5 Singers Who Had No Idea What Their Hits Were About
Music can teach you about other people’s experiences. Maybe you don’t personally know what it’s like to be a coal miner’s daughter or how to do the hokey-pokey, but then you hear the right song, and you suddenly understand.
Other times, it turns out the singer has zero experience with the subject of their song. And we’re not talking about songs where someone boasts about flying jets and gunning down their enemies. We’re talking about stuff that millions of people have done but the singer hasn’t.
The ‘The Piña Colada Song’ Guy Never Tried Piña Coladas
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“Do you like piña coladas?” asks the song “Escape.” The song’s better known as “The Piña Colada Song” (the full title is “Escape (The Piña Colada Song”) because while some people know every word, that’s the one part everyone knows.
Rupert Holmes wrote and performed the song in 1979, at which time he had never once tried a piña colada. When someone asked him about this omission a quarter century later, he still hadn’t.
In fact, he hadn’t originally wanted the song to be about piña coladas. The original first line of the chorus, which narrates the text of a personals ad, from a woman seeking a compatible guy, was, “Do like Humphrey Bogart?” You can imagine how that name might fit the meter of the song, if you really stretch “Humphrey” out, but it was a struggle, so he subbed in a proper five-syllable phrase.
The original line made more sense because liking the same drink is no basis for picking a mate. You might seek someone who likes the same activities, such as making love at midnight in the dunes on the cape, because that’s something you do together. But when you go to a bar, you order one drink, they order a different one and there’s no advantage in the two of you liking the same one. Plus, piña coladas have a reputation as a girly drink. Whether or not that’s deserved, that just shows how two people in a relationship needn’t like the same drink, and people might well be attracted to those with opposite drink tastes.
A similar taste in movies is also not the strongest basis for a relationship, but it’s one thing you can have in common and bond over. There was a whole separate song about that.
The ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ Guys Never Went to a Ball Game
“Take Me Out to the Ball Game” is a full song, with two verses in addition to the chorus everyone knows. It’s about a woman named Kate, who tells her date that she’d rather he take her to a baseball game than to a concert.
Katie Casey was baseball mad,
Had the fever and had it bad
Just to root for the home town crew,
Ev'ry sou, Katie blew
The word “sou” there is not short for southpaws, saying that Katie blew several players, but instead refers to coins. She spent all her money on baseball games.
The song was written back in 1908 by Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer. Neither one of them had attended a baseball game at the time, and neither would for decades after writing it. Norworth (the lyricist) just took inspiration from a baseball poster he saw while riding the subway.
It’s a song about baseball from someone who knew little about baseball, and as a result, it talks about the game in the most generic terms. “Root root root for the home team,” though broadly applicable enough that the song could become popular nationwide, is a line that could only be written by someone who has no real allegiance to any team, else he’d name-drop it here. “One, two, three strikes, you’re out,” while accurate, is similarly a line someone who’s never watched baseball might say to prove that they know the game.
All the talk of peanuts and Cracker Jack, while again accurate enough, sounds even more like someone trying to set a scene they’ve heard about secondhand. Think of it like the following quote from Tom Cruise, who sees his movies in private screenings and is here pretending to know what the common theatergoing experience is like:
Kurt Cobain Didn’t Know What Teen Spirit Was
Kurt Cobain wrote “Smells Like Teen Spirit” after seeing the following words scrawled on his wall: “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit.” For millennials reading this, we are referring here to the literal wall of his house, not his Facebook wall. For everyone else, there was briefly this thing called “writing on your Facebook wall,” and if you’ve not heard of it, we can just move on.
The words had been spray-painted by Kathleen Hanna, a member of the band Bikini Kill. Cobain saw them and thought that sounded like a revolutionary slogan, so he stuck that into the title of a song he wrote.
Teen Spirit is really a line of deodorants. It’s a line of girls’ deodorants, which came in such varieties as Berry Blossom and Cool Coconut (deodorants, like cocktails, tend to be gendered). The message wasn’t calling Kurt girly exactly but was saying he smelled like his girlfriend, either because they spent so much time together or because he did not shower after their nightly sessions.
Cobain would have been horrified to learn what the words really meant — if he took the song seriously at all, which he did not.
John Denver Had Never Been to West Virginia
“Almost heaven, West Virginia,” says the opening line of “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” It’s an official state song of West Virginia, which is funny because some listeners maintain that it isn’t about West Virginia at all.
The second line of the song, you see, is, “Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River,” which could refer to West Virginia, but both those places are mostly in that state’s neighbor to the east. So, the lyrics really instead seem to talk about someone in west Virginia — meaning, the western nook of the separate Commonwealth of Virginia.
We could ask John Denver to weigh in. But it turns out that he’d never been to West Virginia at the time of the song’s writing. Also, he’s dead. Plus, he didn’t write the song.
The song was written by Bill Danoff — who also hadn’t been to West Virginia at the time. He just knew the phrases “Blue Ridge Mountains” and “Shenandoah River,” which he associated with that general neck of the woods, and he included them in the song because of how they sounded. “They’re songwriter words,” he’d later say.
He wasn’t inspired by any personal association with West Virginia. Instead, he was inspired by driving on a picturesque country road in the unrelated state of Maryland.
‘The Night Chicago Died’ Guys Had Never Been to Chicago
Next up is another song written by someone who’d never been to the place in question. It’s “The Night Chicago Died,” by Paper Lace.
Now, the above video is actually an ad for a compilation of 1970s songs, and “The Night Chicago Died” only appears there for a few seconds, but if you grew up when that ad was on TV, it’ll hit you harder than any of the individual songs listed there.
“The Night Chicago Died” is about the Windy City during Prohibition and is loosely based on the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. As a result, it takes more from the writer's vague understanding of gangster stories than it does from their knowledge of the city. Songwriters Peter Callender and Mitch Murray had never been to Chicago.
That’s why the first line of the song references “the east side of Chicago,” even though Chicago doesn’t have an east side. Immediately east of the center of the city is Lake Michigan, so while it does technically have an east (as all places must), no one would call it the east side. It’s similar to how “Don’t Stop Believing” references South Detroit, though no one calls the south end that since the downtown area continues right up to the river that forms the Canadian border.
But wait! There actually is an official community area in Chicago known as East Side. So, that vindicates the song, right?
Maybe not. East Side, though that’s its name, would not be referred to as “the east side of Chicago.” It’s instead located in the region known as the Far Southeast Side.
Cities are confusing like that. Boston has a West End, which is located just steps from the North End. Both are on the east side of the city.
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