The Sarah McLachlan thread got me thinking about all the songs, popular or otherwise, expressing self-pity. I never liked them too well.
I’m talking about the songs that take themselves serious. Unlike classic country songs such as “She got the gold mine, I got the shaft”. Self-pity yes but supposed to be funny.
The first one that comes to mind is a stomach-turning ditty from the '70s by Janis Jan called “At Seventeen”.
Here’s a sample:
The valentines I never knew
The Friday night charades of youth
Were spent on one more beautiful
At seventeen I learned the truth.
Another one, “Alone Again, Naturally”. Gilbert O’Sullivan.
Everything Happens to Me. It actually has a nice melody. To be fair, the song may come from a 1938 comedy movie of the same name.
Writer(s): dennis/adair
I make a date for golf -
You can bet you life it rains.
I try to give a party -
And the guy upstairs complains.
I guess Ill go thru life;
Just catchin colds and missin trains,
Evrything happens to me.
Tori Amos has some self-pity in her music, but she tempers it with a
healthy dose of wrath.
He said you’re really an ugly
But I like the way you play
And I died…
But I thanked him
Can you believe that?
…
I wanna smash the faces of those beautiful boys
Those christian boys
So you can make me ***
That doesn’t make you Jesus
Wasn’t “Act Naturally” a Country & Western song before Ringo did it?
I’m partial to “Yesterday” (I can play it!) so I’d rather not include it in the Self-pitiful category.
But pretty nearly anything by Leonard Cohen.
Pretty nearly anything by the Smiths. (Okay, okay, anything that I happened to hear.)
Before I learned that “Sylvia’s Mother” (or whatever it’s called) was a mickey-take to start with, I thought it was excrutiating. But now I’m in the know, I like it.
If you were to include “poetry” (in the widest sense) there is an entire cyberspace universe full of self-pitying “why me?” poetry.
But there you go. There are so many songs with emotional strings attached, that’s one reason why I like jigs, reels, slipjigs and hornpipes. Oh, and waltzes and polkas. And anything by O’Carolan that I haven’t got words for.
Which reminds me of that Brooklyn Bridge song: Girl…they say you’re getting married, say you’re getting married,
this time you’re really sure. And this is the end…
Oh, geez, that one really only touches the tip of the iceberg where Janis Ian is concerned. Another song on that album is “Pass the tea and sympathy.”
She’s very interesting. She had her first hit when she was 15, “Society’s Child,” which was banned from many radio stations in the South. One DJ was shot for playing it. It’s about a white girl in high school who’s dating a black guy. Within a few years, she checked into a mental hospital for some time (I think over a year). She was away from recording for about 4 years. Her first album back, Stars, is wonderful, and really had her first inward-looking songs. As you might expect, it was very dark. The title song chorus:
Stars, they come and go, they come fast or slow
And we go like the last light of the sun
All in a blaze
And all you see is glory
That album also had Jessie, with which Roberta Flack had a hit. It had lines in it like
Jessie come home, there’s a hole in the bed where we slept
and it’s growing cold
Then came Between the lines, the one with At Seventeen on it. This was her “comeback album” at the ripe old age of about 25. The followup, Aftertones, was probably the darkest of her albums, at least musically, and had some true wrist-slitters on it. After that she pepped up and went largely electric and I lost interest.
If you like depressing music those three Janis Ian albums should be right at the top of your list.
No, that’s not self pity. That’s insight into painful human nature. Well, all right perhaps a leeeeettle bit of self pity. =)
One of Us Cannot Be Wrong
_I lit a thin green candle, to make you jealous of me.
But the room just filled up with mosquitos,
they heard that my body was free.
Then I took the dust of a long sleepless night
and I put it in your little shoe.
And then I confess that I tortured the dress
that you wore for the world to look through.
I showed my heart to the doctor: he said I just have to quit.
Then he wrote himself a prescription,
and your name was mentioned in it
Then he locked himself in a library shelf
with the details of our honeymoon,
and I hear from the nurse that he’s gotten much worse
and his practice is all in a ruin.
I heard of a saint who had loved you,
so I studied all night in his school.
He taught that the duty of lovers
is to tarnish the golden rule.
And just when I was sure that his teachings were pure
he drowned himself in the pool.
His body is gone but back here on the lawn
his spirit continues to drool.
An Eskimo showed me a movie
he’d recently taken of you:
the poor man could hardly stop shivering,
his lips and his fingers were blue.
I suppose that he froze when the wind took your clothes
and I guess he just never got warm.
But you stand there so nice, in your blizzard of ice,
oh please let me come into the storm.
_
Ticket to Ride, Beatles
Catch the Wind, Donovan
Sorry Seems To Be the Hardest Word, Elton John
Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me, Elton John
The Boxer, Simon and Garfunkel
I Am A Rock, Simon and Garfukel
Tears of a Clown, Smokey Robinson
All By Myself, Eric Carmen
Heart of Glass, Blondie
Oh, Lonesome Me, Neil Young
Look at Me, John Lennon
My Mummy’s Dead, John Lennon
Only the Lonely, Roy Orbison
Crying, Roy Orbison
And these are silly, but I like them, so I’m throwing them in:
Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me, Warren Zevon
Working at the Carwash Blues, Jim Croce
That’s the truth. I love Mr. Cohen, but Jesus.
Like a bird on a wire
like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried, in my way
to be free.
Like a worm on a hook
like a knight from some old-fashioned book
I have saved all my ribbons
for thee.
EDIT: Okay, Bloomfield beat me to the Cohen commet.
We haven’t even mentioned the be-all-and-end-all of self pity:
Please don’t Pass me By (A Disgrace)
Oh please don’t pass me by,
Oh please don’t pass me by,
For i am blind, but you can see,
Yes, i’ve been blinded totally,
Oh please don’t pass me by.
But even in an hard-to-bear 18-min disgrace like that, Cohen burries really cool stuff like this:
Now there’s nothing that I tell you
that will help you connect
the blood-tortured night
with the day that comes next.
But I want it to hurt you,
I want it to end.
oh, won’t you be naked for me?
Cohen said btw that now that he’s found buddhist peace and tranquility he realizes that he was deeply depressed for forty years.
