While poking around to double-check the lyrics for several of the songs in the previous post, I stumbled across SongMeanings.net, which turns out to be fairly entertaining.
As the name suggests, it’s a site where you can find a pretty comprehensive list of song lyrics by different artists, with notes attached regarding the meaning of the lyrics. The thing is, these are basically comment threads, so most of the people posting are just throwing out wild-assed guesses, not drawing on any particular knowledge.
This leads to some interesting discussions when applied to famously inscrutable artists like Bob Dylan (“Tangled Up in Blue”), or the “soaring vagueness” of U2 (“Ultraviolet (Light My Way)“), or songs that I’ve always vaguely wondered about like “Oliver’s Army”. The real genius is in seeing people discuss ephemeral pop songs– to choose a few suggested by the 80’s shuffle, there’s “Little Red Corvette” or “Jump” or, God help me, “Putting on the Ritz” by Taco (which, I hasten to add, I don’t actually own, but couldn’t resist looking at….).
This is either absolutely brilliant, or kind of sad, and I’m not quite sure which.