One of the fun things about music is trying to figure out what our favorite songs are actually about. Scattered throughout rock history are dozens of songs where we can ask "is this about God, a girl, or drugs?" Other times, we struggle to tell if the lyrics are meant to be taken at face value. And a lot of the time, we just wonder if the singer knows about that girl in math class we have a crush on. Or maybe that's just me.
Anyway, this is the first part of a series I've begun called "Open To Interpretation," in which I'll attempt to figure out what some of my favorite songs (and hopefully some of your favorite songs) are actually about. We're starting off the series with Taking Heads' 1988 single "(Nothing But) Flowers," the best song of their final album, Naked, and thanks to its inclusion in Clerks II, one of their most famous.
In 2007, "(Nothing But) Flowers" found it's way onto a list of conservative rock songs. At face value, this might make sense, as the song talks about a future world where all of our modern conveniences (Pizza Huts, shopping malls, discount stores), have disappeared, replaced by a hippie dystopia. There are no more microwaves, and thus, we are forced to eat nuts and berries. Factories have become mountains and rivers. Essentially, all the things that a nature-loving environmentalist would hope for have come true, and life is miserable.
But does it make sense to read these lyrics without any irony? After all, this is David Byrne we're talking about. An art school grad, and not the most commercial-friendly guy in the world. Would he really write a song which blatantly says that consumerism and capitalism are good, and that a world where we went back to nature would be a nightmare? Surely, it has to be a bit more complex than that.
After listening to this song, many many times, I've come up with four potential interpretations of this song, and I'll leave it up to you to decide which makes the most the since.
Interpretation #1: It actually is a pro-capitalism song. Despite his art school background, David Byrne has more of a right wing streak than we would think, and he wrote this song to tell us how to stupid all those damn hippies are for thinking a nature-centric world would make us any happier.
Interpretation #2: It's the exact opposite. The song is anti-consumerism all the way, and when Byrne sings "I miss the honky tonks/Dairy Queens/and 7-11's," we're supposed to think it's silly that anyone would miss those things.
Interpretation #3: It's a little bit of both. The song isn't saying that we should miss all the aspects of modern consumerism if they were to magically disappear, but simply that we would miss them. Perhaps in an ideal world, we would be better off just eating nuts and berries, but the harsh reality is, we would really miss our microwaves.
Interpretation #4: It's none of these - David Byrne wrote a song that was damn near impossible to interpret simply for the sake of doing so. Remember the Frasier episode where he has a dream that he can't interpret, but then it turns out that he was subconsciously challenging his abilities as a psychiatrist by giving himself a dream that would be impossible to interpret? That's kind of what Byrne was up to here. It's a musical Rorschach blot, and you take what you want from it.
So, there you go. Hopefully, one of those interpretations represents what Byrne was actually getting at back in 1988. I'll leave it to you guys to tell me how I'm a total Philistine who couldn't be more wrong, and I'll see you next month for round 2 of "Open To Interpretation."
