Analogies backfiring in music.
- There's an old song by The Reflections called "Just Like Romeo and Juliet". The first couple of stanzas use the titular simile to refer to how famous their romance is going to be. By the end, the singer is speculating about how, if he doesn't get his act together, their love will be destroyed by tragedy. Just like Romeo and Juliet.
- Which provides a little Fridge Horror, actually, about the song. You can see the headlines about a murder-suicide brought on by his lack of employment.
- "Fire" by The Pointer Sisters one-ups all other clueless Romeo & Juliet analogies by immediately following it up in the same verse with a second comparison to Samson & Delilah, a pairing that not only ended very badly, but didn't exactly start out all that great, either.
- The Blue Öyster Cult song "Don't Fear The Reaper" manages to get the Romeo and Juliet analogy right — "Romeo and Juliet are together in eternity; we could be like they are".
- Amanda Palmer's "Ampersand" also gets the analogy right: "I'm not gonna die for you, you know I ain't no Juliet."
- Lady Gaga named herself after Queen's "Radio Gaga," a song about how horrible mainstream radio has gotten. Given her general sensibilities, this is quite possibly intentional.
- The song "I Found a Loophole" by wizard rock band the Whomping Willows contains this tongue-in-cheek aversion: "We'll be like Romeo and Juliet, except we won't be dead."
- In the Black Eyed Peas' song "Imma Be", one of the singers compares himself to a sperm bank. As Todd in the Shadows points out, people also deposit sperm there.
- Diamond Axe Studios Music has a slightly different take on the same line: since the lyric specifically mentions "loaning out semen", this implies that the other party has to give it back to him.
- Another example Todd pointed out is "Firework"."Feel like a brief flash of light that exists for 2 seconds before disappearing and is immediately forgotten by the audience."
- Since Helen Keller was mentioned, 3Oh!3's "Don't Trust Me" has the line "Do the Helen Keller and talk with your hips" (Keller was blind and deaf, but learned to talk!).
- Ke$ha's "Blah Blah Blah" has this lyric: "zip your lip like a padlock." Padlocks don't zip.
- There's a Flight of the Conchords song full of these. Bret is describing a girl he just met and supposedly had a love affair with, and Jermaine keeps undermining his comparisons: "'She was comparable to Cleopatra' 'Quite old, then?' 'She was like Shakespeare's Juliet' 'What, thirteen?'"
- The Shake it Up song "Fashion is my Kryptonite". Kryptonite, Superman's weakness, would refer to something that is poisonous, yet the song was most definitely trying to relate it to an addicting drug.
- Metallica's "No Leaf Clover"
: "Then it comes to be that the soothing light / At the end of your tunnel / Was just a freight train comin your way." - Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You":Just before our love got lost you said
"I am as constant as the Northern star"
And I said "Constantly in the darkness?
Where's that at?
If you want me I'll be in the bar." - The Los Furios song "Bad Waters" is supposed to be a parable about how adversity makes us strong, and facing your fears head-on is how you become a better person. Pretty good moral, yeah? However, the setting chosen for the parable was... a captain deciding to sail directly through a storm at sea and telling a sailor not to be such a baby about it. There is a difference between "not being afraid to take on challenges" and "being suicidally reckless".
- Paul and Storm's "Your Love Is (Love Song With Metaphor)", in which each verse begins with a pleasant and innocuous metaphor that quickly turns dark.My love is a sailing ship,
Seeking out a friendly shore,
To cast out my anchor, happily never to sail no more.
And your love is the ocean that drowns me,
Leaving my bones to be picked at by crabs,
And bringing settlers to the new world with smallpox and influenza,
And wiping out the indigenous population.- Their previous group Da Vinci's Notebook had a song with a similar premise called "I Wish I Were".
I wish I were a dog
Cause if I were a dog
Then I'd do tricks to show I love you
I could run and fetch the stick
And I could sit right down and lick my privates
When your mom came over
But if I was your Rover
You'd have my testicles recalled
...I don't want to be a dog after all - Crazy Town's "Butterfly" has "Girl it's me and you like Sid and Nancy". Not a model relationship by any means!
- Mitch Benn:
- "Sometimes Love" has a similar structure to "Your Love Is" in the first two verses:Sometimes love,
Is a long black car,
That takes you away,
From where you are.
You get to choose,
Which road it takes,
Then it goes too fast,
And it's got no brakes. - His topical song "Interrupt Your Enemy":"Never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake",
Those are the words of Napoleon Bonaparte,
Who was defeated twice and died in exile,
Poisoned by the wallpaper,
So maybe don't take everything he said to heart.
- "Sometimes Love" has a similar structure to "Your Love Is" in the first two verses:
- Kanye West in "Jesus Walks," with reference to a memorable Insult Backfire from Happy Gilmore:They be askin' us questions, harass and arrest us,Saying, "We eat pieces of shit like you for breakfast."
- Jon Lajoie's character MC Vagina does this a lot, given that he's a terrible lyricist and Talks Like a Simile:
- "I'm the Helen Keller of having sex / No, wait, that's a bad example..."
- In "Very Super Famous" he brags that "in Iraq they found WMDs — Women on My Dick." As was widely reported in the media, and in a major embarrassment for the Bush administration, there were no WMDsnote found in Iraq.
- In "I Kill People," he claims to be "dangerous, like a fire in a nursing home" before realizing that the thought of old people burning is "kinda messed-up." In another verse, he brags, "I don't give a fuck, I'm crazy, like Mel Gibson/No, wait, that just makes me sound racist...", and while bragging about his sexual prowess, calls himself "the Anne Frank of erections... uh, that's inappropriate."
- "I'm the Helen Keller of having sex / No, wait, that's a bad example..."
- Former Christian radio presenter turned atheist activist Seth Andrews considers Petra's album "Unseen Power" to be this, likening faith in god to the wind. As he points out, wind has measurable effects that can be categorized, while religious faith does not, at least not beyond the effects of belonging and community regardless of religion or lack thereof.
- According to Word of God, "Astronaut in the Ocean" by Masked Wolf uses the title as a metaphor for depression, the sense that one is in a place where they don't belong. The problem is, astronauts train for spacewalks underwater, and prior to the space shuttle program, typically made water landings to return to Earth. If anything, an astronaut should be at home in the ocean.
- Amy Grant's "Takes A Little Time" has an optimistic message that when things beyond your control go wrong, sometimes all you can do is be patient and hope for a better future... but the chorus mentions that "it takes a little time sometimes / to get the Titanic turned back around". The lyric was probably intended as a timely pop culture reference to Titanic (1997), which was released the same year as the song; Of course the actual Titanic (and its fictionalized film counterpart) didn't have time to turn and avoid the iceberg.
