Also an improvement thanks!
Nope. No idea still. I googled and it’s some clothes. I’ve heard the song but never really paid attention. It seems to be some Springsteen/ American high school movie thing… In most of the test of the world the idea or expectation that school is the peak of your life is utterly absurd.
Diane sitting on Jacky’s lap
Got his hands between her knees
Jack he says
“Hey, Diane, let’s run off behind the shady trees
Dribble off those Bobbie Brooks
Let me do what I please”
She’s sitting on his lap. He’s got his arms around her with his hands between her legs and he’s suggesting that they go off by themselves to a secluded area and she take off her clothes and let him do what he wants to her.
All right, the “there’s always an xkcd” thing is getting to be a little strange here.
I dunno, I liked JCM back in the day; and while J&D wasn’t my fav song by him, the line that goes “Oh yeah, life goes on… Long after the thrill of living is gone” always resonated with me.
Yeah, I agree that’s a good line. Maybe I get the song mixed up in memory with the one about little pink houses. All that smalltown white wistfulness, which I personally associate with narrow streets breeding narrow (racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.) minds. And in j & d, seems like the teen horniness is all from the objectifying male perspective, even though it’ssupposefly about a boy and a girl. But then, I haven’t scrutinized all of its lyrics lately.
Then you should revisit that one, too. He laments the “American Dream” for the entirety of the song.
I like J&D, but it does seem to say that the thrill of living is gone around the age of 16. Maybe he should have gotten into accountancy instead of rock and roll. Doesn’t seem to have agreed with him.
Thanks for the prompt, I just did look the lyrics up. I can see how it exposes the Dream as an illusion. Blackness gets named and whiteness doesn’t and so the latter gets to stay as the centerstaged default, but whatever. I did mostly fall for the “Born in the USA” effect, if that’s a good thing to call that.
Just looked up j & d too, can’t say that changed my mind about anything.
He had a (background) anti-racist theme running throughout a lot of his work though. And he’s not so much celebrating “America” in LPH as its people, the people who never really made it. As I said above, he is kinda fatalist or even defeatist often.
I don’t think it’s peaking in high school so much as recognizing that life won’t match the mythology. He’s not going to be a football star, she’s not a “debutante”, and the implication that our song subjects are unaware of is that they are both going to watch their dreams slide out of view until they’re tired of living, so they better enjoy suckin’ on chili dogs and messing around while they can.
And in a strange twist TIL on wikipedia that Mick Ronson of all people apparently had a large hand in making the song successful.
Alternate take on that lyric. The words are:
Diane’s debutante, back seat of Jacky’s car
Could refer to her Debutante’s Ball.
Why this would be her entrance into society may not be clear until:
Change is coming 'round real soon
Make us women and men
Usually that would refer to puberty. However the bobbie brown line makes it clear (as if being age 16 didn’t) that that is already happening. This could be referring to teen pregnancy then.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, ca. 1986:
"Rambo Reagan is forcing me to eat American Pie
I’m forced to live on the porch of a pink house
Please please save me from the pink houses"
No lie, this is how I sing the song because it’s the only bit I can remember. I say it’s about feckin’ time.
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