What song are you listening to right now? What does it mean to you?
Last Updated: 18.06.2025 17:13
Is that what you think of me?
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.
A finished work. A “fait accompli.”
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.
Hear!
Just leaves me depressed
Care to have a listen?
A deft touch like Peter Gabriel, in such regards.
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.
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Who do you say I am? Some “grammar anarch & semantic champion” for the people!
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.”
Is that what you think of IT? Of art? Or if you’re a real capital-A ASS, of “Art”?
Why do people stay in cults after they have joined?
Would be wildly, reasonably sane to call “BULL’S-HIT!” on such fancy-shmancy anti-bullseye potshots.
No need to confess
Don’t believe the hype.
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You decide. Purpose is what you put into life.
Am I serious?
I know you've deceived me
It is what the thing itself meant in you. Or: means to you, coming forward now.
This is each person’s moving contribution to any work of art: to say how it moved in you.
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?
What kind of lights would you like to use for your home decor?
It is background intel, no part of the work at all, at all.
Here’s the musical recording from the band They call “TMBG”
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.
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It ain’t the thing. Is it?
Now my tearstains on the wall reflect an ugly sight
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?
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Context is not “key.”
Everyone looks naked when you know the world's address
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.
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A. See below. It’s a 2-Parter!
Nope. It isn’t the thing.
So be it, then!
When British people write X after everything, are they being serious or trying not to be awkward?
Couldn't sleep last night
It means an “accomplished fact.” Something that has already been done, and there it is: “that’s-that.”
Taste!
Does eating bread before bed make you fat? If so, why?
I’m plain-out roaring, here!
…this is all very well beyond what the thing itself means, or meant. It is new.
I’m not sure if it’s like Wet Leg. I haven’t really drawn a bead on Wet Leg yet. Look.
Would the word literate carry the same meaning with public (common wealth) in 1900 vs today 2020?
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 kind of hack art critique confidence job (or “fanfic”) would you like us to call that crap?
Life's parade of fashion
So…you can read the lyrics above. Those words, in that simple order? That IS what the song really means.
You know it.
The thing really done.
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?
This isn’t a matter for seriousness.
AND LET THEM HEAR THIS SONNNG
THE WORLD'S ADDRESS
Under every garment I can see the world's address
CALL THE MEN OF SCIENCE
Behold!
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.
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!
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.
Meaning is what you get out of it.
What does it mean to me?
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!
It is trivia.
I’m far worse than serious on such scores: I’m sincere.
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.
WERE WRONG, the world's address! A place that's
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.
There is no “code” in art to break.
Whose song is it, any old way?
It is we the living who’ll each decide what it means: to each and all.
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!
Is “it” an art at all?
Vulgar?
I can see your secrets
Hold!
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!
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.
HAH. HA! No! How could I possibly be, about something as trite as art has in our day and age become? Grossaroo!
The thing itself is the thing itself.
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.
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?
TELL THEM ALBERT EINSTEIN AND COPERNICUS
Answer one. “What song” indeed! I’m listening to "The World's Address":
Official audio only.
Look.
worn...etc.
Every meaning is valid to the degree it can be supported from within the text.
You gonna tell us the mere author or creator of a work gets to decide for YOU what it means?
I didn’t tell you what it meant.
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?
A whole lot like AC/DC, Sia Furler and The Black Keys! Great pool hall music, the lot of them!
The original authors did.
A sad pun that reflects a sadder mess
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!
Did it stink for you, or were you moved to applaud? Don’t be shy.
A place that's worn
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?
I’m so mean I mean it all.
Popular, yes. That’s what vulgar originally meant.
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.
What more could one ask of a work of art? Sometime, maybe try to ask the song itself what it means.
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?
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).
Whatsoever is moved in you: now THAT you can know!
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!
I like to enjoy music, literally. Just the text, just what it says.
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?
Everybody’s got one.
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!
Not in some misbegotten competition with the dead.
Nothing beyond what was literally made part of the song is the song’s meaning.
Yet…
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?
This all holds true for every thing called art, in every form of art, or called art.
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?
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?
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.
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.
Q. What song are you listening to right now? What does it mean to you?
The world's address
Art is what moves you in ways mere craft could not.
“The Word’s Address”
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.
Touch!
“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.
Now pull the other one! How did it make YOU feel, about your mother for instance?
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.
They told you simply: by making the whole thing, nothing less. Nothing more. In every single word strong strung in sequence.
A great deal like Robert Frost. “No musician!” would you say? HA. HA! HA! HA! Nonsense!
Feel!
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.
I'll repeat it for those who may not have already guessed:
Not I.
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.
Check between one or the other set of your cheeks, and go blow.
We humans do love trivia, and some of us: we love it more than art.