Collective Misinterpretations of Smash Hits: A Retrospective
There comes a moment in your adolescence when it’s time to have the talk. You know, the talk. When an omniscient authority figure reveals with heavy heart that “Puff, the Magic Dragon” by Peter, Paul and Mary isn’t an anthem for an innocuous enchanted beast. Now robbed of that little twinkle in your eye, you’re crushed — and frankly, a little confused as to how the devil, lettuce, and dragons interrelate. The authority figure tries to console you, reminding that every other kid who only took piano lessons for six years also fell down the same rabbit hole of deception, but it’s no use. Six piano recitals too late, innocence is lost and life is a ruse.
Add this to the canon of childhood favorites with dark subtexts. “Row Row Row Your Boat” is a product of late-19th century minstrel shows, and “Ring Around the Rosie” is undoubtedly the most charming nursery rhyme ever written about the Bubonic Plague.
This is just the beginning.
A year later, hearing Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The U.S.A.” on a loop at Water Country U.S.A. Water Park in Williamsburg, VA puts your interpretative skills to the test. In that moment, your twelve-year-old ears are probably too clogged with chlorine water for you to discern lyrics of national pride from those of pointed cynicism. But what’s the Republican Party’s excuse? George Will, in his 1984 Washington Post column, wrote of Springsteen’s world tour, “I have not got a clue about Springsteen’s politics, if any, but flags get waved at his concerts while he sings songs about hard times. He is no whiner, and the recitation of closed factories and other problems always seems punctuated by a grand, cheerful affirmation: ‘Born in the U.S.A.!’” Will, in apparent cahoots with President Reagan’s re-election committee, had a hunch that Springsteen would endorse Reagan; that hunch then led to the following addendum to Reagan’s 1984 campaign speech delivered in Hammonton, NJ: “America’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts; it rests in the message of hope in songs so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.” Spot on, but only if Reagan were to swap “hope” for “denouncing the government, the Vietnam war, and the inadequate treatment of veterans,” as well as “dreams” for “nightmares.”
Next, you’re horrified to learn that the Rednex interpretation of “Cotton Eye Joe” is actually a lament for contracting an STD. Nobody saw that one coming. After nearly a decade of line dancing at bar and bat mitzvah parties to the whimsical, Euro-pop/country hybrid, you’re forced to confront the reality of these lyrics: “If it hadn’t been for Cotton Eye Joe/I’d been married a long time ago/Where did you come from, where did you go?/Where did you come from, Cotton Eye Joe.” First you lost a friend in Puff all those years ago; now you’ve lost a friend in Joe. Fronting for less jaded bar and bat mitzvah-goers who’ll eventually face the truth, you mask your disenchantment and just dance.
Then one day, years later, nostalgia compels you to memorize the lyrics to Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life.” You visit your peer-reviewed lyrics website of choice and encounter the following: “The sky was gold, it was rose/I was taking sips of it through my nose/And I wish I could get back there, someplace back there/Smiling in the pictures you would take/Doing crystal meth, will lift you up until you break/It won’t stop, I won’t come down.” Akin to your reaction upon learning of the Berenstain/Berenstein Bears conspiracy theory, you exclaim, “When did THAT get there?!” Don’t fret, alleged “child of the ‘90s.” It’s not your fault you didn’t know the song is about crystal meth — no one did. Stephan Jenkins just sings so fast.
Finally, you’re writing an article about pop line dances of the 1990s one evening when your research trajectory on “Macarena” by Los del Rio steers you toward a pattern you decide to call “collective misinterpretations of smash hits.” You already knew the pop sensation once infiltrated the 1996 Democratic National Convention, where Democrats syncopated and synchronized their limbs in blissful naivety. That is, except for Al Gore, who honored the dance craze by just standing there. But what you didn’t know was the song’s message. In fact, you, every 1996 DNC-goer, and everyone with zero-to-marginal knowledge of Spanish hadn’t really considered that it even had a message. Because “Macarena” predated the invention of Google Translate, and narrowly avoided the phenomenon known as Exhibiting Enough Curiosity To Find Out The Meaning Of The Song Yourself So You Know What You’re Shaking Your Limbs To, it passed undetected by otherwise discerning Americans.
Upon further investigation, you now know the song is about a girl named Macarena who “has a boyfriend who is named/Who is named with the last name Vitorino/And while he was being sworn in as a conscript/She’s giving it to two friends.” So, “Macarena” is an indictment of sexual infidelity, cloaked in saccharine pop deception and televised to the nation in 1996. This mishap is the yin to the yang of music appropriation for political campaigns: the Republicans head-banged to anti-nationalist rock, and the Democrats shimmied to adultery. Maybe Al Gore didn’t participate because he knew something the public didn’t: the song’s English translation.
You shudder when you realize “Macarena,” which warns of infidelity, would’ve been an appropriate unofficial anthem to Bill Clinton’s 1996 presidential campaign. The 1996 DNC attendees didn’t know about that yet, but they would soon.
After all this, you’re wondering if you were better off in that rabbit hole of deception. Sure it was dark in there, but wasn’t it easier that way? To misinterpret is to believe the mythical, the sweet, the simple, and the optimistic. Part of you wants to return to a consciousness facilitated by naive interpretations — a time before drugs, cynicism, STDs, and infidelity. The other part of you knows that such a time never really existed.
Now it’s your turn to share in omniscience, to debunk Puff and Joe. Do you look back?
