Eminem “Same Song and Dance”–NOT About Raping Girls

“Same Song and Dance” is NOT about Eminem raping girls, it’s a message to women about the crazy men they will attract if they don’t respect themselves. In this rap, Eminem is playing a serial killer/rapist/womanizer  who keeps telling girls to “do that dance and shake that ass” because “it’s the last dance you’ll ever do.” Translation: keep acting like a whore and you’ll be treated like one. More importantly, they’ll be raped.

Here’s a line that really stuck out for me.

“You aint never gonna break that glass, the windshield’s too strong for you.” Apparently a lot of girls think it will never happen to them or that they’ll be able to fight back. Here’s Em hitting home with some common sense, yeah right.

A lot of women’s libbers give Em a hard time for his lyrics being hard on women, personally I think that this is a direct message to women that men respect women and not whores.

Now I’m not saying that women don’t have a right to express themselves, dance provocatively, or wear attractive clothing, they can be just as risqué as guys and are well within their right to be, but there’s a difference between a whore and a go-go dancer and even someone just having a good time.

Same song and dance—happens time and time again.

Rob Thomas- Her Diamonds: About Being Helpless

Rob Thomas confirmed that this song was inspired by his wife’s battle with an auto-immune disease. The voice of this song is a man trying to help a woman who is crying “tears like diamonds on the floor” but “[he] don’t know what [he's] supposed to do, so [he] sits down and [he] cries too.” It is constantly echoed that they are facing a problem they don’t know how to deal with, and they don’t know how to help each other through it. “Hard to see them on the ground” refering to the tears on the ground but also how hard they are struggling. The fear of not knowing what to do is paralyzing, like being frozen. Helplessness is like being encased in ice and the lines “if she can find daylight, she’ll be alright, just not tonight” echo a struggle that everyone experiences at some point in their lives that takes strength you just don’t have at that moment.

Wikipedia has said that Rob says this song is about being frozen by fear, but as far as I have searched he has not directly outright said this song is just about being “frozen by fear,” nor that that is the central theme. Centrally it’s about his wife’s struggle with disease, but to put it in generic terms it is about being frozen by helplessness. I guess fear is part of being helpless, if someone finds the link to where Rob said that from Wikipedia, post it up.

Hollywood Undead “Undead”- About Jaded High School Rappers

Hollywood Undead is what happens when you eliminate the record label and some form of professional artistic selection in the signing of bands. They literally got famous off Myspace, proof that if you get enough little kids to listen to you, you’ll make lots of money. I knew the Church was up to something when it indoctrinated little kids!

Hollywood Undead’s song “Undead” (and oh how originally titled) is a knock-off of just about every famous rapper who ever lived. “Oh I’m jaded because no one ever listened to my lyrics and when they did they bashed me well you know what F-U!”

I THOUGHT there MIGHT have been a redeeming quality and something remotely resembling a deeper meaning in this song when I once again misheard its lyrics. Blame me, it’s rap. I thought I heard “cause we are someplace anyway,” meaning they don’t need people to tell them “you’re going to go places kid, you’re going someplace,” and don’t care when people say “you’ll never go anywhere, give up, quit dreaming” because they are someplace anyway.

HOWEVER, what the song actually said was “Cause we are gonna rock this whole place anyway.” Oh, what a surprise, they don’t give an F-word what you think or say because they’re going to rock this whole place anyway. Why is it that whenever artists diss their fanbase, they make millions?

Colplay “Viva La Vida”– About God

When this song first hit the airwaves, I was blown away. What a powerful song with such an illusive message. Coldplay was my hero for a moment…then I realized I had misread ONE word in the lyrics and it changed everything.

At first, I heard the line as “For some reason I can’t explain, I know Saint Peter WILL call my name.” The entire song had been talking about a king who’d lost his kingdom for whatever reason, bad decisions in life, poor choices, and that he realizes now what he did wrong. The entire melody had an apologetic feeling to it, the king, or whoever the king represented, was sorry for whatever happened. Then the uplifting course filled the audience with hope, suggesting that the king was doing what he could to right his wrongs.

“For some reason I can’t explain, I know Saint Peter will call my name,” said to me that “I don’t know how and I can’t explain it but I know I’m doing something right and that deep down I know I’m a good person.” It was like a light at the end of a dark tunnel to all this self-loathing cynicism that it means to be human nowadays. It meant that people could change and even if we’re the lowest scum of the earth or sleeping in the gutter, we can turn around and be good people.

I also took it to mean something personal to the band itself. Coldplay dropped off the grid for a loooong time, their name almost fell out of household use, I think the last song I remember hearing by them was “Yellow” back when I was in like seventh grade. Everything they had kind of disintegrated on “pillars of sand” but now they’re coming back. “For some reason I can’t explain, I know Saint Peter will call my name,” said that they might not be sure what the future holds for them or if they’re doing the right thing, but they love what they’re doing and somehow they know that it’s going to turn out okay.

THEN…I reread the lyrics. The actual wording of the line is “For some reason I can’t explain, I know Saint Peter WON’T call my name.”

For fuck sake, it’s just another song lamenting life and all the things you did or didn’t do. Like we’ve never heard that one before. Coldplay, you ruled the world for a moment, then my reverence for you disintegrated on pillars of sand.

The Fray “You Found Me”– Not About Finding God

I’m sorry I’m unable to load the actual music video, embedding has been disabled on youtube but here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obhdTlImFBo

Lyrics:

I found god
On the corner of First and Amistad
Where the west was all but won
All alone, smoking his last cigarette
I Said where you been, he said ask anything
Where were you?
When everything was falling apart
All my days were spent by the telephone
It never rang
And all I needed was a call
That never came
To the corner of first and Amistad

Lost and insecure
You found me, you found me
Lying on the floor
Surrounded, surrounded
Why’d you have to wait?
Where were you? Where were you?
Just a little late
You found me, you found me

In the end everyone ends up alone
Losing her, the only one who’s ever known
Who I am, who I’m not, who I want to be
No way to know how long she will be next to me

Lost and insecure
You found me, you found me
Lying on the floor
Surrounded, surrounded
Why’d you have to wait?
Where were you, where were you?
Just a little late
You found me, you found me

Early morning, City breaks
I’ve been calling for years and years and years and years
And you never left me no messages
You never send me no letters
You got some kind of nerve, taking all I want

Lost and insecure
You found me, you found me
Lying on the floor
Where were you where were you

Lost and insecure
You found me, you found me
Lying on the floor
Surrounded, surrounded
Why’d you have to wait?
Where were you, where were you?
Just a little late
You found me, you found me

Why’d you have to wait?
To find me, to find me

The Fray dropped off the grid for a while, but we all knew that when they came back, they’d explode onto the scene. This new song “You Found Me” is not about finding God, it is about not finding God, or moreover about God not finding us.

In the music video, paramedics arrive on the scene of a girl lying on the ground. The camera pans up to an open window and we realize she had jumped. Isaac Slade is singing on a rooftop, but I do not think he is singing on behalf of himself or of the girl, more like on behalf of us. He is asking God where he was when he needed him and why God never came to find him. When Isaac says he “found God” on the corner of First and Amastad, he means he died on the corner of First and Amastad because that’s where he jumped.

Isaac insists that God did find him by singing “you found me, lying on the floor…” Then he asks “Why’d you have to wait? Where were you? You were a little late.” When he says God found him lying on the floor, he is saying that he had died, he went to meet God. He is frustrated because God waited until it didn’t matter anymore to find him. He died or something in him died and God wasn’t there, no one was there.

This song deals with society’s frustration with the concept of faith, that if we are good people, good things should happen, but in the real world it doesn’t always work out that way even though it should. Bad things happen to good people, and we as a society have trouble understanding why such a good and righteous god would allow such things to happen like that. The Church comes up with all kinds of theories to justify it, but in the end, everyone’s alone and no one knows why and it isn’t fair. To go even deeper, God could also be a metaphor for society itself. People only found the girl after she’d jumped, paramedics only showed up after she was dead, everyone only cared after it was too late. This is a sad truth about our culture that leads us to ask the question, why?

I don’t really pick up on atheistic morals in the song, the lyrics only slightly hint at the possibility that maybe there is no God at all. The song is connecting us in our universal frustration. In conclusion, “You Found Me” is about our frustration with squaring the way we’ve been told things are with the way things actually are.