Happy Valentine's Day: Here's a Piece About Love Songs From My Book, "I Love Rock 'n' Roll (Except When I Hate It)"

Valentine’s Day is less than two weeks away, so you’re going to need to buy something for that special someone, or something special for someone, or, if you’re all alone, something for yourself. The perfect gift, for somebody who loves music, books, humor, but especially music books with humor, is I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll (Except When I Hate It): Extremely Important Stuff About the Songs and Bands You Love, Hate, Love to Hate, and Hate to Love. It’s got hundreds of pages of interesting stories and trivia about rock and pop music, including the true, misunderstood meanings behind famous tunes.

Like these: songs that one might think are super-romantic, super-sexy love songs that are appropriate for your smooth, get-down Valentine’s Day Mix Tape, but are, in fact, fairly horrifying if placed in a romantic context. (This comes from an article called “That Song, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.” Go buy the book.)

IT’S ABOUT HEROIN, NOT A GIRL. “There She Goes” by the La’s failed to make much of an impression when it was first released in 1988, but in 1990 it became a minor hit upon re-release. It ultimately became an all-time pop classic because of its bouncy hook and playful lyrics, presumably about a pretty girl the singer is crushing on, so much so that she’s even coursing through his veins. Our narrator is in love, but the “she” is most likely sweet lady H (heroin, not Preparation). In M. W. Macefield’s 2003 book In Search of the La’s, La’s guitarist Paul Hemmings flat-out dismissed the idea that “There She Goes” was about anything other than an adorable hipster girl, while the song’s writer, La’s singer Lee Mavers, has never explicitly said if it is or if it is not about drugs, but then his word isn’t all that reliable, as he’s been rumored to have an on-again, off-again relationship with, uh, heroin. Presumably, when the song was covered in 1999 by crossover Christian pop band Sixpence None the Richer, the group had no idea it was about horse. And it’s certain that nobody at Ortho-McNeil Pharmaceutical knew the song’s real meaning when the company licensed the Sixpence version for use in a commercial for Ortho Tri-Cyclen, a birth control pill. So when you think of Christian bands unwittingly endorsing birth control pills, laugh harder, because they’re also unwittingly endorsing heroin. 
 


IT’S ABOUT FAT WOMEN, NOT STRONG WOMEN. In 2008, Hallmark introduced a line of greeting cards with sound chips inside that played familiar songs when opened. One card, for example, had written out on the front “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away … you were born” and then the Star Wars theme plays. Wockawocka. A Mother’s Day card, meanwhile, intended to go to a person’s wife, was embedded with the Commodores’ funk classic “Brick House.” Hallmark overlooked the fact that calling a woman a “brick house” is not a reference to her moral strength, nor is it a lustful admiration of her womanly figure. No, “she’s a brick house” was a ’70s slang term that basically meant “thoroughly and sizably built,” that is, fat. And this was supposed to go to a person’s wife, on Mother’s Day.
 


IT’S ABOUT SEX, NOT LOVE. The kind of girl who is impressed by the kind of guy who breaks out an acoustic guitar at a party is the kind of girl who loves Extreme’s “More Than Words,” which is the kind of song played by the kind of guy who breaks out an acoustic guitar at a party to impress a girl. It may sound sweet and romantic, but Extreme singer-songwriter Gary Cherone told VH1 that he wrote it from the point of view of a woman frustrated by her emotionless, romantic gesture–averse boyfriend, and how she wishes he would do something more grand and powerful beyond words … like playing her “More Than Words” on an acoustic guitar, for example. 
  


IT’S ABOUT STALKING, NOT ROMANCE. Another favorite of assholes with acoustic guitars is “Crash Into Me,” the pretty ballad that got the Dave Matthews Band a ton of mainstream attention in 1996. But just because it’s slow and driven by an acoustic guitar doesn’t make it a love song. Matthews said on his episode of VH1 Storytellers, in which songwriters explicitly admit what their songs are about, that “Crash Into Me” was written from the perspective “of a Peeping Tom” watching a girl at night through her bedroom window. The lyrics also command a woman to pull up her skirt and show off the goods, which sounds kind of rapey.