I can offer another explanation for the rugby reference on the Live album. Joe was playing in Sydney at the time and the Wallabies had just won an important match. The song is about gender ambiguities ("See the nice boys... All the gays are macho...") It has often been said that rugby (and other team-based contact sports) are an outlet for the homosexual feelings of those macho types who absolutely cannot bear to even consider that they might have homosexual leanings. They can get close to one another, touch, hug (after scoring tries/goals). So Joe was basically taking the piss by dedicating this song to the Wallabies... a clever, ironic comment.
I think mellisande is right about what the song is actually about - Joe isn't saying that society is changing for the worse, not exactly. He's simply saying that traditional roles are breaking down. The whole song is ironic - it is sung from the point of view of a super-straight, conservative man, at least initially. Hence the "us and them" and the "girls that wore pink, boys that wore blue" in the first verse. Then you have the disapproving-sounding second verse. But at the end, the sting in the tail comes - "Kill all the blacks, kill all the reds, and if it's war between the sexes then there'll be no people left". That's the real message - artificial, arbitrary divisions and categorisation (like man / woman, gay / bi / straight, black / white) will kill us all. This is a theme running through Joe Jackson's work - that we are all human beings, and we should try to get along as such, not put any other characteristic first. See also "It's different for girls" and "One to one", among others.
I can offer another explanation for the rugby reference on the Live album. Joe was playing in Sydney at the time and the Wallabies had just won an important match. The song is about gender ambiguities ("See the nice boys... All the gays are macho...") It has often been said that rugby (and other team-based contact sports) are an outlet for the homosexual feelings of those macho types who absolutely cannot bear to even consider that they might have homosexual leanings. They can get close to one another, touch, hug (after scoring tries/goals). So Joe was basically taking the piss by dedicating this song to the Wallabies... a clever, ironic comment.
I think mellisande is right about what the song is actually about - Joe isn't saying that society is changing for the worse, not exactly. He's simply saying that traditional roles are breaking down. The whole song is ironic - it is sung from the point of view of a super-straight, conservative man, at least initially. Hence the "us and them" and the "girls that wore pink, boys that wore blue" in the first verse. Then you have the disapproving-sounding second verse. But at the end, the sting in the tail comes - "Kill all the blacks, kill all the reds, and if it's war between the sexes then there'll be no people left". That's the real message - artificial, arbitrary divisions and categorisation (like man / woman, gay / bi / straight, black / white) will kill us all. This is a theme running through Joe Jackson's work - that we are all human beings, and we should try to get along as such, not put any other characteristic first. See also "It's different for girls" and "One to one", among others.