a little honey.”
The same thing happens
in Goa. Recalling a case
of such a nature,
Ashly Fernandes,
of popular
band Purple
Rain shares
one of his
experiences.
“Once, for a wedding, the bride asked us for
‘Every Breath You Take’ as their bridal special.
So I asked her to go over the lyrics of the song
and explained to her it was a song about a
stalker, rather than a ballad. She came back to
me with a response of “yes we’ve heard it, but
my husband-to-be really liked the song so we
would like to go ahead with it.” Eventually we
sang the song for their bridal special but we
changed the lyrics a bit to suit the occasion,”
he says.
In similar vein, let’s talk about ‘the song’.
You know the one. The one every tourist sings
at a karaoke night in Goa; the one that local
bands still perform at every given show; the one
that teenagers lip sync to, though the odds of
even their parents having been around at the
time is questionable. Yes, we’re talking about
Bryan Adams’ ‘Summer of ‘69’. Here’s a fun fact.
Having been born in the winter of 1959 himself,
Bryan Adams would’ve only been 10 during the
eponymous summer. But ‘Summer of ’69’ isn’t
so much Adams waxing nostalgic over the dog
days of 1969. In 2008, Adams went on record
to say “A lot of people think it’s about the year,
but actually it’s more about making love in the
summertime. It’s a sexual reference.” However,
the song’s co-writer, Jim Vallance,
stands by the song
as a nostalgic
trip in a time
machine.
Closer to
home,
music aficionado Ovansian Coutinho talks about
his tryst with misinterpretation, saying, “At first
when I heard ‘A Team’ by Ed Sheeran, it sounded
like a simple folk song about an emotionally
troubled girl. But then I got to know that it’s a
song about a girl addicted to cocaine, which is the
reason why the songwriter used the alphabet A
in the title, since cocaine is considered an A class
drug.”
Another avid music listener and singersongwriter,
MJ De Mello says, “When I heard
‘Titanium’ by David Guetta for the first time, I felt
like the song was talking about a person stuck in a
war zone. However on listening to the lyrics clearly,
I understood that the song is talking about how
the person is as strong as titanium and can’t be
brought down by the battles one faces in life.”
So the next time you’ve got a song stuck in
your head, it is best that you check out what it
means. Otherwise, unlike the songwriters who
intended the song to be one that represented
the apartheid era in South Africa, you may
be left hanging on hope that you expect to
come from a woman called Jo’anna.
