What song are you listening to right now? What does it mean to you?
Last Updated: 22.06.2025 09:22
Nope. It isn’t the thing.
We humans do love trivia, and some of us: we love it more than art.
A deft touch like Peter Gabriel, in such regards.
A place that's worn
I can see your secrets
This is each person’s moving contribution to any work of art: to say how it moved in you.
When was the last time you had sex with someone much older than yourself?
Just leaves me depressed
Whatsoever is moved in you: now THAT you can know!
Everyone looks naked when you know the world's address
I’m plain-out roaring, here!
Behold!
Is that what you think of me?
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The thing itself is the thing itself.
You decide. Purpose is what you put into life.
A song made for public consumption has no “real meaning” beyond what it means to you: the hearer. The listener, ideally. The artist, the creator, the originator or the band of record merely bring you the best they could put out to move you, given available talent and production time. So?
What was your embarrassing moment in front of your father-in-law as an Indian daughter-in-law?
Bull. The public has always known better than that. It isn’t novelty of theoretic conception that makes good art. It is truth. It is beauty. Which can include: hideous ugliness, if true. Or: hideous ugliness, if for some reason you the viewer, the onlooker, the innocent bystander, the paying customer or the passerby decide: I rather like the feel and style of that hideous thing.
“The Word’s Address”
Answer one. “What song” indeed! I’m listening to "The World's Address":
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Let’s not get personal. A woman, even a very young and competitive woman far too good for the likes, loves, needs or wants of me (or you, for that matter) is only called a “dog” by some sour grapes loser. Or! Hey, if she must love dogs, maybe she won’t even mind being called in a doggy style?
“The text” here means only: the entire artwork of whatever kind. Picasso’s Guernica is a text. Citizen Kane is a text. “The World’s Address” is our text, for this instance.
So…you can read the lyrics above. Those words, in that simple order? That IS what the song really means.
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Would be wildly, reasonably sane to call “BULL’S-HIT!” on such fancy-shmancy anti-bullseye potshots.
No need to confess
Is that what you think of IT? Of art? Or if you’re a real capital-A ASS, of “Art”?
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Nobody could possibly credit my take over and above or underneath the text itself, the thing itself: the actual work and nothing else. Nothing but. All that’s in or within it. Right?
Official audio only.
I’m so mean I mean it all.
Whatever each viewer, hearer, taker-in and receiver “gets” out of it is, if anything, that critic or fan’s own personal production. Of what? Meaning. Value. Worth. Call it by any metric you can lay forth or set out: it’s pure personal judgment in play now, dog. Cur. Bitch?
It means an “accomplished fact.” Something that has already been done, and there it is: “that’s-that.”
Yes! You nailed it! A “full-on slob-mode aficionado of pop cultural forms” to boot! Who minds what I, some rando asshat off the internet, told YOU couched so hot, deep and hard in threadbare shorts, rocking and a-rolling on a huge leather sofa stolen from “schools” and “styles” of old thought, “BUD”? Not it!
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I’m not sure if it’s like Wet Leg. I haven’t really drawn a bead on Wet Leg yet. Look.
I'll repeat it for those who may not have already guessed:
How are you moved? It’s not a f***ing contest. Why would anyone want to WIN a f***ing contest? Oh, that triple asterisk stands for “art” not “uck.” Pretty yucky, that droll substitution. Pretty disgusting, those who try to pass it off as “fresh.”
Hear!
They told you simply: by making the whole thing, nothing less. Nothing more. In every single word strong strung in sequence.
It, whatever the heck it is or may be to someone, doesn’t really mean anything else but its own real features and properties. The thing itself is what must mean, and the only thing that can mean: to anyone, everyone, okay uh-huh alright forever and ever amen.
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Or do not. Yoda won’t take them odds, and you shouldn’t aspire to be some critic’s forceless green-tinged puppet, whether cartoon or foam rubber: IT STANK EVERYWHERE BUT THE BOX OFFICE, and buddy?
I say leave that to the one being called, Holmes. Or…sure, lock your tongue away behind your lips and bite yourself, hard! Why offend needlessly over what amounts to a nickname? Must you?
A. See below. It’s a 2-Parter!
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Big “A” or little? Done for Art’s sake, or just for free sushi and sake? Got anything for us, anything for each or all? GIVE IT UP, HOMO SAPIEN.
HAH. HA! No! How could I possibly be, about something as trite as art has in our day and age become? Grossaroo!
It is what the thing itself meant in you. Or: means to you, coming forward now.
AND LET THEM HEAR THIS SONNNG
Whose song is it, any old way?
What the singer or writer, the true creator, the artist (modern, classic, wise or otherwise) thinks it should mean in addition to what they’ve indeed made is…puff. Fluff. Tacky add-on, at best.
It is trivia.
Life's parade of fashion
Take it in every sensory or sensual way it exists, by any medium presented! Like, love, want, even need, and even share that with others! Your own lived experience of the thing itself, yeah-heah!
Am I serious?
Why even read my take on what it means? You think my “hot insider intel” can override, overrule or otherwise upset the work itself: in all it truly IS? Can interpretation unseat the text?
There is no “code” in art to break.
Context (since there’s every single context you or anyone could choose to clap on top of it or pretend-slide beneath any artwork) is keyhole.
I’ve got to be some kind of “sense, senses or sensual snob” who wants to root like King Tut on human growth hormones and steal your golden moment right out from under you, right?
THE WORLD'S ADDRESS
Some lovely story about what the artist went through prior to making the thing? Human interest, yes! We love to be deep in the gossip, we kind and faithful beings. Yet is this OF the artwork? No.
worn...etc.
Vulgar?
Disabuse you of that “secret meaning” or “real meaning” nonsense notion pronto and galore! I mean consistently, coherently, cogently and with integrity: in every onstage bout of audience-aimed grateful candor, plus every interview segment you’re likely catch them in, speaking for themselves to all the world: unabashed, unashamed, not too guardedly at all.
What does it mean to me?
It ain’t the thing. Is it?
Check between one or the other set of your cheeks, and go blow.
Feel!
Don’t believe the hype.
Well, duh. More than that: TUH-DUH. TA-DA! It means the words! It means each and only what the words say. Read ’em and weep not! See? Right up there for you. SEE? See!
Nothing beyond what was literally made part of the song is the song’s meaning.
Popular, yes. That’s what vulgar originally meant.
WERE WRONG, the world's address! A place that's
Couldn't sleep last night
In many circles (and the glorious art that erupts and cruises forth from these circles is not to be puked at), what’s vulgar is pretty always a-gonna be a good bet: to pop.
Everybody’s got one.
Did it stink for you, or were you moved to applaud? Don’t be shy.
I men: you’d have to be a surefire every-miss dweeb of cretinous nature to credit what I have to say here with authority, or even a slick, greasy Greek booty-toot of value. GROSS. GROW UP, if so! Get a real load on!
A whole lot like AC/DC, Sia Furler and The Black Keys! Great pool hall music, the lot of them!
Frankly, The Dead’ve never been the same since Garcia died, except on record and if you take a lot of drugs, too. Got Art?
This is They Might Be Giants, and contrary to the dull, glistening and listless imaginations of self-perverted twerps who think songs have “real” or “secret” meanings that only the author or authors could tell you, John L. & John F. of They Might Be Giants will lay it all right out on the line for you every time I’ve ever seen ’em get into it.
Anyone who wants to pretend their free gift to the world means something other than what they actually made and gave is welcome to be that pretentious.
I didn’t tell you what it meant.
Every meaning is valid to the degree it can be supported from within the text.
Who do you say I am? Some “grammar anarch & semantic champion” for the people!
This isn’t a matter for seriousness.
Q. What song are you listening to right now? What does it mean to you?
TELL THEM ALBERT EINSTEIN AND COPERNICUS
What kind of hack art critique confidence job (or “fanfic”) would you like us to call that crap?
I’m far worse than serious on such scores: I’m sincere.
Context is not “key.”
I like to enjoy music, literally. Just the text, just what it says.
It is yours. Your own. Don’t be too precious about it, please. Shoot me a comment below: tell me what’s moving in you, easily or uneasily as you listen for yourself to the song (below!), and judge it for all that it is, or isn’t. For what they have done, or for what they have failed to do: in you.
Meaning is what you get out of it.
The thing really done.
I know you've deceived me
Now my tearstains on the wall reflect an ugly sight
It is we the living who’ll each decide what it means: to each and all.
Kind of like John Linnell, John Flansburgh & The Band Of Dans (who hadn’t yet joined the bandwagon as of the above-limned song’s original finished debut).
Why be a turd about it, stuffing imaginary made-up “author’s intent” (beyond what the author actually DID do, DID make whole) into some fantasy “envelope-pushing” exercise?
So be it, then!
No critic and no investor, no, not even any Capital-A Author or Major League Maker can add one jot, jolt, titter or teardrop to the finished work of art. As it was, or as it lasts in its finished form.
Not in some misbegotten competition with the dead.
Under every garment I can see the world's address
Now pull the other one! How did it make YOU feel, about your mother for instance?
Not at all like Pet Shop Boys, but who really is these days? Beyond Tennant and Lowe, no one has ever been very much like those Pet Shop Boys, actually.
Give us what cha got, “artist.” If indeed you consider yourself an artist: give it up. For all we the living, for any and each who might be moved, AND HOW.
Taste!
…this is all very well beyond what the thing itself means, or meant. It is new.
Why should anyone swallow it? Except for what IT truly is? Your own original production! At best or at worst, “based on” or “inspired by” the thing itself.
A great deal like Robert Frost. “No musician!” would you say? HA. HA! HA! HA! Nonsense!
Shall we uphold that craptastically egotistical self-shoveling attitude? Why should we? Because we, two should be famous for moving the world with what moves us in art? Hey.
Care to have a listen?
A finished work. A “fait accompli.”
Is “it” an art at all?
What more could one ask of a work of art? Sometime, maybe try to ask the song itself what it means.
Hold!
You gonna tell us the mere author or creator of a work gets to decide for YOU what it means?
You know it.
The world's address
The original authors did.
Art is what moves you in ways mere craft could not.
CALL THE MEN OF SCIENCE
Not I.
That doesn’t mean the trivialist has some secret special key and code in their possession. They’re just kinky like that: like to be deep in the loopy sh!t. Smells like some way too-old pretend teen’s spirit hit the fan again, though. VULGAR.
Look.
Who says what’s art? The Modernists united in a real cheap-shot art-critic sold and commanded zeitgeist ventriloquism voice: The Artist! Art Is Whatever The Artist Nominates As Art!
Call it an affectionym, but be sure the other wants yours first. It isn’t a very high art to be sure, this dealing and doling of names. Lables and boxes, more often than not? Empty of everything but nerve, bile and gall. Turn your head and cough, please. Yes!
It’s one motive, at least. If that’s your meaning then run off with it and see who’ll bow, buy, or slap a bow-tie on it for a garrotte. The rest of us?
It is background intel, no part of the work at all, at all.
A sad pun that reflects a sadder mess
Here’s the musical recording from the band They call “TMBG”
The sales and marketing job (includes all backstory and behind-the-bio of the real maker, doer, makers or doers) is nothing to do with the genuine article: the act performed, the thing made.
You say. You’re the one to be moved, after all. In the “final anal”—what some call the “final” analysis. Why be rude? Art may be! Art may be the rudest thing in the world, taken out of its own natural time, place and culture! Pay heed! Open your eyes and let your tongue waggle like a slug!
Yet…
This all holds true for every thing called art, in every form of art, or called art.
Touch!
It means what it is, not what some paid or unpaid maker thinks it should mean to you. Kind of like oh, I don’t know, Neil Diamond? Neil Sedaka? Bing Crosby? I’ve no idea really. Elvis Costello? Aimee Mann? Sean Penn’s sister-in-law? The Beatles? Who gives a rat’s toss? These people were paid and paid handsomely to prettily dish up something for us, for us to take in and mean, and feel. And sure, think! Why not?