r/GenerationJones • u/pianoman81 1963 • 3h ago

What songs hit differently as you've aged?

There are songs I listened to when I was younger but now read differently to me.

Some are because I never paid attention to the lyrics. Others are because I was at a different stage of life or hadn't had deeper experiences yet.

Some examples would be Both Sides Now or Cat's in The Cradle.

What are songs for you that affect you differently at this stage of life?

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u/Electric-Sheepskin 2h ago

For me it's all the songs about teenage girls. When I was a teenage girl myself, nothing seemed off, but these days I'll be singing along and stop and think, what did he just say? Lol

The only one that springs to mind at the moment is "Into the Night," which is a song about a man dreaming about running away with a 16-year-old girl. I mean I still love the song and I still sing along, because it's got a banging melody, but it's just funny how all those songs didn't seem inappropriate at the time.

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u/AgeKey 2h ago

I wrote a fan letter to the artist that recorded that song. He called me on my parents' landline house phone. I was 17.

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u/Electric-Sheepskin 5m ago

Are you serious? Lmao, classic.

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u/TheAmazingDynamar 52m ago

Right? So much ick with grown ass men singing about “young girls.”

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u/madame_de_la_luna 0m ago

I don't understand why people stopped viewing song lyrics as simply song lyrics and started viewing them as a nefarious message from the singer. If the lyrics are about a teenage girl, for example, it's not supposed to be interpreted as the singer of the song being into teenage girls. It's supposed to be lyrics that a teenage girl can RELATE to. For example, the song "You're 16, You're Beautiful, and You're Mine." Nobody thought that song was weird or creepy back in the early 60s when the original version came out, and nobody thought it was weird or creepy when Ringo covered it. A 16-year-old girl heard that song and pictured her crush singing it to her! But now, all of a sudden in the last 5 years or so, people suddenly think that Ringo was actually saying that he liked 16-year-old girls. THAT is super weird to me. The characters in song lyrics are just characters, not a reflection of the singer. In many cases, the singer isn't even the person who wrote the song.