A Green, Waterlogged Cake

OK, so some of you know that several months ago I was shocked to discover the very racy lyrics to a song of my early adolescence, “All I Wanna Do is Make Love to You” by Heart. Essentially, this song is about the narrator, a woman, picking a hitchhiker up off the side of a rode, screwing his brains out (or, rather, him screwing her’s out, hence the line “he brought the woman out of me /so many times, easily”), with the express purpose of him knocking her up so she and her man at home (who, by assumption, shoots blanks) can have a baby. Whew.

I’m not sure what I thought this song was about back in the day; however, I think it brings to light a behavior of mine – to completely not register song lyrics. I mean, I know the words to the song, I just don’t always (or, um, ever, really) put them together in a comprehensive sort of way.

This was made clear again the other day. As some of you know, I recently stopped pirating my wireless from unaware neighbors (it was not an ethical epiphany, they either moved away or password protected their networks); anyway, my new ridiculously strong wireless signal allows me to watch things on YouTube that previously would’ve taken minutes to download…now in mere seconds! So, I am seriously catching up on random YouTube searching, and in order to whet my Donna Summer issues, I have been watching a wide variety of her performances from the 70s through the 00s. Thrilling, let me tell you.

So, this whole lyric conundrum thing reared its head when I was watching a video of “MacArthur Park” from 1978, a song that I love because of its start-off-slow-get-all-discoey sensibility. Anyway, I was humming along, mouthing the lyrics when I realized what I was saying. Example:

“MacArthur’s Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet, green icing flowing down…
Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don’t think that I can take it
’cause it took so long to bake it
And I’ll never have that recipe again
Oh, no!”

It’s about…a cake? I mean, I know it’s a metaphor and all, but this totally soul-wrenching-into-booty-shaking classic is about a green (yuck) cake that was left out in the rain. If that’s the image you choose to represent your love, maybe it wasn’t meant to be after all.

This also makes me smile:
” Between the parted pages
we were pressed,
in love’s hot, fevered iron
like a striped* pair of pants.”

Only because you know those were some booty-huggin’, bell-bottomed striped pants. That’s how Donna rolls.

* Donna sings stripe-ed here. Love it.