Besides the obvious theme of the strained mother-daughter relationship, I feel there's a wider message in this song:
The irony is, although the mother tries to appear concerned, wanting to understand her daughter's problems, she is still calling her a whore to her face! This reflects on how society often reacts to "troubled" people (this may be people suffering with addiction, mental health problems - or anything else society finds difficult to understand).
The song highlights the superficiality of people asking questions like "what's wrong?" - often they don't really want to know the answer, they've already decided the person is just messed up, useless, or whatever. They're only asking to follow some social convention, and to absolve themselves from their own guilt.
I see this song as a metaphor for a wider trend of behaviour, where society shows fake concern about a lot of issues, although judgements have often already been made. And oftentimes the problems people are suffering with are a result of failures of the state to protect them when they were young, so there's that aspect too - the disapproving mother failing to recognise her own responsibility in her daughter's predicament
Besides the obvious theme of the strained mother-daughter relationship, I feel there's a wider message in this song:
The irony is, although the mother tries to appear concerned, wanting to understand her daughter's problems, she is still calling her a whore to her face! This reflects on how society often reacts to "troubled" people (this may be people suffering with addiction, mental health problems - or anything else society finds difficult to understand).
The song highlights the superficiality of people asking questions like "what's wrong?" - often they don't really want to know the answer, they've already decided the person is just messed up, useless, or whatever. They're only asking to follow some social convention, and to absolve themselves from their own guilt.
I see this song as a metaphor for a wider trend of behaviour, where society shows fake concern about a lot of issues, although judgements have often already been made. And oftentimes the problems people are suffering with are a result of failures of the state to protect them when they were young, so there's that aspect too - the disapproving mother failing to recognise her own responsibility in her daughter's predicament