| Cat Stevens – Randy Lyrics | 4 years ago |
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I’ve wondered about the meaning of this song since i heard it, shortly after the Cat Stevens album, Back to Earth, came out (the last album before he became known as Yusef). Stevens had already converted to Islam by this time. The lyrics to Randy are enigmatic; the subject of the song is not identified as to gender. Randi is a common way to spell the name for a girl; that’s not written in stone. The early, problematic verse is “if they knew i think they’d take me away, just for loving you, all alone in my own quiet way, ‘cause that’s the way that i want it.” This does not make sense for a heterosexual love affair unless the family objects to the suitor for any speculative reason. However, the prospect that it is a gay love affair has to be a possible interpretation. That being said, even though the artist is speaking in the first person, it shouldn’t be assumed Stevens is coming out as gay or bisexual. (All the love affairs in his previous songs are with females, e.g., “I’m looking for a hard headed woman,” etc. However, he ~may~ be stating that if one is gay, it’s OK. Gay love is not sanctioned anywhere in Islam. |
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| Elton John – Sixty Years On Lyrics | 6 years ago |
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Bernie Taupin wrote the lyrics for the album, Elton John, which was released in the U.S in 1970, John's first U.S. release, and from which Your Song charted well (#8 on Billboard's top 100). John Lennon is quoted as saying [That is the first new thing to happen since us]. The U.S. was mired down in the Vietnam War, and there was much social unrest and protest by the young regarding the conflict, no doubt because the Korean War had abruptly ended with no clear victory for the U.S., with North Korea, a totalitarian state, resulting. Sixty Years On definitely has an anti-war edge to it. The song has an instrumental introduction of strings playing a dissonant chord, which builds to a fevered pitch, then fades to a sound like a hive of bees, before John's piano fades in for the beginning of the lyrics. Also of note, in British literary history, the novels 1984 and Brave New World were widely read in the States at this time (1970s). Taupin was only 20 twenty years old, and he is the voice of the protagonist of the song, perhaps the same age. If this is correct, the young man will be at the start of his 80s in 60 years' time, and also facing the dystopian society about which Huxley and Orwell sounded the alarm in the 1930s and late 40s. The protagonist is pessimistic he does not want to be alive in that future. He states that even by the time he's 60 he will be old and dependent, needing an arm to lean on as he walks to church. Sixty years is old to someone 20 years of age, and 80 certainly is. |
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