Angie Baby

There IS NO actual guy, and therefore no one actually dies. Angie is a loner who constantly listens to the radio in her bedroom, increasing the volume on her favorite songs and dancing with fantasy lovers at will. In one particular fantasy, she has herself dancing with a boy who (in her mind) has spent time spying through her bedroom window before he gets up the courage one night to knock on the front door and offer to be her dance partner. Once a song comes on the radio that she won't dance to, she turns the volume back down as part of her routine, not needing anyone until the next danceable tune gets played.

Songwriter Alan O'Day devotes an entire verse to the effects on the boy when she does this, but those lines are nothing more than typical song development, utilizing multiple rhymes, sound-a-likes, and imagery. Since the boy isn't real, none of the effects described are actually happening, The line "toward the radio he's bound" describes his sudden awareness that the dancing has ended as quickly as it began, and that the radio is more important to Angie than he is. In Angie's mind, he vaporizes into nothing as quickly as he appeared. That's the way it is with all of her dance 'lovers.'

There are no actual newspaper headlines either. This is referring to the fact that she goes to her (alternative) school the next day, creating her own verbal 'headlines' by telling friends about a peeping Tom who 'came over' to dance with her 'while her parents were gone.' Since Angie has a reputation for making up wild, far-fetched stories, her school mates often play along by asking probing questions, just to see what she'll say. When they ask what happened to the boy, she says "he's dead," implying that she killed him when done with him, but without explicitly admitting it. "I'm like a black widow spider," she tells them, enforcing everyone's opinion that she's a nutcase with a vivid imagination who likes to toy with people's heads.