Notes from Upstream: Baffling Song Lyrics. . .

And booger jokes. (Betcha didn't see that one coming.)

This morning (Sunday), as I poise at my home office desk, ready to get to work on this week’s Notes From Upstream post, I am flummoxed. Also frustrated, perplexed, confused, lazy, and, finally, desperate.

I have no topic.

That’s right: in a world overflowing with topics of substance, I cannot come up with a topic of substance. There’s the War in Iran (done that); the puerile commie jibber-jabber spouted by the DSA (did that too); antisemitism (not again—yes, again, or still, depending how you understand history).

Here’s a partial list of other topics I dismiss:

• The prospects for disarming Hamas

• What Trump is doing wrong this time

• Republican chances this November

• How crazy are those Democrats?

• What Trump is doing wrong this time

• Why J.D. Vance is a weenie

• Why Jews vote Democrat

• Where some irritating podcaster goes awry

• What Trump is doing wrong this time

Steve has told me “no worries” if I don’t post every week, but I do worry, or at least fret. Doing what I say I will do is how I’ve lived my life so far. I can’t give up on that habit now, so late in my short visit to this weird planet.

I don’t believe in “identity” politics; but I do believe we can divide people into two identities: those who do what they say they will do and those who don’t.

My frustration reminds me of the great Dave Barry, who for years took money to write not one but two columns every week—in one, he bemoans his dismay, locked in his writer’s hut, tearing at his hair, desperate to come up with a way to sneak the always hilarious word “booger” into his second column of the week.

We don’t do booger jokes at PQ, which is a Substack of Substance, which is why, as an alternative, I offer as my topic this week only this: Baffling Song Lyrics.

You know the songs I mean. You have your own list. Like you, I’ve sometimes gone years trying to figure out what some hit song was even about.

We didn’t used to have internet or any other way to look up song lyrics. We had to take them as we heard them.

It all started in 1963 with the Kingsmen rock cover of the reggae song Louie, Louie:

Having grown up on Mozart and Beethoven, the first thing I noticed about that song was it musical stupidity. Three chords and a monotonous beat—imbecilic.

Until Louie, Louie, I had always understood the lyrics of songs. Vocalists made a point of articulating them. They saw that as part of their job. When Sinatra sang, you always understood the lyrics. In fact, before he sang any song, he read the lyrics aloud to himself as spoken verse, learning to perform the song lyric even without its music. Only then did he perform the song.

At the time, I thought Louie, Louie was pretty naughty:

“I laid her there

On the chair.”

I didn’t hear Ol’ Blue Eyes crooning that.

After Louie, Louie, the same befuddlement kept happening, over and over. There was Groovin’, here lip-synched live by the Young Rascals:

With these immortal lines:

“Life would be ecstasy

You and me and Leslie”

Who is this Leslie? Male or female? Why is this androgyne horning in on someone else’s relationship? Hasn’t this Leslie heard that three’s a crowd?

Nobody had heard of the perennially tedious Bruce Springsteen when Manfred Mann covered the Springsteen song Blinded By The Light:

As Manfred explained, he was,

“Blinded by the light

Wrapped up like a douche

In the middle of the night.”

Who wraps up a douche? Is this something someone could and would do? And why in darkness? I supposed to hide what he was doing.

Even my beloved Beatles stymied me:

“So I licked her thigh

Isn’t it good,

Norwegian Wood?”

John Lennon wrote those words; what he meant by them is best left unexplained.

At least Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Bad Moon Rising provided a travel tip:

“There’s a bathroom on the right.”

Finally, something helpful.

But how do the songwriters feel? In 1986, sitting at some kitchen table somewhere, John Prine tells a sad story about his song That’s The Way The World Goes Round:

It wasn’t just song lyrics which confused me. Growing up, I used the word “misle” (pronounced like “missile”). I deduced the existence of its present tense from its past tense, “misled.”

I knew no more about that word until the approach of adulthood. That’s when my soon-to-be wife Susan explained my mistake to me.

Susan countered with her own confusion the first time she read the word “assassin” as an eight-year-old. What shocked her was that this forbidden word showed up twice in a row in a book her Sunday School gave her.

All of which leads to an Israeli cousin whose English is fifty times better than my feeble Hebrew. She is a lawyer. She was telling me a story about this guy she was having trouble with and how hard it was to get him to do his job:

“So I was buggering him and buggering him, and finally…”

I had to explain that our English verb “to bugger” means something different from our verb “to bug.”

Which I did, with delicacy. And I never once used the word “booger,” though it sounded a lot like what she was saying.

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Max Cossack lives with his wife Susan in a dusty little village in Arizona with two cats who lack all sense of humor.

Also, in case you missed it, readers describe his novel Simple Grifts as “hilarious,” a “great grifter story,” in which “The ancient Greeks would have loved the ending.”