Ever wondered what your favorite song was about? Probably not, which is good because a nice melody and tune are far more enticing than words. Church hymns have truly inspiring lyrics and meaningful messages but don’t really jump out of the record stores. At last a biased attempt is being made to determine what some of the best-loved tunes are really about. We will have a look at the background of these songs and see if history can tell us if any light can be shed on these cryptic verses, poignant prose or just Grade Two poetry
PART 11
I Stated a Joke - The Bee Gees (1967)
A timeless classic that reminds us the Bee Bees really were good once and maybe that Disco period thing can be just seen as when they were possessed by evil spirits. Although the songs singer Robin Gibb has claimed that the melody was inspired by the sounds he heard in a jet engine, he has always steadfastly refused to explain the mysterious lyrics.
Brother Barry has been quoted: "there was a lot of that in those days. there was a lot of pschedelia and the idea that if you wrote something, even if it sounded ridiculous, somebody would find the meaning for it, and that was the truth".
In the monstrous 2000 Unauthorized biography The Bee Gees - Tales of the brother Gibb, The authors describe I Started A Joke as ".... (the) prime example of the pure abstract Gibb lyric that everyone can read something into and, it would seem nearly everyone did"
This must of been a sixties thing, I remember growing up and thinking the song was about Adolph Hitler, because he was the only person I thought who could make the whole world cry, and everyone was happy when he died. But after an exhaustive search through heaps of Bee Gee web sites I couldn't find one reference to the songs meanings ( with the exception of the melody/aeroplane link) anywhere.
© 2004 Shidot Prod.
