5 Songs Secretly About Tragedies

5 This Year’s Olympic Anthem Is About a Plane Crashing in the Atlantic

The opening ceremony to this year’s Olympics was full of wackiness. We read that Gojira showed up, and we said, “Sure, why not,” only later learning that that’s the name of a heavy metal band and wasn’t someone dressed as a giant Japanese lizard. The opening also featured a song called “Hymne à l’amour” performed by Celine Dion. There was no way to tell what it was about because it was in French, and who in the world speaks French? 

This performance had some tragic undertones because Dion now has a neurological condition. She hadn’t performed publicly in four years, and we don’t know how many times she’ll perform again. But right now, we’re more interested in what originally inspired the song, which was written by Édith Piaf in 1949.

Back then, Piaf and boxer Marcel Cerdan were having an affair. Cerdan had a wife and a couple kids, but he and Piaf were pretty open about their relationship, as everyone involved was French, and the French are cool with such arrangements. Piaf went to New York to do a concert, and on October 28th, Cerdan got on a plane to fly over and see her. The plane crashed in the Azores, killing all 48 aboard. Piaf went on to record “Hymne à l'amour,” dedicated to her recently deceased lover.

Dion may have sung this song for Paris because Piaf is a French icon. Though, the song was also performed at the Tokyo Olympics. That’s surprising because it’s not (as you might speculate) about perseverance but simply about giving up everything for love. “I will renounce my country if you ask me to,” says the song, which isn’t quite in line the Olympic spirit. “I will dye my hair blonde if you ask me to,” it also says, which is an odd thing to hear from anyone, especially Celine Dion. 

“As long as my body will tremble under your hands,” says the song. We know we said earlier that all songs are either about sex or sadness and death, but a song can also be about all three. 

4 ‘Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover’ Is About Domestic Violence

Going just by the chorus, Sophie B. Hawkins’ “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” is saying, simply, “I wish I had you because I want you.” We’ve had lots of songs about wanting someone who’s in a relationship, and most of them come with the assurance that “I can treat you better.” This one goes a little further, in that the object of the song is being abused. It’s right there in the verses — “can't stand to see you black and blue,” says the song — but a lot of people don’t listen to verses.

The song’s meaning became a point of discussion recently when interviewers told Hawkins it was now a lesbian anthem. The repeated line “Free your mind and you won’t feel ashamed” apparently set that off, but if people were looking for LGBTQ+ themes in the song, you’d think the line “And I lay by the ocean making love to her” would be more of a smoking gun. The situation in the song was “triggered by events in my childhood,” says Hawkins. She doesn’t get more specific than that, but she left home at 14 to move in with a 40-year-old man, and this was an escape from earlier abuse. 

The serious background of the song casts a new light on some less-than-serious renditions of the song. Like from Community, where Troy and Abed ask Hawkins to change the words. They make it “Damn, I Wish I Had Some Ice Cream” and “Damn I Wish Abed Was Batman” — without changing the verses of course, because people don’t listen to verses.

This was during that weird season of Community, when the writing staff changed. Maybe the usual version of Community would have had a character interrupt that conversation to point out what the song’s really about. Or maybe a character would point out that a celebrity sweeping in to save the day is a cliché. Still, this is remembered as the best episode of that season, so maybe not everything needs to be meta. 

3 Sarah McLachlan’s ‘Angel’ Is About the Allure of Death by Heroin

Here’s a song you already associate with sadness. “Angel” by Sarah McLachlan is now perhaps best known as the soundtrack to a bunch of ASPCA videos. Below is one of the less depressing of these ads (others include more mutilated animals and fewer hugs).

Indeed, the famous ads seem sadder than the song itself, which is about finding comfort “in the arms of the angel.” Comfort from what, though? McLachlan didn’t answer that question until 2014, almost 20 years after the song came out. 

The song was inspired by the death of Jonathan Melvoin, who played keyboard for the Smashing Pumpkins. He fatally overdosed on heroin in 1996. He was shooting up that night with Pumpkins drummer Jimmy Chamberlin, whom the band fired soon thereafter. They didn’t fire him because they blamed him for Melvoin’s death or because the police charged him with possession. They fired him because they figured that if he stuck with the band, he’d go on doing heroin and would probably wind up dead, too. 

So, “Angel” was another tribute to the fallen, like several other hits from around then, like “One Sweet Day” and “I’ll Be Missing You”? Not exactly. McLachlan never knew Melvoin. She read about his death in Rolling Stone. The song isn’t about someone mourning Melvoin’s death and seeking comfort in religion. It’s about someone (like Melvoin) in a hotel room seeking comfort through heroin. This search for pain relief ends in death, and isn’t that the ultimate relief, says the song?

“Angel” is therefore not necessarily an appropriate anthem for cats and dogs whose salvation lies in adoption. Though, we suppose it’s actually a most appropriate anthem for the many such pets whose salvation instead comes from a needle. 

2 The ‘Dancing in the Moonlight’ Guy’s Face Had Just Been Smashed Open

“Dancing in the Moonlight” — made famous by King Harvest in 1972 and then by Toploader in 2000 — is a very happy song. You’ve heard it in countless movies like Guardians of the Galaxy, where it sets a happy scene. Wait, sorry: We lied. It didn’t appear in any of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies because so many people requested for it to that James Gunn figured that was the obvious choice and made sure to leave it out. 

“Everybody here is out of sight,” says the song. “They don't bark, and they don't bite.” That’s kind of a weird thing to say in your happy dance song. Sure, it’s nice that no one’s barking or biting, but this feels like a suspiciously specific denial. We weren’t worrying before that this crowd might attack us. Should we have? The assurances continue. “We like our fun, and we never fight,” says the singer. This is starting to sound awfully like this guy is very concerned about constructing a narrative in which the people around him at night aren’t violent.

He had good reason for that. Sherman Kelly wrote the song while in the hospital following an attack from a street gang. He and his girlfriend (whose name we don’t know) were in St. Croix for a day, and they couldn’t get a hotel room because they’d mistakenly left all their money on the boat. One innkeeper said he’d give them a room for free, in exchange for sex with the girlfriend. This didn’t sound like a good deal, so the couple took their chances on the beach. 

They encountered a group of locals, who’d later be dubbed the Fountain Valley Gang. This gang raped the girlfriend and beat Kelly with baseball bats, breaking the bones in his face. A couple of the attackers would later murder eight people at a nearby golf course, an incident known as the Fountain Valley massacre.

When recovering from something like that, you really find yourself saying, “Wouldn’t it be nice if the next people we see in the moonlight just want to dance?”

1 ‘Save the Last Dance for Me’ Is About the Singer’s Paralysis

Quite a few songs about dancing are dark. That includes not only “Dancing in the Dark” but also all those songs about people dancing on their own and even “Just Dance” by Lady Gaga. As always, we urge you to listen to the verses, and the song’s meaning will generally become obvious. Or if that doesn’t work, ask YouTubers to edit the song to make the tone clearer.

Then there’s “Save the Last Dance for Me,” originally recorded by the Drifters in 1960. You might have heard cover versions by various artists, or some of you might only know it for inspiring the title of the movie Save the Last Dance. It’s about a guy at a dance, saying his lady can and will dance with various guys there, and he’s fine with that. But ultimately, she’s coming home with him, and they’re having sex tonight. So, save the last dance for him, the “last dance” being sex.

Some people will dispute that final bit of our interpretation, but the rest is unambiguous, and it raises a question: Why isn’t he dancing with her right now? Does he not like dancing? He describes the two of them as being “apart,” but he’s surely at the same venue as her, as he’ll be taking her home later. Either that or he’s home and picking her up later, but that just raises further questions. 

Here’s the explanation: Songwriter Doc Pomus was paralyzed from polio. His inspiration for this song was his own wedding day in 1957, in which he was unable to dance with his bride, since he was stuck in a wheelchair. She danced with other guys there, including his brother, but not with him. This especially stung because she was a professional dancer, who’d go on to dance on Broadway, so dancing with her husband at her wedding had been a pretty strong expectation of hers.

Today, the normal thing for him to do in such a situation would be to roll onto the dance floor and dance, from his chair, but people were weirder about that sort of thing back then. We also have better wheelchairs nowadays. We’ve also all but eliminated polio, which is nice. Paralytic polio is a thing of the past, like the Great Plague.

Hey — a song about dancing that’s really about a horrible disease. We found it after all. The legends spoke true. 

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