The Barenaked Ladies are one of my favorite "newer" bands, not only because I like their sound, but also, and more importantly, I love their lyrics. They are a band that knows how to have fun with words. They play with word meanings and with listeners' expected interpretations of words.
Take a couple of lines from one of their more recent songs titled "Adrift" as an example:
Ever since we said our goodbyes
The onion rings, the phone makes me cry
The syntactical juxtaposition of the words onion, rings, phone and cry almost causes the word rings to be interpreted as a verb because normally people think of a phone as something that rings and onions as something that makes you cry.
Another example is a couple of lines from their song "Crazy":
I'm a few bricks short of a load,
but a full load always hurt my back.
Here, by adding the second line, they prompt the listener to identify the individual words and their meanings in the idiom "a few bricks short of a load" rather than think of it as one unit.
1 comment:
I, too, have enjoyed Barenaked Ladies, but I sometimes worry they will get sued for false advertising, since they are neither.
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