What on earth are they on about?
There's a group called OMD, which stands for Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, who wrote a song called Enola Gay. I can remember when the song came out because that was when I learned what an atomic bomb was. I was told that the Enola Gay was the aeroplane that carried the bomb used to destroy Hiroshima and then a lot of detail about what exactly happened when it did. It was the eighties and there was a lot of paranoia about global nuclear war. But the thing I remember the most was not being able to understand what the lyrics really meant.
On the other hand, the Ultravox song Dancing With Tears In My Eyes made much more sense. It is also about the end of the world but the lines of the song show this more clearly, and the video that went with it left me with no doubts.
Every now and then someone writes a pop song that is just plain weird. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. It's great fun racking my brains trying to make head or tail of what the songwriter is on about. Later, sometimes after several years, I discover something new either about the group or the topic of the song. That's when everything falls into place and I think "Ah, NOW I see!".
Take the song China In Your Hands, by T'Pau. The first line is confusing enough: "It was a theme she had on a scheme he had, told in a foreign land", but by the time they reach the chorus I'm thinking "Wait a minute. Say that last bit again, will you?". By the way, it's about Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.
How about this: "I'm your only friend. I'm not your only friend but I'm a little glowing friend but really I'm not actually your friend but I am…"? The title might help (it's called Birdhouse In Your Soul), or it might not. The group, They Might Be Giants, wrote it about a bedside lamp (a bird-shaped light that young children who are afraid of the dark keep in their bedrooms while they sleep).
And why does Neil Tennant sing "we never calculate the currency we spent. I love you. You pay my rent"? It turns out that he is singing from the perspective of a woman in a relationship with a rich man who she is not married to. If you can understand that sentence then you should be able to understand the rest of the song Rent by Pet Shop Boys.
On the other hand, "I sold the Renoir and the TV set. Don't want to be around when this gets out", which comes from The Reflex (by Duran Duran), has a number of different interpretations. Some of them I can't print in a newspaper that children might be reading. Simon Le Bon (the lead singer) was so fed up with people asking him "What is The Reflex about?" that he decided to stop writing obscure lyrics. I wish he'd write some more. Ordinary World may be a very good song, but it doesn't play with your imagination the way Union Of The Snake does.
Grammar note:
The BBC, which stands for British Broadcasting Corporation, is over eighty years old.
Lee Harvey Oswald was the man who shot John F Kennedy.
The underlined words are called relative clauses. They give extra information in the sentence. What is the difference between these two examples?
Which paragraphs have other examples?
KEY
If you remove the first one, the sentence still makes sense. It doesn't work with the second.
There are relative clauses in every paragraph except the 4th one.
Glossary
to stand for oznaczać
doubt wątpliwość
every now and then od czasu do czasu
weird dziwny
to rack your brains łamać sobie głowę
to make head or tail of something = to understand
to glow jarzyć się
obscure niejasny
Did you know?
When The Beatles released I Wanna Hold Your Hand some people mistook the line "I can't hide" for "I get high" (which is about taking drugs). Some medical students listening to the song Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds thought the line "the girl with kaleidoscope eyes" was "the girl with colitis goes by" (colitis is a digestive illness).
The song I Like Chinese by Monty Python sounds innocent, but it has a couple of verses in Mandarin. They are extremely rude words.
Bob Dylan was asked why he had written "People don't live or die. People just float". He answered: "Because it rhymes with coat".