Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 13: Joe

Prompt: "A song that's not about sex, but would be funnier if it was"

Selected by Joe

"Sucker's Prayer"

The Decemberists

I'll Be Your Girl, 2018

I imagine that today's write-ups will feature a lot of wink-wink nudge-nudge ha-ha plays on words, and I think that's a-okay. It's all about your intentions. We're out here blogging in 2024, doing a homemade "Song Challenge" for shits and giggles. These are the giggles. Nothing wrong with that.

As far as "Sucker's Prayer" is concerned (besides the fact that it's one of the best songs on the Decemberists' late-discography and extremely underrated I'll Be Your Girl), the double entendre can be made right there in the title. "Sucker" in this case is meant by Colin Meloy to refer to "a gullible or easily deceived person." The term could also refer to "one who sucks," i.e. sucking penis (or, for the more enlightened among us, sucking clitoris). The fact that Meloy drops the line "Like Rimbaud to Baudelaire before" probably proves that he is not, in fact, singing about oral sex here in this song, but, ya know, we're just having some fun with it, right?

You can even stretch the wordplay into many of the lyrics throughout the song, to make them mean "sex stuff" too. "I was so discontent to wear that heavy load"—jizz. "And so I got down on my knees"—a position in which you can perform oral sex. "Stuffing rocks into the pockets of my pants"—an erection. "I wanna throw my body in the river and drown"—she's really wet. "I wanna love somebody but I don't know how"—virginity. And so on. Whatever you want! It's all pretty innocent, even when we use words that are probably gonna make Blogger slap an NSFW screen on some of these blog posts. It's the Decemberists! It would be pretty funny if this song was about blowjobs!

A few weeks ago, my daughter—YEESH, how's that for a rough transition?!—asked Pam about the middle finger. Showed it to her, asked if what it meant. Lately, she's been holding up her middle finger and ring finger at the same time and making a point to say that it's not just the middle finger that she's holding up. And then the other day, she tells me on the walk home from school "[So-and-so little shit she goes to school with] told me that holding up the pinky is the 'Spanish middle finger.'"

Those kind of children-are-innocent moments always catch me a little off-guard, and I would be lying if I said I didn't find it at least a little bit amusing. But still, here is a moment of self-reflection and a little lesson-learning and a little opportunity for some deft parenting. I don't want my daughter giving people the middle finger, but take a step back and ask oneself: why? Why is it so bad? I've given and received the middle finger plenty of times. I too learned in my youth the urban myth of the internationally-recognized middle finger of Spain. What's the lesson here?

The lesson here is that it's one's intentions that really matter. The goal is to be a nice person. You want to be nice to your family and friends and peers and neighbors. The intention of holding up one's middle finger could be and very often is to be rude or mean to a fellow human being. You hold up your middle finger to say: I dislike you in this moment. It's not the finger itself, it's the meaning that you intent to back it with. It's not rude to, say, scratch your ear with your middle finger, because there's innocence in that act. Doing something mean—throwing the middle finger, saying a curse word, anything—is the thing we're trying to avoid here, young child.

Today's Song Challenge assignment got me thinking about all the gross "sex terms" we used to catalog in grade school, and snicker about, and look up on Urban Dictionary. Terms like "strawberry sundae" and "gorilla mask" and "the Houdini" and countless others (Soulja Boy Tell 'Em would later validate the pursuit by bringing one of those terms to the top of the Billboard charts). The more absurd the better. But I wonder, decades after the fact, what the intentions were behind the jokes. A whole lot of them sure seemed to have something to do with violence against women. Maybe it would've been a different story if I hadn't been a virgin among virgins during that line of humor's elementary school heights. Maybe not.

In any case, I don't expect my own kids to be perfect, and I don't expect them to walk the tightrope right away, especially the early age they're at now, when they're just beginning to start to try to figure that shit out ("that shit"=I don't know, I guess how social expectations fit into or don't fit into ethical and moral expectations and standards, or something). What I view it as is an opportunity to pass something better to the next generation.

I didn't come home talking about gorilla masks because my parents would've said "don't talk about crude sex stuff at home," and so I learned to keep it amongst friends. I want my kids to be able to ask about it, and to try to gain the ability to be able to think about that kinda shit cognitively. Be less concerned with what you're doing or where, and more concerned about why you're doing it. What kind of person do you want to be?

And if they ever stumble upon the blog, I hope it's clear that we're just having a nice innocent laugh today about the idea of Colin Meloy, bookish nerd supreme, singing a tight indie rock song about giving head. We don't intend anything else by it. Just some silliness on a Saturday morning before the daily grind begins anew.