The Pitters' Place

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

Eva's back!

For now.

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.