Songs where people completely missed the point.

[CashRules]

It's been forty years and white people still don't get it. I used to hear idiots singing along with this song completely oblivious to the fact they were parodying themselves.

[Gendo]

I don't know how many people get this wrong, but if you only listen to the chorus, you think it's a patriotic song; when really it's an anti-government war protest song.

[CashRules]

You can blame Kenny Rogers himself and those horrible made for TV movies for screwing with some people's perception of this one. But even before the first movie a lot of people got it wrong. The song has absolutely nothing to do with poker or any form of gambling. It's a song about the hurdles faced in life. The gambler character uses poker terminology as allegories. He also dies in the last verse, something almost everybody seems to miss.

[Gendo]

I always assumed that one was just obvious; the allegory is pretty thick.

Fun fact, I knew the Johnny Cash version of that song well before I heard the Kenny Rogers one. I always thought of it as a Cash song. Just looked it up to learn that neither of them wrote it; it's by Don Schlitz (who's from Durham apparently).

[Eva Yojimbo]

A song about an obsessive stalker that's also one of the most played wedding/romance songs ever.

[Gendo]

Eva's back!

[Eva Yojimbo]

For now.

[BruceSmith78]

I'd add Wu Tang's CREAM to the list. If you pay attention to the lyrics, it's a scathing indictment of how cruel and heartless the world of capitalism can be (and it speaks about racism as well). I remember listening to it in my early 20's when I was living paycheck to paycheck, alone with no safety net since I had completely cut my family out of my life, my job hanging by a thread, and thinking of all the people who had taken advantage of me, and it really resonated.

A lot of people just hear the hook and think it's a celebration of wealth and excess.