"I've looked into it, and I just don't see how the lyrics are political"

[conuly]

Really? You really don't see it at all?

Watch on YouTube

(The comment is a few years old and gave a few more details in the thread that read to me like they were a teen or young adult when they wrote it, so to protect their identity I'm linking to a different lyrics video of the same song. But seriously, there's a level of stupidity that can't be entirely excused by youth.)

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Comments

[shadowkat]

Yeah, I saw similar comments on Twitter (X), Bluesky, Thread, etc at various points. Some nitwit says "since when did Green Day get so political"? And I'm thinking...okay where have you been? They've been political since the release of their first album. I mean come on, one of their songs is entitled "American Idiot"?

Or they'll get upset about Bruce Springsteen being political all of a sudden, and how disgusted they are - they used to love Springsteen. And I'm thinking, do these people listen to Springsteen's lyrics? Born in the USA is not the pro-America, conservative theme song, people think it is.
And the folks complaining are in their forties.

[conuly]

I can sorta see people who haven't really read the lyrics or listened to them closely being surprised. This particular commenter associated the song with a sportsball or video game thing, fair enough.

But holding that opinion once you've actually had a chance to peruse the lyrics? The song is an actual, factual call to (presumably violent) revolution! FFS.

[mama_kestrel]

To me it's right upper there with the Tangerine Toddler thinking "Do You Hear the People Sing" from Les Miz is a MAGA song. Really? Reeally???

[topaz_eyes]

Yes--when taken out of context of the rest of the musical (and history), the lyrics to this song do align with MAGA sensibilities. MAGA is angry. MAGA wants a better world--only for themselves of course, screw everyone else. They honestly believe they're fighting for their freedom. But MAGA and the Tangerine Toddler don't care about context.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Some people are oblivious. My mother, after hearing that the Catholic Church objected to His Dark Materials, sat through the entire movie of The Golden Compass (2007) in the theater with me, and walked out saying, "See? There's no reason to censor it. I didn't hear a word about religion, did you?"

Me: "Uhhhhh..."

Her: "Also, there's no point in censoring anything. Nobody ever changed their mind about religion or anything else important because of something they read or watched."

Me: "You're so close and yet so far!!"

Conversely, my wife, who grew up politically aware in a dictatorship where everything had to be smuggled past official censorship, and who *can* read between the lines, has been eyerolling to me about people discovering that Rage Against the Machine is *gasp* *shock* political!! She quoted a witty comment she read online: "What machine did you think they have been raging against for decades? The ice cream machine? The ATM? Lawnmowers?"

So, yeah.

(My wife also said that she used to think "Born in the USA" was a rah-rah jingoistic American song and vaguely disliked Bruce Springsteen for it.

Me: "I don't know the song, but I thought I had osmosed it was one of the anti-Vietnam protest songs?"

Her: "Yeah, but in Brazil, that kind of nuance about US culture hadn't reached us. We were busy being upset your government was sponsoring our dictatorship."

Me: "Fair.")

[conuly]

I rage against lawnmowers every single week. Noisy things.

[mildred_of_midgard]

We have a phrase for it in my household: "noisy grass".

[fayanora]

Some people are oblivious. My mother, after hearing that the Catholic Church objected to His Dark Materials, sat through the entire movie of The Golden Compass (2007) in the theater with me, and walked out saying, "See? There's no reason to censor it. I didn't hear a word about religion, did you?"

Wow. So she completely missed that world's version of the Catholic Church being involved in mutilating children and experimenting on them? I wonder if she would have missed the parts in later books about 'God' being a liar, that he didn't create the universe because it was already there when he was born, and heaven being a concentration camp.

[mildred_of_midgard]

My impression was that, to her, because it didn't use the words "Catholic Church", nothing in this movie had anything to do with the Catholic Church. Just some fantasy world, with no relation to our own, obviously!

I was facepalming so hard.

[topaz_eyes]

"Born in the USA", "Rockin' in the Free World", "American Woman"--people like this guy hear only the repetitive and jingoistic chorus, the beat, and the slick guitars. They don't stop to think about the lyrics. (Tbh I find a lot of song lyrics very hard to listen to because they're not sung clearly enough for me to parse without a printed sheet.)

[conuly]

See, I'd accept that as an answer except they were saying that in the comments to a lyrics video and claiming they'd read the lyrics and didn't understand how they could be seen as political at all.

[brokenallbroken]

I think one of the most important lessons I got in high school was the week my AP English teacher decided to treat Eleanor Rigby as a poem, literature to be analyzed like any other literature. There are some songs I like only because of what they're saying. My mom says things like the Christmas version of Hallelujah makes more sense than any of Leonard Cohen's verses, and it makes me want to scream.

[minoanmiss]

*runs past*
*agrees heartily*
*runs off pursued by work*