Ask Lemmy

99 luftballoons is similar.

The 80s was oddly dark.

I, as a child, did a music class presentation on "my favourite song of the year" on this little ditty.

Whoops!

Edit: To clarify, then, much like now, I listened to the music and not the lyrics. I don't know if that's common at all, but the singing is basically another instrument to me, and I hardly ever pay attention to the actual words.

Do you maybe mean "Every Breath You Take" by The Police? That's a common answer to this kind of question. A lot of people think of it as cute and romantic at first, but the song really talk about the Big Brother (from George Orwell's 1984): a state of constant surveillance watching "every breath you take, every move you make".

It's not. It's about a guy who can't beat jealousy and believes he's being cheated on "except it's all in [his] head"

No, it's a song about a nice guy not getting his crush.

Oh fuck, no way.

Ok, I read thenlink and the bassist was an opely total piece of shit before joining the band but I didn't see anyhing about the AoB songs being hidden propaganda or the rest of the band's history. Where does the speculation come from?

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.

Dude the south lost and slavery is bad. I’m sorry

WTF? Don't be sorry about that!

I know it's just sort of a reflexive idiomatic politeness, but still, it is really important to make it absolutely crystal clear how irredeemably contemptible the "lost cause" shit take is, at every opportunity. Never, ever be polite about it!

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.

Yeah I used to love MSI and never really listened to the lyrics closely. Dude covers songs by black artists and straight up sings the N word.

See also his cover of "Big Poppa"

The more I looked into Jimmy Urine, the more problematic it got, like grooming a teenage girl.

Dang. Just looked it up. It's a song about a girl he met once and was dating someone else, but he still wrote a damn ballad and sent her a copy. Then she had to live her life surrounded by a song about a stranger's feelings for her.

And looking at the lyrics, they're sweet if said about a long-distance partner, but really weird to sing to a vague acquaintence.

Scott Weiland was compelled to write the lyrics after an incident in which a girl he was dating was raped by three high school football players after a party. Thus, Weiland has stated the song is an anti-rape statement, not a song simply about sex, saying: "This song is really not about sex at all. It’s about control, violence and abuse of power."

Weiland found himself in the position of defending "Sex Type Thing" to individuals who took the first-person approach he used in the song ("I am a man, a man/I'll give ya something that ya won't forget/I said ya shouldn't have worn that dress") literally. "It was, 'All right, the "Cop Killer" controversy's dead, let's try to find something else,' " says Weiland, who has been outspoken in the press about women's rights and contends that he wrote the song in the mind-set of what he has called "the typical American macho jerk" because he didn't want to sound peachy. "I never thought that people would ever seriously think that I was an advocate of date rape."

I think pumped up kicks is actually a really poignant statement on how normalized gun violence is in the states, to the point where this song was all over radios and I'm sure all over high school dances and nobody thought twice about it. Like obviously the band did it intentionally but the fact that the point was missed so hard by everyone who sang along. It is like Hey Ya vibes to me, or smells like teen spirit for the older crowds. The point is to take these very serious ideas and use them to highlight people's willful ignorance.

From genius.com : "The original inspiration for the lyrics came from David Lee Roth watching a person on TV who was threatening to commit suicide by jumping off of a building and Roth figured someone in the crowd must be thinking, “Go ahead and jump”. It was, however, not written about suicide – the song is about ‘jumping’ on the opportunity to hook up with someone."

Though I can see where you got that.