Yesterday I watched a marching band performance; the theme for that show was Woodstock, so they played songs that apparently were played at Woodstock. Two of them had eccentric/inscrutable/"abstract" titles, or so I thought. Titles don't really necessarily convey a ton of information about a song, especially if you have no idea what corresponding the lyrics are.
Hence, the titles "Proud Mary" and "Pinball Wizard" seemed very abstract and inscrutable to me. I thought maybe they were supposed to be metaphorical or something, but I was thinking too deeply about it. Neither are actually metaphorical. The phrases are eccentric/unusual enough that I thought they could be metaphorical. More straightforward phrases as song titles are less prone to such thoughts.
"Proud Mary" is actually an impressively boring and sedate song when not arranged for band, i.e., the original Creedence Clearwater Revival version (as a tangent, I had to look up the etymology of that band name. It's on Wikipedia). It was way more boring than I expected it'd be after hearing it played by a marching band. Kind of like how the Killers ripped off part of a Smiths song and massively improved on it! [ETA: the Dandy Warhols ripped off (or, 'paid homage to') part of a David Bowie song and also improved on it]
I thought, "Proud Mary, what the hell is that supposed to mean? Is it a person? Who is she?" I thought maybe it had some weird religious aspect to it also. Turns out in the song it's the name of a boat...
Bad Moon Rising, the only other CCR song I know of -- it's jauntier and therefore somewhat less bad/boring, but I still wouldn't go out of my way to listen to it; the only reason I care is because the Killers have covered this song in the past.
Pinball Wizard I also thought could be a metaphorical title, because it's an odd/unusual phrase, but it isn't metaphorical. The song apparently is about some guy who's very good at pinball... how insipid, I thought.
Admittedly, perhaps a title like "Not If You Were the Last Junkie On Earth" could also be considered insipid, but that song is pretty amusing, to me... and the music video!
"New Dawn Fades," while somewhat abstract, provides concrete imagery. As a phrase new (adj., self-explanatory), dawn, (noun, also self-explanatory), fades (verb, self-explanatory too!) conveys an idea. New dawn fades. A new dawn that's fading. While the title isn't mentioned in the song, I think that it fits with the whole Joy Division theme.
"With or Without You" (U2) is pretty... straightforward as well, I think.
Color me not so big on classic rock. Or at least some of it. "She's a Rainbow," which I heard in a car commercial (I don't really get what this song has to do with advertising cars) is a pretty decent song though.
No comments:
Post a Comment