Sun Worshippers

The summer has made it here already. Unlike the snake-like people, who desperately crave sunny days for their cold blood, I’m ambivalent about it. For approximately the sixth year in a row, the youth of this country have resorted to gaudy 1980s pop to mark the changing of the seasons. Worst of all, they’re clothes are accessorised by a mandatory straw trilby. “Oh, how summery I am.” says the youth in his summer uniform. Yesterday, I saw them all shuffling onto buses out of town, the girls all prepped with wellies, knee-high rainbow socks, and waterproof fake tan. The Kings of Leon were headlining the event, and I so loathe them that I’m glad that’s their audience. It used to baffle me (given my deep mistrust for live music and the everybody-is-everybody’s-friend nonsense that goes on in festivals) why people were so eager about these things. That is until I saw this advert, abundant with golden promises:

Ah yes! The summer is a wonderland of endless possibilities. Men and women of exotic ethnicity and unconventional style will be interested in some dope like you. They’ll want to share tips on how to stay glamorous-looking after three days of festival, and they’ll be charmed by your Buckfast guzzling and straw trilby (How chic!). No thick ankles, no bad hygiene, no stupid assholes that steal your stuff or start fights. Connor O’Neill, nicknamed Captain Generic by his finance classmates in UCD, will get 43 ‘likes’ on Facebook, for announcing “What a weekend!”. Few will take notice that his name abbreviates as CON.

Dazzled as our youth is by the glamorous interpretation of getting drunk and getting their hole, it still doesn’t account for our endless preoccupation with sunshine. I suppose what is rare is precious, but we live in an age of cheap flights and warm infrastructure, so we’re not as exposed to the cold. And it doesn’t matter how many nice days in a row we have, you’re still subjected to boring conversation about how unfortunate we are. What matters the change in weather to me, when I can’t escape the tedious conversation about the conditions outside! And it’s usually expressed in one of two awful narratives: the God fearing narrative or the national self-deprecating narrative. Fear or shame. It says more about what’s inside than out, when you associate those two feelings with something relatively harmless and beyond our control. But it's okay to get uppity about poor bus services. If people didn't get uppity about buses, they wouldn't be able to marshal the anger to write blogs about all the people they see while they're waiting...

You Know Those People.

Oh, you know. The sort who constantly read meaning into lyrics that clearly doesn’t fit. Famous pop songs and children’s rhymes can’t be just that; they have to have some secret depth that needs to be decoded. Sometimes it’s about some love affair that people speculate about, other times there’s a hidden message about race or homosexuality. Even if there is a message in the song, I don’t see how that makes it better. Such songs usually attract praise for their apparent depth, yet all the songwriter has done is deliberately obscure something that could be expressed more explicitly, and I’m pretty sure most people don’t value obscurantism.

Puff the Magic Dragon by Peter, Paul, and Mary is a classic example of this pretentious malarkey. Some idiot, who was obsessed with drugs, decided that the song was about taking narcotics. After all, it was released in the 1960s, which were solely characterised by drug taking and subversive song writing. Words like ‘Puff’ and ‘paper’ pretty much explain their secret context by themselves, and the dragon represents opium or, perhaps, a hookah. The fantastical story of a magical dragon could only come from the mind of someone on shrooms or acid.

Leaving aside the ungainsayable argument that the songwriters have consistently denied that they were alluding to drugs, the drug interpretation only accounts for about 10% of the lyrics. With such flimsy requirements for interpretation, you could warp any song into any meaning. “But the author is no longer the generator of context and meaning,” says the post-structuralist, literary snot in you.

“Meaning lies with the reader or listener, and the text’s meaning shouldn’t be regulated by the songwriter.”

I see, but having read that Wikipedia link, can you really say you are still interpreting the song as a drug reference.

“What? What do you mean? Of course I do.”

No, I think your interpretation runs like this: The song was written without allusions to drugs, but I have chosen to read drug references into it.

“No, you’re just being polemical! You should give up your racket. Nobody’s impressed.”

I think we can safely say that interpretation isn’t willed, but passively received.

“Stop!”

The mechanisms of interpretation are antecedent to the will, surely. Mendacity will get you nowhere; you know you don’t believe that drug interpretation. I’m sorry friend, but you are not some master in your literary universe.

“Fuck you, Nigel! Boo hoo hoo!”

Okay. Leave the room then. I’ll entertain your girlfriend. Hey, you! – good-looking female – c’mere…

If you’re not convinced by my manly arguments, then I guess I’ll have to take advantage of the mass ignorance and start planting meaning into songs. Listen to this other ditty by Peter, Paul, and Mary:

That’s right, you’ve guessed it – it’s about a man who's disgusted by cunnilingus.