"I don't practice santaria..."

[quarrel]

"I ain't got no crystal ball.
 If I had a million dollars, well, I'd,
 I'd spend it all."

I was sitting in the hair salon when the cheery opening strains of this Top 40 Sublime song started wafting from the ceiling speakers. This song, in my opinion, has got to be one of the most disturbing songs I've ever had the mispleasure of hearing.

Yes, Marilyn Manson acts all freaky and sings songs about doing bad things to God and stuff, and Ozzy Ozbourne allegedly bites the heads off live bats (or did, back when he was under 70), and any number of rappers glamorize running from police and/or pre-emptively returning fire. The Offspring even have a cathartic song about road rage which I actually kind of like. So why am I upset by this chipper little ditty?

Well I'll tell ya. It starts with the words. If you listen carefully to the whole thing, the central message of the song is this:

"Tell that guy you're going out with, now that you've broken up with me, that I've got a gun now, and if I see him, I'll kill him."

Great. We've got a lovelorn individual threatening not the life of the woman who's dared to break up with him, but, instead, anyone she has the audacity to be friendly with. If that's not the mark of a sadistic, disturbed, immature individual, I don't know what is.

But it's not just the words. The whole song is deceptively light and melodic. In fact, it's in regular rotation on soft-rock stations. The singer delivers his lines with harmony and aplomb, in a casual voice that subliminally (heh) drills the message deep into the listener's hindbrain that his is a perfectly natural sentiment. It's normal to think this way.

Like I said: really, really creepy.

Comments

[donnaidh-sidhe.livejournal.com]

I think that that's a pretty cool way to write a song, actually. Instead of putting it to music that matches, it fucks with your mind. I like music/art/etc. that makes me double-take. And I don't doubt that the mindfuck was what the writer intended, rather than intending to make it seem perfectly okay to kill the people one's ex is interested in :). Of course, if there's a statement to the contrary, by all means point me towards it.

[quarrel.livejournal.com]

I think it's a cool way too, if it's done on purpose. It's the thing I like most about Rush's song "Nobody's Hero" off Counterparts: time after time, we're given examples of ordinary, mundane people who die in one way or another and are told it doesn't matter because they weren't exceptional...they never accomplished anything. But then, I know Neil Peart is an accomplished songwriter, and he's deliberately saying that to make you think to yourself, "Hey, that's not right. It does matter!"

Phil Ochs's "Outside of a Small Circle of Friends" (http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~trent/ochs/lyrics/small-circle-of-friends.html) does the same thing. So does Pink Floyd's "Free Four" off Obscured By Clouds. Just listening to "Santaria" though, without extensive knowledge of the band, I simply don't get the feeling that it was done intentionally. :/

[donnaidh-sidhe.livejournal.com]

Oh.

Bleh.

[katrus.livejournal.com]

See: Just about anything by Steely Dan. They do these soft, mellow songs about drug use and weird sex.

[silvermink.livejournal.com]

Yesterday morning at breakfast we were talking about how Steely Dan is named after a type of dildo. Yes, this is what passes for breakfast conversation in my circle of friends.