Nusrat Jahan Progga
Do you sometimes find a very cheery song that’s fun to head bang to or a very depressing song that makes you think of your ex or that pretty pair of shoes that didn’t fit you or how pizza doesn’t grow on trees? Well, guess what? Some songs, regardless of how cheery or depressing they are, have a very dark back story!
• Lola, The Kinks- The song is a retelling of Davies seeing the band’s manager at the time, Robert Wace, spending the night with a transvestite. It is full of hints towards this hidden theme, throughout its darkly humourous lyrics, such as the narrator’s confusion upon meeting Lola for the first time – “Well I’m not dumb but I can’t understand, why she walked like a woman and talked like a man” and again in the fourth verse – “Girls will be boys and boys will be girls”. Both lyrics comically pointed out the confusion felt by Wace upon the realisation that the woman he was dancing with had stubble.
• Town Called Malice, The Jam- the song is in fact a cynical look at growing up in an English working class background, highlighting the choices that had to be made when living on a low income and questioning the morality of people as they put their own happiness before the essentials when living in those circumstances.
• Diamond Smiles, the Boom Town Rats- when this was released as a follow up, what people heard at first was simply the poppy guitars accompanied by Geldof’s retelling of an aristocratic girl heading to a party. Which is what the first half of the song is about yes, however in the second it evolves into something much darker lyrically. It becomes apparent that the song is in fact about the paranoia the girl feels in the party and eventually culminates in her suicide. et still this surprises the listener as without paying very close attention to the lyrics before hand there is no hint towards the song being centered around suicide.
• 99 Red Balloons, Nena- This is a song about the apocalypse essentially. The lyrics in fact describe the idea that whilst the Berlin wall was standing what would happen if someone was to release a bag of balloons from the East Berlin (Controlled by Soviet Union) and they flew into West Berlin (controlled by Germans) setting off the Early Warning System and thus starting a nuclear war. The idea was allegedly conceived by the band’s guitarist at a Rolling Stone’s gig who saw a mass of balloons in the air and believed it resembled a large spacecraft, which he believed the German’s sensors would not be able to differentiate from an enemy aircraft.
• Shiny Happy People, R.E.M- the video looks like it came straight from an early morning children’s cartoon. However, when faced with the reality of what the song is about, it becomes apparent that this was an intentional choice by the band to add to the irony of the title. The title and chorus of the song is taken directly from a Chinese propaganda poster which when translated had written on it “Shiny happy people holding hands”. The reason for using this was mostly due to the timing, a mere two years after the Tienanmen Square uprising, where the same government who were promoting their citizens to become “Shiny Happy People” slaughtered hundreds of student demonstrators.
• Pumped Up Kicks, Foster The People- the song is about a mentally unstable youth as he plans to shoot up his high school. This is made evident in the songs chorus in which the youth issues a warning to his potential victims that “You better run, better run, better outrun my gun” and also “You better run, better run, faster than my bullet”. Ironically this is one of the few sections in which Mark Foster’s vocals are clearest, yet lyrically the most notable for exploiting the songs theme of anti gun violence.