How many of these did you know already?
Born in the USA (Bruce Springsteen): This song is not a patriotic anthem. It’s a rather depressing tune about a veteran who’s having a hard time in life. Extra points for the Reagan campaign cluelessly using an anti-America song as their theme.
More Than Words (Extreme): This is not a touching love song about declaring emotions. It’s about getting laid. If you screw me, that will show your love more than words will.
Won’t Get Fooled Again (The Who): This is one of the all-time anthems, an eight minute lesson in aggression and defiance. Or so you would think from the music. The message is truly about acceptance, and is passive. In the story this song comes from, the good guys have finally deposed the bad guys and everything is okay. Only it’s not, the new boss is the same as the old boss, the slogans on the left are the same as the slogans on the right, everything is the same as ever. Oh well, that’s how it goes, smile and grin at the change all around me, I won’t get fooled again. I won’t get fooled by revolutionary rhetoric and the idea that anything really changes. Kind of a downer, really.
Every Breath You Take (The Police): Not a love song, a psychopathic stalker song.
Norwegian Wood (Beatles): This is a song about arson. The girl won’t put out, so her house gets burnt down.
Paul McCartney explained that the term “Norwegian Wood” was an ironic reference to the cheap pine wall panelling then in vogue in London. McCartney commented on the final verse of the song: “In our world the guy had to have some sort of revenge. It could have meant I lit a fire to keep myself warm, and wasn’t the decor of her house wonderful? But it didn’t, it meant I burned the fucking place down as an act of revenge, and then we left it there and went into the instrumental.
The Beatles were drawing a rich tradition of threatening violence to exes. Try this one, a great old blues song, but the lyrics — wow.
At least Norwegian Wood is subtle. John Lennon later lamented Run for your Life, which was pretty darn direct. I’d rather see you dead little girl than to be with another man …
So — hand play? 3rd base? Close enough…. either way it’s not a sentimental love song.
I’ve heard that interpretation of More Than Words, but I disagree with it. Physicality, yes, but not necessarily sex.