First of all, read NeonFlow's anwer with Liz's own explanation of the song's background in her childhood. Dogma72's answer is also spot-on: young women are not given options ("here's your #2 pencil"), and then gladly accept this state of affairs, because they discover that accepting it, conforming, is highly valued, while asking for something more or different is frowned upon. It's a double-edged sword: you are assigned a role, and then (even worse) you are rewarded for accepting it.
It's the added verse, about how all of this manifests later in sex, where the song becomes especially brilliant. The popular answer, that it's about bad oral sex, is just so wrong and backwards that it pains me.
It's about all the guys -- and it would be all of them, in Liz's experience in Guyville -- who think that if they can give a girl great head and make her come, that suffices completely. "I come, that's all." I come, but I don't get listened to. I come, but my ideas don't get taken seriously. I come, but none of my other needs are attended to in the least.
(I mean, this is not happening in a small town in 1955 where the boys don't know how to give good head and the girls don't know to masturbate if their boyfriend's efforts fall short. It's not about the orgasm but the context in which it takes place. And it's not about a specific relationship, but about men and women in general, in this time and place.)
There are two or three great double meanings here, too. Everyone gets that the "cherry" is a clitoris, but it's also virginity / the hymen, so it also makes it clear that this has been going on since her earliest experiences with men (when she was 17 or even, metaphorically, 12).
"Canary" is probably here because it rhymes with "cherry," but it also brings to mind the "canary in a coal mine" whose failure to sing indicates danger and possible death. So "I sing like a good canary" is "I make sure he knows he gets me off because the whole point for him is not to give me pleasure, but to satisfy his own ego as a pleasure-dispensing device."
Hence "I come when called," which now goes from a double entendre to explicitly sexual. And following the preceding lines, it's devastating. If there's anything that is (or should be) all about you, it's your orgasm. "I come when called" means it's about the other person. Which leads us into "I come, that's all" as above.
I'll also note that Liz loves the alternate section that's sort of a bridge but isn't, and that is intensely personal and harder to parse ("Dance of the Seven Veils" does this, too). She's explained that "Send it up on fire, deaf before dawn" is a purely subjective attempt to describe her emotional reaction to being put into this situation.
First of all, read NeonFlow's anwer with Liz's own explanation of the song's background in her childhood. Dogma72's answer is also spot-on: young women are not given options ("here's your #2 pencil"), and then gladly accept this state of affairs, because they discover that accepting it, conforming, is highly valued, while asking for something more or different is frowned upon. It's a double-edged sword: you are assigned a role, and then (even worse) you are rewarded for accepting it.
It's the added verse, about how all of this manifests later in sex, where the song becomes especially brilliant. The popular answer, that it's about bad oral sex, is just so wrong and backwards that it pains me.
It's about all the guys -- and it would be all of them, in Liz's experience in Guyville -- who think that if they can give a girl great head and make her come, that suffices completely. "I come, that's all." I come, but I don't get listened to. I come, but my ideas don't get taken seriously. I come, but none of my other needs are attended to in the least.
(I mean, this is not happening in a small town in 1955 where the boys don't know how to give good head and the girls don't know to masturbate if their boyfriend's efforts fall short. It's not about the orgasm but the context in which it takes place. And it's not about a specific relationship, but about men and women in general, in this time and place.)
There are two or three great double meanings here, too. Everyone gets that the "cherry" is a clitoris, but it's also virginity / the hymen, so it also makes it clear that this has been going on since her earliest experiences with men (when she was 17 or even, metaphorically, 12).
"Canary" is probably here because it rhymes with "cherry," but it also brings to mind the "canary in a coal mine" whose failure to sing indicates danger and possible death. So "I sing like a good canary" is "I make sure he knows he gets me off because the whole point for him is not to give me pleasure, but to satisfy his own ego as a pleasure-dispensing device."
Hence "I come when called," which now goes from a double entendre to explicitly sexual. And following the preceding lines, it's devastating. If there's anything that is (or should be) all about you, it's your orgasm. "I come when called" means it's about the other person. Which leads us into "I come, that's all" as above.
I'll also note that Liz loves the alternate section that's sort of a bridge but isn't, and that is intensely personal and harder to parse ("Dance of the Seven Veils" does this, too). She's explained that "Send it up on fire, deaf before dawn" is a purely subjective attempt to describe her emotional reaction to being put into this situation.