Similarly, watching the music video for Africa by Toto changes the entire vibe of the song. It’s about wanting to bang a black woman. Bless those rains, I guess.

Sadly, Chester grew up being horribly abused and then using a lot of drugs. He was super close with Chris Cornell, who had also killed himself some months prior to Chester. Chester had been sober for a time but ended up staying the night alone after traveling and drank a little and hung himself on Chris’s birthday.

Mike Shinoda has stated in interviews that when he and Chester would write lyrics, they would focus on the emotion and not necessarily just the exact experience. So the lyrics would slowly evolve until they both could sing them truthfully while relating them to their own separate lived experiences, which is part of why they can be so universally related to - because none of their songs are truly only about one specific thing, but rather about the feelings people experience.

It’s not. It’s about a guy who can’t beat jealousy and believes he’s being cheated on “except it’s all in [his] head”

No, it’s a song about a nice guy not getting his crush.

I second one of the other commenters who says that the song is about the perception of being cheated on. It’s funny, after the first day I ever went on with my partner that song played and for a little while we considered it our song, then eventually kind of faded as they both realized the song didn’t relate to us very well. Now I can look back years later, after going through a lot of therapy and self enrichment and I can realize that those kind of paranoia really did plague our early relationship. I’m glad that we were able to move on from it

Dude the south lost and slavery is bad. I’m sorry

WTF? Don’t be sorry about that!

I know it’s just sort of a reflexive idiomatic politeness, but still, it is really important to make it absolutely crystal clear how irredeemably contemptible the “lost cause” shit take is, at every opportunity. Never, ever be polite about it!

Dang. Just looked it up. It’s a song about a girl he met once and was dating someone else, but he still wrote a damn ballad and sent her a copy. Then she had to live her life surrounded by a song about a stranger’s feelings for her.

And looking at the lyrics, they’re sweet if said about a long-distance partner, but really weird to sing to a vague acquaintence.

I didn’t know it was about Crystal meth for a really long time because I only heard it on the radio for many many years and they only played a clean version where the phrase “Crystal Meth” is cut out in a way that’s not really obvious it was edited so I just never understood the lyrics.

Not so much a song about doing meth as it’s a song about the ramifications of doing meth. “Doing crystal meth will lift you up until you break” it mentions lockjaw at the end and even talks about watching the love of his life die to an od.

I, as a child, did a music class presentation on “my favourite song of the year” on this little ditty.

Whoops!

Edit: To clarify, then, much like now, I listened to the music and not the lyrics. I don’t know if that’s common at all, but the singing is basically another instrument to me, and I hardly ever pay attention to the actual words.

But it’s about how the excitement of meth, like that of a new relationship, fades and leaves the speaker wanting something more substantial while still fondly reminiscing about the good times.

The speaker thinks of the girl as a “sunburn” he “would like to save.” He describes meth as something that “will lift you up until you break.” I think these characterizations point very strongly toward nostalgic longing and away from the glorification of addiction or even that of drug use. So no reason to feel weird I think.

Yeah I used to love MSI and never really listened to the lyrics closely. Dude covers songs by black artists and straight up sings the N word.

See also his cover of “Big Poppa”

The more I looked into Jimmy Urine, the more problematic it got, like grooming a teenage girl.

The cover definitely goes hard though. I’m legitimately stunned to see MSI mentioned at all, especially at the top of a thread. I’ve been a huge fan of theirs for decades, and rarely if ever see anyone mention them.

Harper Road from Sun Kil Moon is similar, super beautiful song but tragic fucking lyrics

My blood runs through my lonely daughter
Her eyes are mine, so wild with wonder
Be my voice, my light, my power
Be with me in my leaving hour

Their song “Happy Nation” sounds pretty questionable to me, too.

Oh fuck, no way.

Ok, I read thenlink and the bassist was an opely total piece of shit before joining the band but I didn’t see anyhing about the AoB songs being hidden propaganda or the rest of the band’s history. Where does the speculation come from?

Ooof, TIL…

Scott Weiland was compelled to write the lyrics after an incident in which a girl he was dating was raped by three high school football players after a party. Thus, Weiland has stated the song is an anti-rape statement, not a song simply about sex, saying: “This song is really not about sex at all. It’s about control, violence and abuse of power.”

Weiland found himself in the position of defending “Sex Type Thing” to individuals who took the first-person approach he used in the song (“I am a man, a man/I’ll give ya something that ya won’t forget/I said ya shouldn’t have worn that dress”) literally. "It was, ‘All right, the “Cop Killer” controversy’s dead, let’s try to find something else,’ " says Weiland, who has been outspoken in the press about women’s rights and contends that he wrote the song in the mind-set of what he has called “the typical American macho jerk” because he didn’t want to sound peachy. “I never thought that people would ever seriously think that I was an advocate of date rape.”

I got that back when it came out and always wondered why folks treated it like alternative pop. It’s seems like a dark mirror on rape to me.