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Cake day: July 25th, 2024

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  • I posted this in a different comment thread on this post, but I would be interested to hear your perspective:

    While they aren’t generally stylistically complex, some songs with complex nonsense lyrics seem, at least to me as a young American, to be the ones that are simultaneously easiest to appreciate for a great many people, and also have huge staying power, despite being quite old. For example:
    American Pie
    Hotel California
    We Didn’t Start the Fire
    Don’t Stop Believing
    Bohemian Rhapsody (or, really, most things by Queen)
    These, at least among the places I’ve been here in America, are the ones to which everyone in the bar starts singing along. Sure, these have underlying meaning, or make references to specific events, but in my experience, most of the people I hear singing and dancing to these have no idea what they’re referencing, and often don’t even know the words. Perhaps it is simply that they are so overplayed that they get those “multiple listens” of which you speak? Or is there something inherently compelling in the seeking of meaning in complex, random lyrics, such that people are immediately drawn in?


  • While they aren’t generally stylistically complex, some songs with complex nonsense lyrics seem, at least to me as a young American, to be the ones that are simultaneously easiest to appreciate for a great many people, and also have huge staying power, despite being quite old. For example:
    American Pie
    Hotel California
    We Didn’t Start the Fire
    Don’t Stop Believing
    Bohemian Rhapsody (or, really, most things by Queen)

    These, at least among the places I’ve been here in America, are the ones to which everyone in the bar starts singing along. Sure, these have underlying meaning, or make references to specific events, but in my experience, most of the people I hear singing and dancing to these have no idea what they’re referencing, and often don’t even know the words. Perhaps it is simply that they are so overplayed that they get those “multiple listens” of which you speak? Or is there something inherently compelling in the seeking of meaning in complex, random lyrics, such that people are immediately drawn in?











  • I am! Because the fact that his family, the figures he looked up to, and he himself, all directly benefitted from the system of apartheid that was a specific integral part of the system in South Africa from which they derived their gains?

    That is relevant in the same way that saying “he was born in Alabama in the 1850s, is the son of a slaveholding knight of the golden circle, and owns a lot of bedsheets with eyeholes cut in them” would be a valid set of concerns, all of which can be used as valid identifiers that, why, yes, these add together to paint a picture of the culture that this hypothetical man is most likely to espouse. So when he “accidentally” lights a cross on fire while holding a rope with a slipknot in his offhand, do we really think that the tied slipknot at the end of his rope is to lead cattle, or is it more likely that he intends to lynch someone?