Sarcastic Songs Everyone Takes Seriously

We often forget that pop music is just poetry performed by hot people

Irony is the lifeblood of poetry and literature, and we often forget that pop music is just poetry performed by hot people. As a result, we tend to take their work at face value, even when it’s more sarcastic than Daria Morgandorffer at the Goop summit.

‘Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)’ by Green Day

Judging by the number of graduations where the song is played, a lot of people don’t realize “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” is actually a really mean breakup song, despite, you know, that title. “It sounds like I’m trying really hard to be level-headed,” Billie Joe Armstrong said about the song. Basically, you can add “you bitch” to the end of every seemingly thoughtful line.

‘Hip to Be Square’ by Huey Lewis and the News

“Hip to Be Square” seems like a celebration of all things lame, but it’s actually making fun of the hippies of the ‘60s and ‘70s trading in their ideals and expanded minds for material comforts and good health. “I thought it would be funnier in the first person, but I kinda mistold the joke a little bit and I think some people thought that, in fact, it was an anthem for square people,” Lewis later said. Even Patrick Bateman, usually a keen student of character, got this one wrong.

‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ by Rod Stewart

From several decades in the future, where all those guys from back then seem like the same flavor of corn, it’s not immediately apparent what a departure “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” was for Rod Stewart. He was known for his raspy rock vocals and soulful ballads — one of the last guys you’d expect to go disco. And in fact, it “was a spoof on guys from the ‘cocaine lounge lizards’ of the Saturday Night Fever days,” songwriter Duane Hitchings explained in 2007. “We rock and roll guys thought we were dead meat when that movie and the Bee Gees came out,” so “Rod, in his brilliance, decided to do a spoof on disco.” Now it’s just a song that plays in the background of disco scenes in movies.

‘Poor, Poor Pitiful Me’ by Warren Zevon

Warren Zevon’s ode to self-pity is better known as a recording by Linda Ronstadt, who swapped the genders and changed several lyrics, but it was originally a dig at producer and friend Jackson Browne, who wrote morose songs while living like Barney Stinson. That’s why the original lyrics juxtapose a comically failed suicide attempt with picking up kinky chicks and the chorus complains that “these young girls won’t let me be.” Pitiful indeed.

‘Happy’ by Pharrell Williams

Hey, did you remember that one of the most successful songs of the 2010s was from a freaking Minions movie? It wasn’t the first one Pharrell offered Universal for Despicable Me 2, either. In fact, “Happy’ was born out of his frustration with the process. “After nine times of, you know, nine nos, like, nope, doesn’t work, doesn’t work, doesn’t work, doesn’t work, doesn’t work, doesn’t work, doesn’t work, then I had to kind of ask myself a rhetorical question: How do you write a song about someone that's so happy that nothing can bring them down?” he said. “And I sarcastically answered it and put music to it, and that sarcasm became the song. And that broke me.”

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