Song Lyrics

Don’t you just hate it when you’re listening to a really great-sounding, catchy song that you like, and then suddenly you listen to the lyrics a little bit more closely, and you realize that this great song is actually offensive? I had that experience last week.

I was listening to the song “Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield. It’s a catchy little tune from the early ‘80’s about a guy who finds himself having feelings for his friend’s girlfriend. I’m sure we all can relate to the experience of falling for someone who is unavailable. It seems to be a universal part of the human condition, and the song really resonated with me for that reason.

There’s no violence or swearing in the song, so its offensiveness is not immediately apparent. (The only sex in the song is implied, and that’s not what I find offensive here.) The part that I find offensive is that the woman in the song is objectified. She is never given a name. Throughout the song, she is only referred to through her relationship to men. She is always Jessie’s girl, never her own person.

The song starts out:

Jessie is a friend, yeah, I know he's been a good friend of mine
But lately something's changed that ain't hard to define
Jessie's got himself a girl and I want to make her mine.

The woman in the song isn’t viewed as a person. She’s viewed as a thing for the men around her to possess. Additionally, she’s referred to with the infantilizing term ‘girl’, as opposed to what she presumably is, a grown woman. (If she really is a girl, we have even more problems.)

It gets keeps going.

You know, I wish that I had Jessie's girl
I wish that I had Jessie's girl
Where can I find a woman like that?

Here, we see more of the possession issue, with the use of the verb ‘to have’. Also, the use of the pronoun ‘that’ is problematic. Pronouns such as ‘that’, ‘which’, etc. are used for things. Pronouns such as ‘her’, ‘him’, ‘who’, etc. are the appropriate words for people.

Now that I’ve thought about this, I’m not going to be able to enjoy the song anymore. It’s so annoying. I’ve tried to come up with an alternative interpretation, but nothing works. Sometimes alternative interpretations can serve to rescue a song.

I was able to do that with another song that at first struck me as problematic. There’s a song called “Everybody Else Does” by The Morning Line (an indie group in the Bay Area). I’m acquainted with the author of the song, and I know him to be completely non-sexist. He’s one of the biggest supporters of my ambitions, in fact.

Anyway, the song is about how every relationship the singer gets into ends with him getting dumped. (I can relate to that, too. I’m the queen of being dumped.) The singer thinks that his new love is going to dump him, too, since everybody else does.

A line in the middle of the song goes like this:

And if you think you might
Stay my satellite,
Then we may rewrite what
Everybody else does.

When I first heard this, I was caught off guard. I worked in an astronomy lab in college, so satellites and I are rather well acquainted. The first characteristic of a satellite that came to my mind was subordination. Communications satellites orbit the earth and exist only to serve the earth. This jarred me because, like I said, I know the author to be non-sexist.

I started thinking of possible alternative interpretations. Then I remembered another characteristic of satellites: fidelity. The moon is the earth’s natural satellite. It is always with the earth. It doesn’t go running off after other planets. The moon and the earth are a pair. In light of the rest of the song, the fidelity interpretation of satellites makes more sense, and it gets rid of that nasty little sexist subtext.

What songs have been wrecked for you by closer listening? What songs have been redeemed by a closer analysis?