The Bitch Is Back

I have a block against writing in this blog. But maybe now I can just do it without even thinking.

Listening to Elton John's "The Bitch Is Back". (YouTube) (lyrics) These are interesting lyrics...quite challenging to authority:

eat meat on friday that's alright
even like steak on a saturday night
I can bitch the best at your social do's
I get high in the evening sniffing pots of glue

Elton and Tina Turner did this song together at one point! (YouTube) Notice what she sings instead of the sniffing glue bit...something like:

I can bitch the best at your social do's
I get high just thinking 'bout the things you do

Oof, just like that, a bold challenge to conventional thinking has been truncated into a gimp love song. A gimp love song is a song that pretends to be about love but doesn't have the power of an actual love song, one that comes from the songwriter's life experience. A love song teaches you about love, but a gimp love song just writhes around pathetically on the floor in front of you, trying to get pity. Don't give in!

This truncation, this censorship, muffling, gagging phenomenon, of a song's beautiful difficult message being smothered, of a wild animal being defanged so he's not a threat at the circus...this thing reminds me of what Ani DiFranco says about hip hop in her song Serpentine: (YouTube, around 5:45) (lyrics)

and the music industry mafia is pimping girl power
sniping off sharp-shooter singles from their styrofoam towers,
and hip-hop is tied up in the back room with a logo stuffed in its mouth
cause the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house

But the point of my writing this is not to bitch about censorship. It's to meditate on the change in the lyrics, and the underlying change in the meaning of the song. The first lyric, "I can bitch the best at your social do's/I get high in the evening sniffing pots of glue" is a brave confession that all is not as it seems in society. The eccentric genius who's the life of the party and everybody's darling is very often sought after precisely because s/he has taken a very different path than most people in society. But the new lyric, "I can bitch the best at your social do's/I get high just thinkin' 'bout the things you do", seems to me almost a complete non-sequitur. It seems strange because love doesn't make you more egotistical, it destroys your ego the more you let it...and these lyrics seem quite egotistical, so why suddenly act like the whole verse is about love? That's why it becomes a gimp love song instead of a real love song.

By the way, I just realized that Can You Feel the Love Tonight has super-awesome lyrics. That's an example of a real love song. There are tons of real love songs, but they just seem cheesy or superficial depending on how you listen to them. When you're in love they make the most sense.